Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer's Journal - Softcover

Lefanu, Sarah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1781320861 ISBN 13: 9781781320860

Publisher: Silverwood Books, 2013

Synopsis

'Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer's Journal' is a fascinating account of a biographical quest and of a personal journey. While working on her biography of the writer and traveller Rose Macaulay, Sarah LeFanu kept a journal that charts the details of that quest: the people she met, the places she visited, and her strange dreamworld encounters with the very subject of her biographical pursuit.

About this title

About the Author:

For many years Sarah LeFanu was Senior Editor at The Women's Press, and was responsible for their innovative and highly-regarded science fiction list. She has written widely on feminism and science fiction, including introductions to a number of scholarly editions of the works of Joanna Russ ('The Female Man', 'The Two of Them', 'To Write Like a Woman'). Sarah has also edited a range of anthologies of contemporary fiction and science fiction, including 'Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind' (with Jen Green), 'Letters from Home', 'How Maxine Loved Her Legs and Other Tales of Growing-Up', and (with Stephen Hayward) 'Colours of a New Day: Writing for South Africa'. She is the biographer of Rose Macaulay ('Rose Macaulay' and 'Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer's Journal' will soon be available from SilverWood Books) and, most recently, of Samora Machel ('S is for Samora: A Lexical Biography of Samora Machel and the Mozambican Dream', Hurst & Co, 2012). 'In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction' (eBook available from SilverWood Books) won the prestigious MLA Emily Toth Award. Sarah's short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, along with two radio plays, Thin Woman in a Morris Minor and Death Bredon. She works regularly on abridgments and dramatizations for the BBC programmes Book of the Week, Book at Bedtime and Woman's Hour. From 2004 to 2009 Sarah was Artistic Director of the Bath Literature Festival. She continues to chair events for the LitFest on a regular basis, and also for the Bristol Festival of Ideas.

Review:

'Very interesting and funny - (it) reflects on the art and craft of biographical writing in general.' www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/bidisha/sarah-lefanu-the-writer-_b_3931157.html?utm_hp_ref=tw 'This is such a wise and charming book, giving us a glimpse over the shoulder of a biographer at work. It captures what it's really like to write a biography, which is nothing like the soothing sensation of reading one. Here are the highs and lows, the episodes of frustration and exhilaration, the serendipity, the slog, the networking, "the biographer's art of bullying" - and the constant shifts in emotional weather between biographer and biographee. People imagine that biographers "identify" with their subjects in some simple sense, but Dreaming of Rose conveys how much more complicated the relationship is. The book becomes a tribute to biography itself, as a quest, as an art, and as the most generous and selfless of literary genres.' Sarah Bakewell, author of 'How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer'

About this edition

• Publisher: Silverwood Books
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1781320861
• ISBN 13: 9781781320860
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 236