Aubrey's Brief Lives - Softcover

Aubrey, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1567920632 ISBN 13: 9781567920635

Publisher: Nonpareil Books, 2015

Synopsis

"I love John Aubrey's writing more than is seemly - it's a marvelous, gossipy, informal, brilliant stew of information, rumour, history, and anecdote." - Neil Gaiman

The whole ferment of the Elizabethan age and the vigor of the century that followed come alive in these "brief portraits" that have been looted by scholars for centuries. Here are Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Thomas More, Shakespeare, Milton, Marvell, and countless others, who in these pages become not abstract names from a history book, but flesh and blood characters. Brief Lives was written by John Aubrey (1626-1697), the greatest gossip columnist of the seventeenth century. A hanger-on among the rich and famous, he left posterity a sprawling collection of notes, anecdotes, and morsels of gossip that the editor has cleverly sutured together into a series of unforgettable portraits. These men-flawed, vain, ambitious, vulnerable-are more alive and kicking in these pages, miraculously edited by Oliver Dick, than in any formal history. As Edmund Wilson writes in his introduction, "I have never read anything else that makes me feel in quite the same way what it must have been like to live then."

Foreword by Edmund Wilson. Part of the Nonpareil Books collection.

About this title

About the Author

John Aubrey (1626-1697) was the Bystander of his age, a hanger-on and hanger-out at great houses, a country gentleman of lively intellectual curiosity and unsteady character who left not a book to history but a random, sprawling collection of notes, anecdotes, scribbles and morsels of gossip that have been looted and quoted by scholars ever since. So, alongside prostitutes, soldiers, impostors and scholars stand, fully in the round of their humanity, such historical figures as Sir Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare, Wolsey, Sidney, Sir Thomas Moore and Milton. These men and women flawed, vain, ambitious, vulnerable are more alive here than in any formal history; these giants of an age are brought to a human scale, making it possible for the modern reader to feel, in the words of Edmund Wilson who contributes a foreword, what it must have been like to live then, to find oneself a part of an England that was venturesome, unsettled and eager, that was opening new horizons.

Review

Reading Aubrey's Brief Lives is like sitting in a 17th century ale house and listening into the gossip of the day about the dings of both ordinary folk and the gentry alike. This reprint edition of a "time lost classic" is very strongly recommended for personal reading lists, as well as both community and academic library 17th century Biography & History reference collections and supplemental studies lists. --Able Greenspan, Midwest Book Review

Edition details

• Publisher: Nonpareil Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1567920632
• ISBN 13: 9781567920635
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 408