"A nuanced, comprehensive portrait of Britain's most famous female poet, a woman who invented herself and defied her times. "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." With these words, Elizabeth Barrett Browning has come down to us as a romantic heroine, a recluse controlled by a domineering father and often overshadowed by her husband, Robert Browning. But behind the melodrama lies a thoroughly modern figure whose extraordinary life is a study...

This biography of celebrated Romantic poet John Keats explodes entrenched conceptions of him as a delicate, overly sensitive, tragic figure. Instead, the author reveals the real flesh-and-blood poet: a passionate man driven by ambition but prey to doubt, suspicion, and jealousy; sure of his vocation while bitterly resentful of the obstacles that blighted his career; devoured by sexual desire and frustration; and in thrall to alcohol and opium. Through...

Metamorphosing from scholar to buccaneer, from outcast to establishment figure, John Donne emerged as one of the greatest English poets, concentrating the paradoxes of his age within his own crises of desire and devotion. Following Donne from plague-ridden streets to palaces, from the taverns on the Bankside to the pulpit of St. Paul's, John Stubbs's biography is a vivid portrait of an extraordinary writer and his country at a time of bewildering...

In one of the most comprehensive pictures of the poet yet published, James Booth examines the people, the places and the chance encounters that influenced Larkin and shaped his poetry. From Larkin's early life, his academic studies and his aspirations as a novelist, an image emerges of a reserved and gentle man greatly affected by those close to him. Delving into his fluctuating relationships with Maeve Brennan and Monica Jones, two of the many women...

Nineteenth century poet John Keats and the girl next door, Fanny Brawne, started out as unlikely lovers who were totally at odds with each other. However, when Brawne offers to help Keats nurse his seriously ill brother, the two soon became involved in an unstoppable romance that only his untimely death at age 25 could bring to a shattering end.

"He was a man of extremes whose deep flaws and high virtues were interfused, ' writes Lyndall Gordon in this perceptive and innovative biography of the great poet. She brilliantly explores his poetry, drama and essays in relationship to the four quite different women in his life and to his time in America and England. The Imperfect Life of T.S. Eliot follows the trials of a searcher whose flaws and doubts speak to all of us whose lives are imperfect."...

John Keats: A poet and His Manuscripts traces the life and career of the poet through the surviving manuscripts of many of his finest poems and letters. Mostly shown in their entirety, many at actual size, Keats's original manuscripts provide a unique visual record of his creative processes and rapid literary progress. Nearly 200 years after they were first written, they have lost none of their immediacy. Charged with a restless intensity, the poet's...

Traces the friendship and collaborations of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from their initial encounter as young men in 1795, to their creation of "Lyrical Ballads," to their role in initiating England's Romantic Movement.

Commissioned to negotiate the release of papers linked to Frankenstein infamy, London detective Charles Maddox, whose uncle remains haunted by an unsolved mystery surrounding the Romantics literary movement, is roped into a gothic-tinged case that places him in the path of such luminaries as Lord Byron and Mary Shelley.