Kirjahaku

D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider is an illuminating and clear-sighted portrait of one of the twentieth century's most brilliant, radical and misunderstood writers.John Worthen follows Lawrence's from his awkward and intense youth in Nottinghamshire, through his turbulent relationship with Frieda and the years of exile abroad to his premature death at the age of 44. His account is an intimate and absolutely compelling reappraisal of a man who believed himself to be an outsider, in angry revolt against his class, culture and country, and who was engaged in a furious commitment to his writing and a passionate struggle to live according to his beliefs.

Shattering longstanding myths, this new biography reveals the robust and positive life of one of the nineteenth century's greatest composers This candid, intimate, and compellingly written new biography offers a fresh account of Robert Schumann’s life. It confronts the traditional perception of the doom-laden Romantic, forced by depression into a life of helpless, poignant sadness. John Worthen’s scrupulous attention to the original sources reveals Schumann to have been an astute, witty, articulate, and immensely determined individual, who—with little support from his family and friends in provincial Saxony—painstakingly taught himself his craft as a musician, overcame problem after problem in his professional life, and married the woman he loved after a tremendous battle with her father. Schumann was neither manic depressive nor schizophrenic, although he struggled with mental illness. He worked prodigiously hard to develop his range of musical styles and to earn his living, only to be struck down, at the age of forty-four, by a vile and incurable disease.Worthen’s biography effectively de-mystifies a figure frequently regarded as a Romantic enigma. It frees Schumann from 150 years of mythmaking and unjustified psychological speculation. It reveals him, for the first time, as a brilliant, passionate, resolute musician and a thoroughly creative human being, the composer of arguably the best music of his generation.

“A Night or two after a worse Rogue there came, The head of the Gang, one Wordsworth by name . . .”—Coleridge, A Soliloquy of the full Moon, April 1802Over a dramatic six-month period in 1802, William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy, and the two Hutchinson sisters Sara and Mary formed a close-knit group whose members saw or wrote to one another constantly. Coleridge, whose marriage was collapsing, was in love with Sara, and Wordsworth was about to be married to Mary, who would be moving in beside Dorothy in their Grasmere cottage. Throughout this extraordinary period both poets worked on some of their finest and most familiar poems, Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode and Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode. In this fascinating book, John Worthen recreates the group’s intertwined lives and the effect they had on one another.Drawing on the group’s surviving letters, and poems, as well as Dorothy’s diaries, Worthen throws new light on many old problems. He examines the prehistory of the events of 1802, the dynamics of the group between March and July, the summer of 1802, when Wordsworth and Dorothy visited Calais to see his ex-mistress and his daughter Caroline, and the wedding between Wordsworth and Mary in October of that year. In an epilogue he looks forward to the ways in which relationships changed during 1803, concentrating on a single day—11 January 1803—in the lives of the group.

By examining the family and financial circumstances of Wordsworth’s early years, this illuminating biography reshapes our understanding of the great Romantic poet’s most creative period of life and writing. Features new research into Wordsworth’s financial situation, and into how the poet and his family survived financiallyOffers a new understanding of the role of his great unwritten poem ‘The Recluse’Presents a new assessment of the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge

Author of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', 'Kubla Khan' and 'Christabel', and co-author with Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the great writers and thinkers of the Romantic revolution. This innovative introduction discusses his interest in language and his extraordinary private notebooks, as well as his poems, his literary criticism and his biography. John Worthen presents a range of readings of Coleridge's work, along with biographical context and historical background. Discussion of Coleridge's notebooks alongside his poems illuminates this rich material and finds it a way into his creativity. Readers are invited to see Coleridge as an immensely self-aware, witty and charismatic writer who, although damaged by an opium habit, responded to and in his turn influenced the literary, political, religious and scientific thinking of his time.

Author of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', 'Kubla Khan' and 'Christabel', and co-author with Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the great writers and thinkers of the Romantic revolution. This innovative introduction discusses his interest in language and his extraordinary private notebooks, as well as his poems, his literary criticism and his biography. John Worthen presents a range of readings of Coleridge's work, along with biographical context and historical background. Discussion of Coleridge's notebooks alongside his poems illuminates this rich material and finds it a way into his creativity. Readers are invited to see Coleridge as an immensely self-aware, witty and charismatic writer who, although damaged by an opium habit, responded to and in his turn influenced the literary, political, religious and scientific thinking of his time.

This collection of short pieces (mostly unpublished, mostly lectures) represents work done between 1994 and 2008 by John Worthen, now Emeritus Professor at the University of Nottingham and its Professor of D. H. Lawrence Studies, 1994-2003. They range between his research into the manuscript of D. H. Lawrence's story "New Eve and Old Adam" in Tulsa, to his farewell lecture ("Ways of Saying Goodbye") at the University of Nottingham. Brief introductions recall the original occasions when the pieces were written or given as lectures; they recall John Worthen's underlying interest in the biographical and the tangible.

Biographical writing about Eliot is in a more confused and contested state than is the case with any other major twentieth-century writer. No major biography has been released since the publication of his early poems, "Inventions of the March Hare," in 1996, which radically altered the reading public's perception of Eliot. There have been attempts to turn the American woman Emily Hale into the beloved woman of Eliot's middle years; and Eliot has also been blamed for the instability of his first wife and declared a closet homosexual. This biography frees Eliot from such distortions, as well as from his cold and unemotional image. It offers a sympathetic study of his first marriage which does not attempt to blame, but to understand; it shows how Eliot's poetry can be read for its revelations about his inner world. Eliot once wrote that every poem was an epitaph, meaning that it was the inscription on the tombstone of the experience which it commemorated. His poetry shows, however, that the deepest experiences of his life would not lie down and die, and that he felt condemned to write about them.

John Worthen's mordantly humorous novel is grounded in reality: it is wholly fictional, but deeply rooted in the lives of real people. All accounts of the life of Frieda von Richthofen Weekley Lawrence Ravagli - best known as the wife of the writer D. H. Lawrence, and one of the models for his Lady Chatterley novel ‒ are hopelessly flawed by the impossibility of understanding her first marriage, to Professor Ernest Weekley. Readers of this novel will discover what Weekley was like as he grew up, how much he loved Frieda, how she felt about him, how she managed to carry on her marriage for thirteen years, how and why she turned to D. H. Lawrence, how she lost her three children to Weekley: and, incidentally, how much Weekley hated Lawrence. These are all here stylishly accounted for by Worthen's back-to-back, fictional, first-person narratives, which take the reader deep inside Weekley's point of view, and comprehensively inside Frieda's: into his rage and bafflement and into her unrepressed anger. At least one tragic history results, and one passionate love story: but whose is which?

The Civil War, the Protectorate, and the Restoration – the extraordinary upheavals at the fulcrum of English history – are embodied here in the story of a remarkable man, politician, and prisoner: the regicide Henry Marten. As an organiser of the trial of Charles I and a signatory of the King’s death warrant, he was targeted for prosecution once the monarchy was restored in 1660. Marten was convicted of High Treason and spent years on the equivalent of death row, writing letters that now give a rare and extraordinary insight into the life of a prisoner in the Tower of London. John Worthen’s revelatory biography uncovers the brilliant mind, modern mindset, political vigour, tender bravery, and extraordinarily emblematic life of a neglected seventeenth-century figure.

Johannes Brahms is often cast as repressed or emotionally distant. This nuanced biography by acclaimed biographer John Worthen reveals a more complex and human figure – brilliant, passionate and deeply committed both to his art and to those he loved. Brahms’s lifelong devotion to Clara Schumann shaped much of his personal and creative life, while his refusal to conform to social expectations kept him at odds with the genteel world around him. Raised in modest circumstances, he remained proudly working class even as he became one of the greatest composers of his time, with works ranging from the intimacy of the ‘Alto Rhapsody’ to the humane power of ‘A German Requiem’. Worthen shows us the man behind the music – blunt, brilliant and fiercely alive.