This book is the story of a life's work to find happiness. It is the story of how the painful past Jeanette Winterson thought she had written over and repainted returned to haunt her later life, and sent her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her real mother.

Rona Parish is writing an article on old family businesses when she learns that Curzon, local manufacturers of fine bone china, are about to celebrate their 150th anniversary. Rona decides to approach the firm, and gets caught up in Curzon family life.

Born in 1918 into a working-class Edinburgh family, Muriel Spark ended her life as the epitome of literary chic, one of the great writers of the 20th century. This book tells her story.

Beatrix Potter is one of the world's bestselling, most cherished authors, whose books have enchanted generations of children for over a hundred years. Yet how she achieved this legendary status is just one of several stories of Beatrix Potter's remarkable and unexpected life. Inspired by the 23 'tales', Matthew Dennison takes a selection of quotations from Potter's stories and uses them to explore her multi-faceted life and character: repressed Victorian...

Over half a century since The Spy Who Came in from the Cold made John le Carr ̌a worldwide, bestselling sensation, David Cornwell, the man behind the pseudonym, remains an enigma. He has consistently quarried his life for his writing, and his novels seem to offer tantalising glimpses of their author - but in the narrative of his life fact and fiction have become intertwined, and little is really known of one of the world's most successful writers....

Antonia Fraser's memoir of growing up has a double purpose. It is partly an attempt to recapture the experiences of her Oxford childhood and youth - in Shakespeare's phrase, to 'call back yesterday, bid time return'. But it is also intended as a chronicle of the progress of her love of history since her first discovery of it as a private pleasure when she was a child in the 1930s - her history, as she believed it to be, for the study of history (as...

Poet, pamphleteer and beauty, Caroline Norton dazzled 19th-century society with her vivacity and intelligence. After her marriage in 1828 to the MP George Norton, she continued to attract friends and admirers to her salon in Westminster, including the widowed Prime Minister Lord Melbourne. Racked with jealousy, George Norton took the PM to court, suing him for damages on account of his 'Criminal Conversation' (adultery) with Caroline. Despite an acquittal,...

One of the first Englishwomen to make a living through her writing, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, known as Mad Madge, was a dazzling figure - brave, eccentric, loving, clever and energetic. Her colourful story is told against the background of the Civil War and the Restoration.

Opinionated, driven, ruthless, eccentric - how do you become Janet Street-Porter? This book is the story of her bizarre childhood, providing an amusing, and sometimes shocking, picture of the formative years of the media queen.

'Jane & Dorothy' compares their upbringing and education, home lives and loves and, above all, their emotional and creative worlds.