Plump, virginal Janice reluctantly writes romances in the hope of earning enough money to find the man she loved and lost 20 years ago. Unfortunately, her agent is hiding her healthy financial position.

Dame Iris Murdoch has played a major role in English life and letter for nearly half a century. As A. S. Byatt notes, she is ?absolutely central to our culture?. As a novelist, as a thinker, and as a private individual, her life has significance for our age. There is a recognisable Murdoch world, and the adjective ?Murdochian? has entered the language to describe situations where a small group of people interact intricately and strangely. Her story...

This biography reveals the life of Anna Sewell - her experiences, her beliefs, and the sympathy with animals and their suffering that drove her to write her famous work, 'Black Beauty'.

Nora is a reclusive crime writer, content with the routine of life in her apartment in London. She hasn't seen her friend Clare in years - not since Nora walked out of school one day and never went back. So she's surprised to receive an invitation to Clare's hen do. Perhaps it's a chance to reconnect with her best friend. But something goes terribly wrong in the eerie glass house deep in the English countryside... Then Nora wakes up with her head...

Since her death, people have got Jane Austen wrong. The real Jane - revealed in this landmark biography - was a less cosy, more spiky, more modern figure than she is usually imagined to be. Far from retelling a familiar story, Byrne's book uses new research and new techniques to give us Jane Austen for the 21st century.

As an internationally bestselling phenomenon and queen of the Regency Romance, Georgette Heyer is one of the most beloved historical novelists. With this biography we catch a glimpse into Georgette Heyer's world, and that of her most memorable characters. It describes a formidable and energetic woman, with an impeccable sense of style.

While the 'Lark Rise to Candleford' trilogy, Flora Thompson's much-loved portrait of life in the English countryside, has inspired a hit television series, relatively little is known about the author herself. In this book, bestselling biographer and nature writer Richard Mabey sympathetically retraces her life and her transformation from a post-office clerk who left school at 14 to a sophisticated professional writer.

Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) was a great English writer, who would never have described herself in such grand terms. Her novels were short, spare masterpieces, self-concealing, oblique and subtle. Loved and admired, and increasingly recognised as one of the outstanding novelists of her time, she remains, also, mysterious and intriguing. This biography - by a biographer whom Fitzgerald herself admired - pursues her life, her writing, and her secret...

Meg Hutchinson grew up as Margaret Rose Astbury in Wednesbury during the first half of the 20th century. She describes not only the constant struggle to make ends meet but also the laughter and love she enjoyed with her five sisters and parents who were too soft-hearted to punish any of their daughters.

Elizabeth Jane Howard wrote brilliant novels about what love can do to people, but in her own life the lasting relationship she sought so ardently always eluded her. She grew up yearning to be an actress; but when that ambition was thwarted by marriage and the war, she turned to fiction. Artemis Cooper's biography explores a woman trying to make sense of her life through her writing, as well as illuminating the literary world in which she lived.