Name: Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer's Journal
ISBN: 9781912766529

When Sarah LeFanu was researching her 2003 biography of Rose Macaulay, she kept a detailed journal of her research trips and her processes as a biographer. She argued with herself over what to include, what to pursue, and what to leave behind. Her immersion in her research led to Rose intruding in her dreams, and fantastical imaginings of what Rose would say or do, at each fork in the road. Dreaming of Rose is a remarkable record of the art of biography, and the search for another woman's life. Research trips to Varazze in Italy to look for Rose's childhood, and to Trabzon in Turkey to find traces of Rose's most fampous novel, The Towers of Trebizond, were remarkably intuitive ventures that found treasures in unexpected places. Dreaming of Rose is also a memoir of a woman juggling the demands of teaching, research and writing while patching together a living. LeFanu's work on Rose was squeezed in between many other commitments and responsibilities: she wrote for the BBC and taught creative writing and English literature. Suffused with the tensions and dramas of everyday life, and the necessity for intellectual integrity, this is an important memoir of women and writing.

Book Details

Publisher: Handheld Classics
Publish Date: Jul 6th, 2021
Pages: 200
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.30in - 0.60in - 0.62lb
EAN: 9781912766529
Categories: • Literary Figures• Personal Memoirs• Women

About the Author

Lefanu, Sarah: - Sarah LeFanu is a British biographer and arts critic, and a descendant of the Victorian Irish Gothic novelist Sheridan Le Fanu. She is the author of Something of Themselves: Kipling, Kingsley, Conan Doyle and the Anglo-Boer War (2020), S Is for Samora: A Lexical Biography of Samora Machel and the Mozambican Dream (2012), Rose Macaulay: A Biography (2003), and In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (1988), which won the MLA Emily Toth Award.

More books by Sarah Lefanu

Book Cover for: Something of Themselves: Kipling, Kingsley, Conan Doyle and the Anglo-Boer War, Sarah Lefanu

Book Cover for: S Is for Samora: A Lexical Biography of Samora Machel and the Mozambican Dream, Sarah Lefanu

Book Cover for: Talking to the Dead: Travels of a Biographer, Sarah Lefanu

What people are saying

Lucienne Boyce

@LucienneWrite

3 years

Writer of historical fiction and non-fiction. To The Fair Land (2012), The Bristol Suffragettes (2013), and The Dan Foster Mysteries.

This month I’ve been reading Sarah Lefanu’s Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal, published by Handheld Press, @KateHandheld , and The Winds of Heaven, a 1950s novel by Monica Dickens from @PersephoneBooks https://francesca-scriblerus.blogspot.com/2021/08/my-month-in-books-august-2021.html

We publish stories of quirk, edge and strong women. Out 19 Sept: a new biography of Hilda Matheson, BBC Talks Director & devoted lover of Vita Sackville West.

@JaneGalt7 @DunnettCentral It's odd, ToT mentions all these authors RM's narrator keeps running into, doing their Turkey books. Am sure some have been identified, possibly by Sarah LeFanu in her 2003 RM biog? Or in Dreaming of Rose? https://t.co/wGIiLhtqMY

Susan Osborne is a book blogger.

Lovely surprise #bookpost courtesy of @KateHandheld - Sarah LeFanu's memoir of writing her biography of Rose Macauley, Dreaming of Rose. Sounds fascinating! Due out next month. https://t.co/DstbTaBkFb

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