Lucasta Frances Elizabeth Miller (born 5 June 1966) [1] is an English writer and literary journalist.
Miller was educated at Westminster School and Lady Margaret Hall, in Oxford, [2] receiving a congratulatory first in English in 1988. She was awarded a PhD at the University of East Anglia in 2007.
Miller worked as deputy literary editor of The Independent in the mid-1990s. Known for her study in metabiography, The Bronte Myth (published by Jonathan Cape in the UK in 2001 and Knopf in the USA in 2003) [3] [4] [5] she has also been a contributor to the Guardian, as a profile and comment writer, [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement [11] and the Economist and was one of the judges of the Man Booker Prize in 2009. [12] Miller wrote the preface for a Penguin Classics edition of Wuthering Heights in 2003. She has been a trustee of the London Library and the Wordsworth Trust and was the founding editorial director of Notting Hill Editions. In the academic year 2015-16 she was Beaufort visiting fellow at Lady Margaret Hall and a visiting scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford.
Miller's biography of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, L.E.L. The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Landon, the celebrated “female Byron”, was published by Knopf and Jonathan Cape in 2019: “Ms Miller ... analyzes with revelatory insight ...this infinitely rich literary biography” (The Wall Street Journal) [13]
In 1992 Miller married the tenor Ian Bostridge. [1] They have two children and live in London.
Anne Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the youngest member of the Brontë literary family.
Charlotte Nicholls, commonly known as Charlotte Brontë, was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels became classics of English literature. She is best known for her novel Jane Eyre, which she published under the male pseudonym Currer Bell. Jane Eyre went on to become a success in publication, and is widely held in high regard in the gothic fiction genre of literature.
Emily Jane Brontë was an English novelist and poet who is best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. She also published a book of poetry with her sisters Charlotte and Anne titled Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell with her own poems finding regard as poetic genius. Emily was the second-youngest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother Branwell. She published under the pen name Ellis Bell.
Wuthering Heights is the only novel by the English author Emily Brontë, initially published in 1847 under her pen name "Ellis Bell". It concerns two families of the landed gentry living on the West Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and their turbulent relationships with the Earnshaws' foster son, Heathcliff. The novel was influenced by Romanticism and Gothic fiction.
Anne Patricia Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and professor.
Lady Antonia Margaret Caroline Fraser, is a British author of history, novels, biographies and detective fiction. She is the widow of the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Harold Pinter (1930–2008), and prior to his death was also known as Lady Antonia Pinter.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon was an English poet and novelist, better known by her initials L.E.L.
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington, was an Irish novelist, journalist, and literary hostess. She became acquainted with Lord Byron in Genoa and wrote a book about her conversations with him.
Richard Westall was an English painter and illustrator of portraits, historical and literary events, best known for his portraits of Byron. He was also Queen Victoria's drawing master.
Ian Charles Bostridge CBE is an English tenor, well known for his performances as an opera and lieder singer.
Dominic Christopher Sandbrook, is a British historian, author, columnist and television presenter. He co-hosts The Rest is History podcast with author Tom Holland.
Penguin Classics is an imprint of Penguin Books under which classic works of literature are published in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean among other languages. Literary critics see books in this series as important members of the Western canon, though many titles are translated or of non-Western origin; indeed, the series for decades since its creation included only translations, until it eventually incorporated the Penguin English Library imprint in 1986. The first Penguin Classic was E. V. Rieu's translation of The Odyssey, published in 1946, and Rieu went on to become general editor of the series. Rieu sought out literary novelists such as Robert Graves and Dorothy Sayers as translators, believing they would avoid "the archaic flavour and the foreign idiom that renders many existing translations repellent to modern taste".
Lyndall Gordon is a British-based biographical and former academic writer, known for her literary biographies. She is a senior research fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford.
Richard William Barber is a British historian who has published several books about medieval history and literature. His book The Knight and Chivalry, about the interplay between history and literature, won the Somerset Maugham Award, a well-known British literary prize, in 1971. A similarly-themed 2004 book, The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief, was widely praised in the UK press, and received major reviews in The New York Times and The New Republic.
The South African Book Fair is an international book fair in Johannesburg, South Africa. It is one of many similar events around the country. The fair started through a joint venture between the Publishers Association of South Africa (PASA) and the Frankfurt Book Fair. It was established in 2006 partially in response to the discontinuation of previous literary events, such as the Harare Book Fair and the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. The South African Book Fair features events including "authors’ readings, book launches, panel discussions and seminars".
Metabiography is the literary study of the relation of biographies to the temporal, geographical, institutional, intellectual or ideological locations of their writers. It is a hermeneutics of biography that sees the biographical subject as a collective construct of different memory cultures, proposing an essential instability of historical lives. In the words of Steven Shapin, metabiography stresses “that shifting biographical traditions make one person have many lives,” none of these necessarily more real than any other, because all are “configured and reconfigured according to the sensibilities and needs of the changing cultural settings.” In this sense, metabiography expresses a belief in the observer-dependence of historical knowledge.
Claire Harman is a British literary critic and book reviewer who has written for the Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, Evening Standard, the Sunday Telegraph and other publications. Harman is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has taught English at the Universities of Oxford and Manchester. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University, and been Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University since 2016.
English writer Lord Byron has been mentioned in numerous media. A few examples of his appearances in literature, film, music, television and theatre are listed below.
Andrea Stuart is a Barbadian-British historian and writer, who was raised in the Caribbean and the UK and now lives in the UK. Her biography of Josephine Bonaparte, entitled The Rose of Martinique, won the Enid McLeod Literary Prize in 2004. Although her three published books so far have been non-fiction, she has spoken of working on a novel set in the 18th century.
Matthew Forster was a British Whig politician and merchant.