Miranda Seymour | |
---|---|
Born | 1948 |
Occupation | Writer, historian, biographer |
Period | 1975–present |
Subject | Women writers, 20th century history |
Notable works | In My Father's House, I Used to Live Here Once, Chaplin's Girl, The Bugatti Queen |
Notable awards | Pen Ackerley Award |
Website | |
www |
Miranda Jane Seymour (born 8 August 1948) is an English literary critic, novelist and biographer of Robert Graves, Mary Shelley and Jean Rhys among others. Seymour is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. [1] She elected to resign from the Royal Society of Literature in December 2023. [2] She was formerly married to Andrew Sinclair, and Anthony Gottleib and is now married to Ted Lynch [3] .
Miranda Seymour was two years old when her parents moved into Thrumpton Hall, [4] the family ancestral home. She detailed her unconventional upbringing in her 2008 memoir In My Father's House: Elegy for an Obsessive Love (Simon & Schuster, UK [5] ), [6] which appeared in the US as Thrumpton Hall (HarperCollins) [7] and won the 2008 Pen Ackerley Prize for Memoir of the Year. [8]
She studied at Bedford College, London, now part of Royal Holloway, University of London, earning a BA in English in 1981. [9]
Seymour began her literary career in 1975 with an historical novel, The Stones of Maggiare. [10] This was followed by six others concerned with Italy and Greece, including Daughter of Darkness, about Lucrezia Borgia, [11] and Medea (1982). [12]
In 1982, Seymour turned to biography, beginning with a group portrait of Henry James in his later years, entitled A Ring of Conspirators. [13] This was followed by biographies of Lady Ottoline Morrell, [14] Mary Shelley [15] and Robert Graves, [16] about whom she also wrote a novel, The Telling [17] and a radio play, Sea Music.
In 2001, she came across material on Hellé Nice, a forgotten French Grand Prix racing driver of the 1930s. After extensive research, Seymour published an acclaimed [18] book, The Bugatti Queen, [19] in 2004 about Nice's ultimately tragic life. This was followed by another life of an unconventional woman, that of 1930s film star, Virginia Cherrill. This was also based on a substantial archive in private ownership, and published as Chaplin's Girl: The Lives and Loves of Virginia Cherrill in 2009. [20]
In 2002, Seymour published a book about herbs: A Brief History of Thyme. [21] Noble Endeavours: Stories from England; Stories from Germany appeared in September 2013 from Simon & Schuster and was described as being a work of 'unphased optimism'. [22]
Seymour returned to biography with In Byron's Wake [23] (2018) which covered the lives of Lord Byron's wife and daughter, Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace. [24] [25] I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys was published by Harper Collins in 2022. [26] [27]
Seymour reviews and writes articles for newspapers and literary journals, including The Economist , The Times , the Times Literary Supplement , Spectator , and the New York Review of Books .
Formerly a Visiting Professor of English Studies at the University of Nottingham Trent, [28] Seymour is currently the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Kings College London. [29]
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation.
Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Morrell was an English aristocrat and society hostess. Her patronage was influential in artistic and intellectual circles, where she befriended writers including Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, and artists including Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington and Gilbert Spencer.
Garsington Manor, in the village of Garsington, near Oxford, England, is a country house, dating from the 17th century. Its fame derives principally from its owner in the early 20th century, the "legendary Ottoline Morrell, who held court from 1915 to 1924".
Garsington is a village and civil parish about 8 kilometres (5 mi) southeast of Oxford in Oxfordshire. "A History of the County of Oxfordshire" provides a detailed history of the parish from 1082. The 2011 census recorded the parish's population as 1,689. The village is known for the artistic colony and flamboyant social life of the Bloomsbury Group at Garsington Manor when it was the home from 1914 to 1928 of Philip and Ottoline Morrell, and for the Garsington Opera which was staged there from 1989 to 2010.
Clara Mary Jane Clairmont, or Claire Clairmont as she was commonly known, was the stepsister of the writer Mary Shelley and the mother of Lord Byron's daughter Allegra. She is thought to be the subject of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Bennet Evan Miller is an English comedian, actor and author. He rose to fame as one half of the comedy duo Armstrong and Miller. He is also known for his roles as DI Richard Poole in the BBC crime drama series Death in Paradise and James Lester in the ITV sci-fi series Primeval.
Mariette Hélène Delangle (1900–1984), better known by her stage name Hellé Nice, was a French dancer and motor racing driver. She danced in Paris at the Hôtel Ritz, Olympia Hall and Casino de Paris, before her career was ended by a skiing accident. She then became a racing driver, using roadster cars built by companies such as Alfa Romeo, Bugatti, DKW, Ford, Hispano-Suiza, Renault and Rosengart. She competed in various Grand Prix motor racing, hillclimbing and rally events at a time when it was rare for a woman to do so. She won the Grand Prix Féminin and the Actor's Championship in 1929. Already famous in Paris, she became a household name in France in the early 1930s and raced as an exhibition dirt track driver for a season in the United States.
Virginia Cherrill was an American actress best known for her role as the blind flower girl in Charlie Chaplin's City Lights (1931).
The Villa Diodati is a mansion in the village of Cologny near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, notable because Lord Byron rented it and stayed there with Dr. John Polidori in the summer of 1816. Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, who had rented a house nearby, were frequent visitors. Because of poor weather, in June 1816 the group famously spent three days together inside the house creating stories to tell each other, two of which were developed into landmark works of the Gothic horror genre: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The Vampyre, the first modern vampire story, by Polidori.
Wittgenstein is a 1993 experimental comedy-drama film co-written and directed by Derek Jarman, and produced by Tariq Ali. An international co-production of the United Kingdom and Japan, the film is loosely based on the life story, as well as the philosophical thinking of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The adult Wittgenstein is played by Karl Johnson.
Ada Byron Milbanke, 14th Baroness Wentworth was a British peer.
Sir Percy Florence Shelley, 3rd Baronet,, was the son of the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, novelist and author of Frankenstein. He was the only child of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to live beyond infancy. His middle name, possibly suggested by his father's friend Sophia Stacey, came from the city of his birth, Florence in Italy. He had two elder half-siblings, by his father's first marriage to Harriet Westbrook, and three full siblings who died in infancy.
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, was a British poet and peer. He is one of the major figures of the Romantic movement, and is regarded as being among the greatest of English poets. Among his best-known works are the lengthy narratives Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; much of his shorter lyrics in Hebrew Melodies also became popular.
Andrew Annandale Sinclair FRSL FRSA was a British novelist, historian, biographer, critic, filmmaker, and a publisher of classic and modern film scripts. He has been described as a "writer of extraordinary fluency and copiousness, whether in fiction or in American social history".
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist who is best known for writing the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft.
George Fitzroy Seymour was High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire in 1966 and Deputy Lieutenant of Nottinghamshire.
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.
Anna Muthesius born Anna Trippenbach was a German fashion designer, concert singer, and author from Aschersleben.
Shoe Dog is a memoir by Nike co-founder Phil Knight. The memoir chronicles the history of Nike from its founding as Blue Ribbon Sports and its early challenges to its evolution into one of the world's most recognized and profitable companies. It also highlights certain parts of Phil Knight's life. The book was ghostwritten by J. R. Moehringer.
Arabella Lawrence (1787–1873) was an English educator, one of the Lawrence sisters, Unitarians who ran a noted school at Gateacre. She is now known as a tutor for Ada Lovelace in the period 1830–2.