Thackeray: The Life of a Literary Man - Hardcover

Taylor, D. J.

3.95

20 ratings by Goodreads

9780786709106: Thackeray: The Life of a Literary Man

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786709103 ISBN 13: 9780786709106

Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub, 2001

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A portrait of William Makepeace Thackeray details his life, from his turbulent Anglo-Indian childhood to his calamitous marriage to Isabelle Shaw, and explores his many complexities that made him one of the most prominent literary figures in Victorian London.

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About the Author:

O.J. Taylor is the author of four novels, most recently Trespass, and several works of non-fiction including the controversial A Vain Conceit and After the War: The Novel in England Since 1945.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Admirers of Dickens may begin this biography suspicious of Taylor's announced objective of establishing Thackeray as the greatest English writer of the nineteenth century. But such wariness will soon melt away in appreciation, for Taylor portrays Dickens' great rival with disarming candor and rare insight. To substantiate his claims for Thackeray's surpassing genius, Taylor traces the fitful growth of the writer's literary gifts, deployed at first in his satirical journalism and later in his penetrating novels. Even in the steady stream of early hackwork Thackeray did to pay his debts, he won wide praise for his prose style, while sharpening the skills he fully displayed in his masterpiece, Vanity Fair. Careful investigation into this great novel reveals that writing it with great haste actually helped Thackeray maintain narrative tension and artistic spontaneity. And no one--not Eliot, not Trollope, not even Dickens--ever surpassed Thackeray as a chronicler of the shifting social dynamics of Victorian England. Yet, as an accomplished novelist himself, Taylor recognizes the sad decline in Thackeray's later fiction, diagnosing the woodenness of the later novels as a consequence of success: once enthroned as a literary aristocrat, Thackeray lost the subversive energy that informed his earlier work. Taylor's unblinking scrutiny exposes the flaws in the man as well as in his work, detailing the novelist's awkward attempts to find solace from a friend's wife for his own disastrous marriage and recounting all the novelist's needless squabbles with prominent contemporaries. By resisting--like Thackeray himself--easy sentiment and smug moralizing, Taylor has produced a rewardingly crossgrained biography sure to attract serious readers for decades. Bryce Christensen
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