Mrs Pat: The Life of Mrs. Patrick Campbell

PETERS, MARGOT

Biographies & Memoirs

Penguin Books, Ltd.

Note : the photo listed with this item is not correct and refers to a different publication.

Charlotte Brontë: style in the novel

Literature & Fiction

University of Wisconsin Press

Lorine Niedecker (1903–70) was a poet of extraordinary talent whose life and work were long enveloped in obscurity. After her death in 1970, poet Basil Bunting wrote that she was “the most interesting woman poet America has yet produced . . . only beginning to be appreciated when she died.” Her poverty and arduous family life, the isolated home in Wisconsin that provided rich imagery for her work, and her unusual acquaintances have all contributed to Niedecker’s enigmatic reputation. Margot Peters brings Lorine Niedecker’s life out of the shadows in this first full biography of the poet. She depicts Niedecker’s watery world on Blackhawk Island (near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin), where she was born and spent most of her life. A brief college career cut short by family obligations and an equally brief marriage were followed in 1931 by the start of a life-changing correspondence and complicated thirty-five-year friendship with modernist poet Louis Zukofsky, who connected Niedecker to a literary lifeline of distant poets and magazines. Supporting herself by turns as a hospital scrubwoman and proofreader for a dairy journal, Niedecker made a late marriage to an industrial painter, which gave her time to write and publish her work in the final decades of her life. During her lifetime, Niedecker’s poetry was praised by a relatively small literary circle, including Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, Denise Levetov, and Allen Ginsberg. Since her death much more of her surviving writings have been published, including a comprehensive edition of collected works and two volumes of correspondence. Through Margot Peters’s compelling biography, readers will discover Lorine Niedecker as a poet of spare and brilliant verse and a woman whose talent and grit carried her through periods of desperation and despair. Best Special Interest Books, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

Lorine Niedecker: A Poet’s Life

Arts & Literature

unquiet soul, a biography of charlotte bronte

DOUBLEDAY COMPANY

Unquiet soul: A biography of Charlotte Brontë

Hodder&Stoughton

VG condition book with a good DJ. Boards are clean with minor wear. Content clean with bright pages and a solid binding. Good DJ with light edge wear namely creasing and some sunning to spine.

Mrs Pat the Life of Mrs Patrick Campbell

Arts & Photography

Performing Arts

Alfred A. Knopf. New York.

From the much-admired biographer of Charlotte Brontë, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and the Barrymores (“Margot Peters is surely now . . . our foremost historian of stage make-believe”—Leon Edel), a new biography of the most famous English-speaking acting team of the twentieth century. Individually, they were recognized as extraordinary actors, each one a star celebrated, imitated, sought after. Together, they were legend. The Lunts. A name to conjure with. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne worked together so imaginatively, so seamlessly onstage that they seemed to fuse into one person. Offstage, they brawled so famously and raucously over every detail of every performance that they inspired the musical Kiss Me, Kate. At home on Broadway, in London’s West End, touring the United States and Great Britain, and even playing “the foxhole circuit” of World War II, the Lunts stunned, moved, and mystified audiences for more than four decades. They were considered to be a rarefied taste, but when they toured Texas in the 1930s, the audience threw cowboy hats onto the stage. Their private life was equally fascinating, as unusual as the one they led in public. Friends like the critic Alexander Woollcott (whom Edna Ferber once described as “the little New Jersey Nero who thinks his pinafore is a toga”), Noël Coward, Laurette Taylor, and Sidney Greenstreet received lifelong loyalty and hospitality. Ten Chimneys, their country home in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin, “is to performers what the Vatican is to Catholics,” Carol Channing once said. “The Lunts are where we all spring from.” In this new biography, Margot Peters catches the magic of Lunt and Fontanne—their period, their work, their intimacy and its contradictions—with candor, delicacy, intelligence, and wit. She writes about their personal and creative choices as deftly as she captures their world, from their meeting (backstage, naturally)—when Fontanne was a young actress in the first flush of stardom and Lunt a lanky midwesterner who came in the stage door, bowed to her elaborately, lost his balance, and fell down the stairs—and the early days when an unknown and very hungry Noël Coward lived in a swank hotel in a room the size of a closet and cadged meals at their table to the telegram the famous couple once sent to a movie mogul, turning down a studio contract worth a fortune (“We can be bought, my dear Mr. Laemmle, but we can’t be bored”). We follow the Lunts through triumphs in plays such as The Guardsman, The Taming of the Shrew, and Design for Living; through friendships and feuds; through the intricate way they worked with such playwrights and directors as S. N. Behrman, Robert Sherwood, Giraudoux, Dürrenmatt, Peter Brook, and with each other. Margot Peters captures the gallantry of two remarkably gifted people who lived for their art and for each other. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were once described as an “amazing duet of intelligence and gaiety.” Margot Peters re-creates the fun and the fireworks.

Design for Living: Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne

KNOPF

Charlotte Brontë's tumultuous and passionate life.

DOUBLEDAY

This 461-page hardcover was published by Doubleday in 1980 (stated 1st edition).

Bernard Shaw and the actresses

Profiles the inimitable Mrs. Patrick Campbell, an eccentric, flamboyant, and brilliant actress, one of the first of the Victorian "actress-managers," in a full-length biography richly illustrated with family photographs

MRS. PAT

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by PETERS, MARGOT. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by PETERS, MARGOT

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by PETERS, MARGOT. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Mrs Pat: The Life of Mrs. Patrick Campbell

Charlotte Brontë: style in the novel

Lorine Niedecker: A Poet’s Life

unquiet soul, a biography of charlotte bronte

Unquiet soul: A biography of Charlotte Brontë

Mrs Pat the Life of Mrs Patrick Campbell

Design for Living: Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne

Unquiet soul: A biography of Charlotte Brontë

Bernard Shaw and the actresses

MRS. PAT