A terrifically engaging and original biography about one of England's greatest novelists, and the glamorous, eccentric, debauched and ultimately tragic family that provided him with the most significant friendships of his life and inspired his masterpiece, 'Brideshead Revisited'.[...]

Who was the real Jane Austen? A spinster who sat in a vicarage confining her novels to the small canvas of village life? Or a woman who knew the turbulent world around her and who took the bold decision to remain unmarried and fashion herself as a professional writer?[...]

Evelyn Waugh was already famous when Brideshead Revisited was published in 1945. The chronicle of a household, a family, and a journey of religious faith--an elegy for a vanishing world--Waugh's masterwork was a tribute and testimony to a family he had fallen in love with a decade earlier. The Lygon[...]

Acclaimed biographer Paula Byrne explores the forces that shaped the interior life of one of the most beloved novelists in the English language: her father's religious faith; her mother's aristocratic pedigree; her eldest brother's adoption; her relatives in the East and West Indies; the family's am[...]