This authorized biography of the poet Kathleen Raine tells the story of how she developed from a small girl, who knew at the age of eight that she wanted only to write poetry, into a world-renowned poet and literary scholar. Philippa Bernard follows Kathleen Raine's struggle against the constriction[...]

The lifework of one of the 20th century's greatest poets. Since her first collection of poems published in 1943, Kathleen Raine has been writing a kind of mystical nature poetry all her own, a poetry immersed in the quiet air of solitude and imagination. Vita Sackville-West, writing in the Observer,[...]

?Bette is a wronged soul; and when her passion does break, it is, as Balzac says, sublime and terrifying,? wrote V. S. Pritchett. A late masterpiece in Balzac?s La Comédie Humaine, Cousin Bette is the story of a Vosges peasant who rebels against her scornful upper-class relatives, skillfully turnin[...]