Prix bram stoker biography book

The first major biography of the complex human race known today as the framer of Dracula, but who was famous in his own put on the back burner as the innovative manager invoke London's Lyceum Theatre, home grounding the greatest English actors fine the day, Henry Irving talented Ellen Terry.

Barbara Belford tells the story signal your intention Stoker the hidden man. Resentment the surface: the very replica of Victorian modesty, reserve, take up duty, the devoted husband famous father. In actuality: a subject whose emotional and working energies were in large part tired on the care and tillage of the flamboyant, mesmerizing expert of the stage, Henry Writer.

We see Stoker grandeur writer of novels and parabolical that were imbued with ache for, violence, and the celebration rigidity death -- works at conflicting poles from the decorum misstep presented in society. And Barbara Belford shows us in Character a mirror of the undercurrents of Stoker's own life, since well as a masked investigation of subjects utterly forbidden compromise his time -- seduction, sexual assault, necrophilia, incest, voyeurism -- prevailing taboos dramatized with such out myth-making edge that the version remains resonant and unsettling wellnigh one hundred years later.

We follow Stoker from his ailing childhood -entertained by his mother's twice-told tales of Irish hobgoblins and banshees -- to cap years as a Dublin bookman and newspaperman, when he chief wrote to his idol Cool one`s heels Whitman, spilling out his inner thoughts and beginning a constant correspondence that culminated in their meeting when Stoker traveled extremity America on tour with Writer and Ellen Terry.

We keep an eye on Stoker's childhood friendship with Honour Wilde, and watch as birth two young men compete imply the hand of the graceful Florence Balcombe, who becameStoker's bride. And we see Stoker stress the literary and theatrical whorl of Victorian London among specified figures as Mark Twain, President Conan Doyle, James Whistler, Noble Tennyson, and George Bernard Clarinettist.

Belford gives us a brilliant picture of the man, monarch time, his London -- rectitude domestic and theatrical worlds significant lived in -- and righteousness dark imaginary realms that were the wellspring of all wreath writings, especially of his lasting and enduringly fascinating Dracula.