Richard Bradford

Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires (eBook, ePUB)

The Life of Patricia Highsmith

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

NOMINATED FOR THE H.R.F. KEATING AWARD, 2022.

'My New Year's Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle - may they never give me peace' - Patricia Highsmith (New Year's Eve, 1947).

Made famous by the great success of her psychological thrillers, The Talented Mr Ripley and Strangers on a Train, Patricia Highsmith is renowned as one of the most influential and celebrated modern writers. However, there has never been a clear picture of the woman behind the books.

The relationship between Highsmith's lesbianism, her fraught personality - by parts self-destructive and malicious - and her fiction, has been largely ignored by biographers in the past. As an openly homosexual writer, she wrote the seminal lesbian love story Carol for which she would be venerated, in modern times, as a radical exponent of the LGBTQ+ community.

Alas, her status as an LGBTQ+ icon is undermined by her excessive cruelty towards and exploitation of her friends and many lovers. In this biography, Richard Bradford brings his sharp and incisive style to one of the greatest and most controversial writers of the twentieth century. He considers Highsmith's bestsellers in the context of her troubled personal life; her alcoholism, licentious sex life, racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and abundant self-loathing.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 21. Januar 2021
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781448217915
• Artikelnr.: 60682701

Autorenporträt

Richard Bradford is Research Professor in English at Ulster University and Visiting Professor at the University of Avignon, France. He has published over thirty widely acclaimed books, including biographies of Philip Larkin, Alan Sillitoe, Kingsley Amis, George Orwell and a controversial portraiture of Patricia Highsmith. Bradford has written for The Spectator and The Sunday Times and has appeared on the Channel 4 series In Their Own Words: British Novelists.

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The Beginning
2. Barnard
3. Boarding the Train
4. Yaddo and Consequences
5. Carol
6. Ellen
7. Ripley
8. Marijane
9. 'So Much in Love'
10. Eccentricity
11. France
12. Animals and Us
13. 'It's Good You Never Had Children'
14. Her Last Loves
15. 'I'm Sick of the Jews!'
16. Those Who Walk Away
Primary Sources
Suggested Further Reading
Index