Victoria Glendinning

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Victoria Glendinning (born April 23, 1937 in Sheffield ) is a British writer and biographer.

Glendinning comes from a Quaker family. Her father was the British banker Frederic Seebohm . Glendinning grew up near York , attended Millfield School in Somerset, and graduated from Oxford University with a degree in modern languages . She also trained as a social worker with a psychiatric component. She then devoted herself to raising children before starting to write in the late 1960s, first for Nova magazine and then, after her first biography was published in 1969, for a short time for the Times Literary Supplement . In the 1970s she moved to Dublin when her husband changed position , and in the late 1970s she was back in England.

She is Honorary Vice President of the British PEN Club, which she led from 2000, and Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature . In 1998 she became Commander of the Order of the British Empire .

She was married three times. Her first marriage was in 1958, when she married her Spanish tutor in Oxford, Nigel Glendinning (later professor), with whom she had four sons and from whom she divorced in 1981. One of her sons is Matthew Glendenning, with whom she edited the book Sons and Mothers , another the mathematician Paul Glendinning and the philosopher Simon Glendinning (professor at the London School of Economics). In her second marriage, she married the writer and literary critic Terence de Vere White (1912-1990), who until 1977 published the literary section of the Irish Times . In 1996 she married businessman and engineer Kevin O'Sullivan.

She wrote biographies of Elizabeth Bowen , Edith Sitwell , Vita Sackville-West , Rebecca West (whom she knew personally and whom Glendinning wanted as a biographer), Leonard Woolf , Anthony Trollope , Stamford Raffles and Jonathan Swift . Glendinning also wrote novels and hosted on the radio. She lives in the Somerset (Bruton) countryside and is a passionate gardener.

Fonts

  • A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter , Routledge & Kegan Paul 1969 (biography of her great-aunt Winnie Seebohm, who was one of the first students at Newnham College in Cambridge in 1885 and died at the age of just 22)
  • Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer , Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1977
  • Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions , Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1981 (received the Duff Cooper Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize)
    • German translation: Edith Sitwell , Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt 1995
  • Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West , Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1983 (received the Whitbread Biography Award)
    • German translation: Vita Sackville-West , Fischer TB 1997, Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt 1990 and Büchergilde Gutenberg 1992
  • Rebecca West: A Life , Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1987
    • German translation: Rebecca West , Zurich, Arche 1992, Goldmann 1995
  • The Grown-Ups , Hutchinson 1989 (novel)
  • Trollope , Hutchinson 1992 (the book received the Whitbread Biography Award)
  • Electricity , Hutchinson 1995 (novel)
  • Editor with Matthew Glendinning: Sons and Mothers , Virago 1996
  • Jonathan Swift , 1998, Hutchinson
  • with other The Weekenders , Ebury 2001
  • Flight , Scribner 2002 (novel)
  • Leonard Woolf , Simon & Schuster 2006
  • Raffles and the Golden Opportunity , Profile Books Ltd. 2012
  • Editor with Judith Robertson: Love's Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, Letters and Diaries 1941-1973 , Simon & Schuster 2009

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