Roger Bishop

Edward Garnett, a reader with exquisite taste, a perceptive critic and a writer, played a crucial role in the literary history of Britain between 1887 and 1937. His unique talent for recognizing and promoting future noteworthy authors is legendary, and he became many writers’ devoted friend and editor. Those authors include Joseph Conrad, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, John Galsworthy, Stephen Crane, Sarah Orne Jewett and more. E. M. Forster noted: "[Garnett] has done more than any living writer to discover and encourage the genius of other writers, and he has done it all without any desire for personal prestige."

Helen Smith's absorbing An Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett captures Garnett’s extraordinary life and times. Smith’s extensive research includes fascinating excerpts of letters and recollections of Garnett’s friends.

Garnett insisted he was an "outsider," by which he meant "outside all coteries and collections of people," as a reader and critic. But he was well connected in the literary world. His father was Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, and Garnett’s wife, Constance, was well known for her groundbreaking translations of Russian classics into English. She and Garnett led quite interesting and unorthodox lives, which Smith discusses in detail.

As an author himself, Garnett was often disappointed. His novels, poems and plays were not successful, although his reviews, essays and short author biographies were generally well received. The discovery of a writer was always the greatest pleasure of Garnett's professional life.

This enlightening and intimate biography looks behind the scenes to show how much time and effort went into the making and maintenance of promising , sometimes struggling, writers who became prominent authors.

When he was a student at Harvard in the 1930s, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. decided that history was “the only possible career” for him. But he wanted to be part of the political world as well. During the next 70 years, he played a unique role in American life as a historian-participant. Acknowledged as one of the foremost historians and public intellectuals of the postwar era, he received two Pulitzer Prizes (his first, for The Age of Jackson, was awarded when he was 28) and two National Book Awards. He expressed his views as a liberal activist in books and essays and as a speechwriter for presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. But he is perhaps best known for his work as a special assistant to President John Kennedy and author of A Thousand Days, a Pulitzer winner and bestselling account of life in the Kennedy administration. The book remains a primary source for the Kennedy legacy, and it brought him both praise and criticism as one of the great political image-makers.

Historian Richard Aldous brings the man and his extraordinary life of influence and controversy vividly to life in his meticulously researched and consistently enlightening Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian. Early in Schlesinger’s life, he became a keen observer and literary stylist. In the White House, Kennedy sought his counsel on some contemporary matters, but Kennedy had a longer view in mind, for as the president often said, “history depends on who writes it.” A Harvard professor and the author of highly regarded books on Frederick D. Roosevelt, whose work JFK admired and whom he liked as a person, seemed like the perfect White House historian. Kennedy told Schlesinger that his most important job was to keep a record of administration activity. The historian set up procedures to capture information and always kept index cards with him.

Schlesinger’s opposition to the Vietnam War and his books, including The Imperial Presidency and his biography of Robert Kennedy, are also explored in detail in this insightful and engaging look at one of the most influential historians of his time.

Jonathan Swift is often regarded as the finest satirist in the English language. He was a complex, fascinating and perplexing mixture of literary genius and contradictions in almost every aspect of his life. John Stubbs brilliantly captures all of this in his marvelously detailed and richly rewarding Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel. An intrepid researcher, Stubbs, the author of the award-winning John Donne: The Reformed Soul (described by Harold Bloom as “an exemplary literary biography”) mines many sources to give us a vivid portrait of his subject. Swift had “a tendency to love and hate things simultaneously, to grow attached to what he once despised and vice versa, and forget the opposite was ever true.”

If Swift had stopped writing in 1714 when he was 47 years old he would be remembered primarily as an excellent conservative writer and a defender of causes that often had reactionary sources and tangents. He had completed almost four years as an apologist and propagandist for the government in London and returned to his native Dublin, where he had been appointed Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a reward for his services to the Tory administration. His most famous work, Gulliver’s Travels, implicitly based on the vice and short-sightedness that he had observed in government, was still to come. When he was writing his masterpiece, he noted, “The chief end I propose to myself in all my labors is to vex the world rather than divert it.”

Swift’s “public career makes sense only when one understands the two desires he managed to harness together: an urge to dole out punishment and an irresistible delight in making mischief.” He was often disappointed, whether by his parents and relatives and the fact that he was born in Ireland and not in England, bothered by ill health, or that he failed to obtain a higher position in the Church. “At one and the same moment he was a stern authoritarian and a daring cultural bandit,” Stubbs writes.

Swift never married, but his best friend was Esther Johnson, whom he met at the home of statesman and man of letters Sir John Temple when Swift and Esther’s mother were on the staff there. When Esther was 20, he arranged for her and a companion, Mrs. Dingley, to move to Dublin, where they lived apart from him. The three of them often visited, always the three (sometimes including another person if Mrs. Dingley was not available) and Swift enjoyed Esther’s “turn of phrase, force of character, and intolerance of fools.” While he was away in London, he exchanged letters with Esther and she became the “Stella” of his Journal to Stella, in which he detailed his years in government. He did not believe in gender equality, but “he was keen to liberate women from being regarded as brittle idols or mere social accessories.”

Stubbs writes, “Almost every paragraph Swift wrote is multi-nuanced beyond definition or paraphrase, even though a ‘message’ is invariably clear.” His career as an essayist, poet, cleric and political pamphleteer demonstrated “the altogether inadequate expectations a moral person might have of life in this world.” But as his writings show, he dealt with that circumstance not by complaining or roaring, offering instead “a liberty of chiding, deriding, cajoling, bridling, impersonating, inverting, building up and laying bare; a liberty of making the powerful seem less so.”

This absorbing biography immerses us deeply in Swift’s world and is highly recommended.