Is there room on the shelf for another book about Charles Dickens? The great novelist has been endlessly scrutinized by critics and biographers, bowdlerized on stage and screen, and lionized by generations of readers since his death 150 years ago. A.N. Wilson, the celebrated British biographer of many eminent Victorians (including Queen Victoria herself), now lends his expertise and singular perspective in The Mystery of Charles Dickens.

Rather than providing a straightforward, linear biography, Wilson explores Dickens’ life and work through the prism of seven “mysteries” that shaped the elusive writer. “Dickens, as an actor and a novelist, and as a man, was a man of masks,” Wilson suggests, “who probably never revealed himself to anyone; quite conceivably, he did not reveal himself to himself.” The rich narrative begins with Dickens’ ultimate public deception: Even in the throes of death from a stroke in June 1870, he diligently kept the existence of his long-term extramarital relationship with actress Nelly Ternan from the adoring eyes of the public. Next, Wilson looks at the mysteries of Dickens’ parents—his problematic relationship with his father and his fraught feelings toward his mother—and how the depiction of childhood in his fiction reflects an ideal rather than a reality. Similarly, his disastrous marriage was marked by private cruelty that belied his magnanimous public persona. The writer’s considerable acts of charity, performed largely anonymously, were complicated as well. Wilson suggests that Dickens likely partook in the services of prostitutes even as he supported organizations tasked with setting these women on the straight and narrow.

It has long been acknowledged how much Dickens’ fiction drew on real life, both his own and the wider world he observed, but Wilson convinces readers that Dickens’ beloved fictional vision, both comic and condemning, was a creation of the writer’s imagination, not grounded in realism like Balzac. It is a romanticized picture of 19th-century reality. Wilson brings dazzling, far-reaching erudition to this study, drawing on unexpected, sometimes arcane sources to paint a portrait with impressive depth and nuance.

During his lifetime, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was one of America’s most highly regarded poets, a phenomenally successful bestselling writer both here and abroad. An author of stories and essays, a translator of Dante and an editor of a multivolume anthology of poetry from around the world, he played a major role in shaping middle-class culture during the 1800s. As the Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard, he brought a cosmopolitan vision to his writing and was influential in bringing European culture to the U.S. and dramatizing American themes overseas. (He is still the only American to have a bust of his likeness in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey.) His many literary friends included Nathaniel Hawthorne, Julia Ward Howe and Charles Dickens.

Longfellow and his times are brought vividly to life by Nicholas A. Basbanes in his authoritative and wonderfully readable Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He traces the poet’s life from Maine, where Longfellow knew early on that he wanted to be a professional writer, to becoming a major literary presence. Basbanes draws on a rich abundance of correspondence, diaries, journals and notebooks and gives readers generous excerpts from Longfellow and many others.

At the heart of the book is the relationship between Longfellow and his second wife, Frances Appleton Longfellow. Fanny, as she was called, was educated, multilingual and skilled as an artist. She was remarkably well read and wrote very well herself, and her relationship with Longfellow thrived on intellect as much as romance. Describing their relationship, a friend once remarked, “Of all happy homes theirs was in many ways the happiest.”

Longfellow usually preferred not to be involved in controversial issues but was a noted antislavery advocate who decried war and violence of any kind. His best friend was Charles Sumner, a noted abolitionist who almost lost his life for the cause of abolition when he was attacked in the U.S. Senate. Long before that incident, Longfellow published Poems on Slavery at Sumner’s request.

Basbanes uses his sources well, transporting readers beautifully to the world of a poet who is often overlooked. If you enjoy literary biography, this is a book to savor.

Books by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard aren’t likely on many readers’ nightstands these days. After all, titles such as Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Repetition and The Concept of Anxiety don’t exactly inspire a desire to dig deeper into their contents (even though the latter title sounds at least like it might be fitting for our unsettling times.) Yet, as Clare Carlisle demonstrates in the absorbing and captivating Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard, reading Kierkegaard is much like reading a good novel or a thoughtful poem. Above all, his work struggles artistically with what it means to be human and what it means to love, expressing these concerns in rhetorical styles that seduce the reader into complex philosophical sketches about aesthetics, ethics and religion.

Carlisle, Reader in Philosophy at King’s College London, eschews the contours of traditional biography, focusing instead on Kierkegaard’s growth and development as a writer through a careful look at his publications. Writing became the fabric of Kierkegaard’s existence, says Carlisle—the “most vibrant love of his life.” (“All his other loves flowed into it, and it swelled like the ocean that crashed against his native land.”) Among these other loves, Carlisle deftly illustrates the ways that Kierkegaard’s breakup with his fiancée, Regine Olsen, haunted him through all his life, weaving itself in some fashion or another through all of his writings. Carlisle points out that Kierkegaard’s work of “soul-searching, exploring his own anxiety and suffering,” deepens “his understanding of being human, and [gives] his philosophy a power to affect others.”

Philosopher of the Heart does what the best biographies do: It sends us back to Kierkegaard’s time so we can see for ourselves the beauty, intricacy and literary artistry of what he accomplished. Carlisle’s meticulous reading of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre reveals that his work deserves a wider audience for its insights into what it means to be human. This penetrating introduction will encourage us to put Fear and Trembling or Stages on Life’s Way on our nightstands.

Henry Kissinger’s approach to American foreign policy continues to be a subject of controversy, even though he’s been out of government since the 1970s. Regarded as a brilliant statesman by many, he has also been called an appeaser, a villain and a war criminal. What was it that caused people to view him so differently? Are there lessons for today we can learn from him? 

Barry Gewen, a longtime editor at the New York Times Book Review, explores these and other questions in his meticulously researched, consistently stimulating and deeply insightful intellectual biography, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World. Through detailed analyses of Kissinger’s policy decisions on Vietnam and Chile, the influence of his personal life on his professional worldview, and the views of other Jewish European refugee intellectuals, Gewen offers a better understanding of Kissinger’s ability to challenge people to rethink their assumptions.

Kissinger always loved the U.S. but remained skeptical about democracy. Although he downplayed the influence of his youth in Weimar Republic Germany during the rise of Hitler, who could forget that the leader of the Nazi Party came to power primarily by democratic means? Kissinger believed not in grand dreams but in dealing with realities. Peace is not the natural condition of humankind, he said, and democracy will not guarantee global peace and stability. A balance of power is essential. All of these ideas were controversial, of course, but probably nothing caused him more trouble than believing that we should accept evil in the world rather than trying to eradicate it. As he put it, “Nothing is more difficult for Americans to understand than the possibility of tragedy.”

This beautifully written and engaging gem is an exciting, exhilarating must-read for anyone interested in international relations, American foreign policy or the ideas of Kissinger, whether you agree with him or not.

He is singular among American heroes: Founding Father, truth-teller, brave but reluctant military leader. In the insightful and entertaining You Never Forget Your First, historian Alexis Coe moves past the well-worn tropes we’ve come to associate with George Washington. Her nuanced portrait paints a man torn between service to country and family.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Alexis Coe.

Born to Augustine and Mary Washington on a modest farm in Fredericksburg, Virginia, George was the oldest of six. Augustine died when George was just 11 years old. With a modest inheritance and no money for education, George learned responsibility at an early age. At 17, he became the surveyor of Culpeper County, the youngest ever, and began buying land. A natural leader, he became a major in the Virginia military by 21 and caught the eye of British Governor Dinwiddie, who sent him on a mission to expel French settlers from the Ohio territory. These were his earliest forays into what would become a lifetime of public service. 

Washington’s story is as well documented as anyone’s in American history. Yet Coe, a former research curator for the New York Public Library, finds fresh angles from which to examine him. And she doesn’t shy away from the most troubling aspect of Washington’s legacy: When he died, he owned 123 slaves. The museum at Mount Vernon claims Washington freed all the people he enslaved in his 1799 will. While that is technically true, Coe points out that their emancipation was not automatic upon his death. Even worse, many of the people enslaved by Washington had married those enslaved by Martha, so even when they were emancipated, their loved ones were not.

Despite the heavy subject matter, Coe writes with style and humor (one chapter opens with the line “Great love stories don’t often begin with dysentery”). You Never Forget Your First reminds us of the importance of public service and diplomacy, and Coe makes colonial history not just fascinating but relevant.

A beguiling look at the many women who helped shape the temperament, talents and art of Virginia Woolf

Modernist trailblazer and feminist icon Virginia Woolf not only helped change the course of literature but also significantly altered the way we think about women writers and their work. In Gillian Gill’s captivating and incisive new study, Virginia Woolf: And the Women Who Shaped Her World, she refracts Woolf’s life, as the title suggests, through the facets of a distaff prism. Detailing Woolf’s fascinating maternal lineage as well as her intimate relationships with female family and friends, Gill explores the ways that young Virginia Stephen became the formidable Virginia Woolf. 

Woolf’s maternal line (the source of her wealth) was Anglo-Indian, and Gill shares the long-hidden probability that Woolf’s great-great-grandmother was of Bengali descent. Woolf was never aware of this extraordinary fact, but it underscores the unconventionality of her clan. There were seven accomplished women in Woolf’s grandmother’s generation, including her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, the Victorian-age photographer whose exquisite images are now preserved and revered—in no small part due to Woolf’s resurrecting efforts. 

All of the women in Woolf’s maternal line were renowned for their grace, beauty and spirit—not least of all Woolf’s mother, Julia Jackson, who was named after Cameron and became one of the photographer’s favorite models. Woolf’s sometimes-fraught relationship with her Victorian-minded mother, who died when Woolf was 13, would be central to the writer’s emotional development, as much for what it lacked as for what it possessed.

Woolf’s immediate family was complicated, with two brothers, a sister and four half-siblings. Her father, the scholar and writer Leslie Stephen, had been previously married to the daughter of novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, and Woolf gained a beloved aunt and a half-sister, Laura, from that earlier union. Laura spent most of her life in an asylum, and other relatives, including Leslie himself, exhibited signs of mental illness, as would Woolf. Her half-sister Stella, from Julia’s first marriage to Herbert Duckworth, was a stabilizing influence after their mother’s premature death. Most significant was Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, who was her closest spiritual confidante. Together they were at the center of the Bloomsbury group that revolutionized the arts and intellectual thought of the day.

Gill persuades us that, for Woolf—who grew up in a male-dominated household and, later, navigated a male-centric world—it was the women in her life who played a consummate role in shaping her revolutionary perceptions and art. This embracing and often sharp-witted study of the peripheries of a great writer’s life makes for compulsive reading.