The Brontë sisters and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were among her fangirls. George Eliot and Charles Dickens knew her work well enough to make fun of it in their novels. Her contemporaries thought of her as a female Byron, but later generations dismissed her as an “insipid virgin” whose verse was repellently sentimental.

Most readers today have never heard of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, an English writer whose pen name was “L.E.L.” But in the 1820s and ’30s, she was an internationally admired “poetess.” As Lucasta Miller writes in her enjoyable biography-mystery tale, L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron”, she is “a poet who disappeared.”

It’s particularly ironic that the likes of the Bloomsbury Set disparaged Landon as an exemplar of Victorian sentimentality. Her real life was high melodrama, filled with illegitimacy, adultery, extortion, drugs and corruption. Landon’s cover-up was too good—after her death at 36 under ambiguous circumstances (murder? suicide?), her friends’ pretence that she was unblemished contributed to her later obscurity. Her new biographer had to dig deep to find the truth.

Early in the book, Miller reveals the secret uncovered by researchers only this century: Far from being a virgin, the unmarried Landon bore three children out of wedlock to her married editor/mentor. At a time of rigid public morality and ineffective birth control, an entire industry existed to hide illegitimate children. Much of Landon’s energy was spent combatting allegations of adultery, both real and spurious. Desperate for domestic respectability, she ultimately cajoled a semicrooked colonial governor to the altar. It didn’t end well.

Her sex life aside, Landon was a hardworking, prolific writer of real talent, cheated and undervalued by London’s male publishing establishment. In a sensitive analysis of her work, Miller sees her as a sophisticated pioneer. Landon’s poetry seems unlikely to come back into style, but her life—at turns funny and sad, but always spirited—has enduring relevance.

When horror superfan and film producer Mallory O’Meara watched The Creature from the Black Lagoon at age 17, her life changed forever. She found a lifelong heroine when she discovered that the movie’s titular creature had been created by a female artist named Milicent Patrick. “For all of my adult life and film career, Milicent Patrick has been a guiding light, a silent friend, a beacon reminding me that I belonged,” O’Meara writes.

Patrick was a footnote long lost to film history, but O’Meara has decided to change all that with her fascinating biography, The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick. Patrick’s story is enthralling: She spent part of her childhood on the grounds of Hearst Castle, where her megalomaniac father was an architect. A talented artist, she became one of Disney’s first animators and, later, the only woman to create a classic Hollywood monster―only to be fired because her boss was jealous of the attention she was receiving. Nonetheless, her legacy continues to inspire, as her creature was the impetus behind the Oscar-winning film The Shape of Water. Patrick was also an actress (albeit not a great one) and a glamorous personality who embodied the allure of Hollywood.

Those details alone would be enough to make this an interesting read, but O’Meara adds her own unique narrative voice, including 177 fact-filled, endlessly funny footnotes. This is a book that O’Meara was born to write, and she seamlessly meshes her own life story with that of her heroine in a way similar to how Julie Powell paid tribute to Julia Child in Julie and Julia. Although O’Meara quickly discovered that her quest to learn more about Patrick was “a researcher’s nightmare,” she makes the journey unforgettable.

“Uncovering her life over the past two years,” O’Meara writes, “has helped me see the things I need to do to protect more women from her fate. It’s helped me be brave, be strong and be loud.”

Even if you’re not a fan of horror films, The Lady from the Black Lagoon is a riveting, sincere Hollywood saga that will quickly win your heart.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Mallory O’Meara for The Lady from the Black Lagoon.

Despite the dark legacy of colonialism, it’s unquestionable that Christopher Columbus was a master mariner, explorer and promoter. He also had apocalyptic beliefs about the end of days that were either visionary or bizarre, depending on your point of view. His admiring son Hernando Colón, educated in Renaissance humanism, downplayed his father’s millenarian ideas when he wrote his biography of Columbus. But Colón had the same wide-ranging imagination as his father, no matter how different their beliefs.

Born out of wedlock in 1488 but acknowledged by Columbus, Colón was a brilliant man whose intellectual ambitions directly provided the seed for modern libraries and whose sorting system indirectly anticipated internet search engines. Edward Wilson-Lee’s engaging new biography of Colón, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World’s Greatest Library, is at once an adventure tale and a history of ideas that continue to resonate.

As a teenager, Colón accompanied Columbus on his fourth voyage to the Caribbean. But as an adult, his own ambitions led him to the great European book marts, where he conceived his dream of a universal library that would include every book ever printed. He collected thousands of books, pamphlets and prints—the “shipwrecked books” of Wilson-Lee’s title were some 1,700 from Venice lost on a voyage back to Spain.

As he assembled his vast library in Seville, Colón led a project to describe all of Spain in a gazetteer, created a pioneering botanical garden and was the top Spanish negotiator (and probably spy) in a dispute with Portugal. But his greatest legacy was his series of book catalogs that attempted to categorize all human knowledge, a pre-digital Google.

After Colón’s death in 1539, his library ended up at Seville Cathedral, where it remains, sadly reduced in size by theft, mold and the Inquisition. Happily, Wilson-Lee’s insightful and entertaining work refreshes the memory of Colón’s sweeping vision. 

During her unprecedented 63-year reign, Queen Victoria grew up in front of the nation she led. After a gloomy and isolated childhood, she happily married her cousin Albert and gave birth to nine children. She reigned through multiple global conflicts and survived assassination attempts. Her popularity waxed and waned.

The subject of countless books, television shows and movies (who else has been portrayed by Emily Blunt and Dame Judy Dench?), Victoria is the very definition of an icon. Her correspondence and diaries have been pored over since her death in 1901 at age 81. But what is left to say about the much-documented life of Queen Victoria, perhaps the most scrutinized of monarchs?

Historian Lucy Worsley manages to offer a fresh look by focusing on 24 days throughout the monarch’s life. By zooming in on key dates to examine Victoria as a queen, wife and mother, the book is simultaneously fast-paced and substantial. Some scholars have tried to reframe Victoria as a feminist, a strong leader decades ahead of her time. But Worsley concludes Victoria was deeply traditional, gladly allowing Albert to influence her political decisions, parenting style and even home décor. Theirs was a complicated yet symbiotic relationship. Victoria struggled with depression, including after several of her pregnancies when she felt “lowness and tendency to cry.” Albert was a generally restrained man, and he encouraged Victoria to repress her own emotions. “Slowly, gradually, she began to check her feelings, to avoid angering or clashing with Albert,” Worsley writes. Victoria herself wrote, “My chief and great anxiety is—peace in the House. . . . God only knows how I love him. His position is difficult, heaven knows, and we must do everything to make it easier.”

Worsley’s portrait of the queen is unflinching. One can barely fault Victoria for being at times self-centered and bristly—her childhood was one marked by solitude and scheming adults who saw her as little more than a symbol of their own potential future power. Yet through Worsley’s clear-eyed and graceful writing, we also see a woman aiming to do right by her subjects and her family, even within the confines of the times.

When Joan Didion’s iconic novel Play It as It Lays came out in 1970, it was widely hailed as the ultimate Los Angeles story. But Didion’s friend Eve Babitz didn’t see it that way: Didion was from Sacramento via New York; Babitz was the real LA woman. So she wrote her own book.

Her book of lightly fictionalized autobiographical sketches published in 1974, Eve’s Hollywood, didn’t get the notice that Didion’s work did, but it was fresh, witty and buzzy. More books followed—some great, some not. But then Babitz became a drug addict. And after she got clean, she suffered a life-changing accident. The books stopped coming.

Babitz is still very much alive at 75 and is enjoying being rediscovered, thanks largely to Lili Anolik’s 2014 Vanity Fair article about her. Anolik has now written a smart, fast-paced meditation on Babitz in Hollywood’s Eve. Unsurprisingly, Babitz remains a complicated subject. Here’s a fractional list of Babitz’s lovers, back in the day: Jim Morrison, Steve Martin, Jackson Browne, Ahmet Ertegun, Annie Leibovitz, Warren Zevon—and so on. She appears nude in a photo with Duchamp, playing chess. Igor Stravinsky was her godfather. For a while, her best friend was the guy who inspired BZ in Play It as It Lays.

But Anolik argues that Babitz’s va-va-voom looks and sexual adventurism belied brains and talent. All those men weren’t exploiting her; she was exploiting them for writing fodder, like Proust and his duchesses.

Anolik’s own writing is jazzy and insightful, and her quest to find Babitz—both physically and psychologically—is an integral part of the book. Anolik notes that many of Babitz’s contemporaries misread her as a 1960s Carrie Bradshaw, yet Anolik sees her as ruthless, unencumbered, unapologetic. In other words, an artist.

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In 1881, Edgar Degas revealed his wax sculpture of an odd-looking young dancer at a Paris exhibition, a piece that caused controversy, revulsion and disgust among viewers. Today, Degas’ dancer is on display in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and it is regarded as a treasure and a breakthrough work of realistic, multidimensional art. In Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, author Camille Laurens attempts to place both the artist and the child who served as Degas’ model, Marie van Goethem, in context, yet much of the mystery surrounding them remains, haunting writer and reader alike.

Marie was born into a family of Belgian refugees, who were barely surviving in the slums of Paris. Managed by her mother, she became a “rat,” one of many young children who scurried across the dance floor in Paris Opera productions. The girls attracted the interest and desire of unscrupulous, lusty, upperclass male patrons. Paris in the 1880s had yet to address child labor protections; rehearsals and performances were grueling and often led to prostitution or, as with Marie, modeling, with its implied intimacies. Yet the work also paid better than most jobs children could physically do. At 14, Marie became a model for the eccentric, solitary Edgar Degas.

Degas’ life and art become familiar in Laurens’ detailed telling, but his relationship with Marie and her ultimate fate remain obscure. Laurens hints at many possibilities, admitting that she is haunted by this child of wax, whose insides Degas filled with the flotsam and jetsam of his cluttered studio. Comparing Marie to the tragic figure of the exploited Marilyn Monroe, who once posed next to the sculpture, and today’s Syrian child refugees working in Turkish textile factories to support their families, Laurens believes Degas sculpted “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” to communicate that “his own present time is universal, that he projects it into all times, that he informs the future with his hands.”

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, November 2018

Ireland is a small country, and it seemed even smaller a hundred-some years ago when giants of literature roamed the narrow Dublin streets, routinely crossing paths and sharing friends, social connections and antagonists. As novelist and critic Colm Tóibín walks the neighborhood south of the River Liffey, where he has lived since his student days, he draws connecting lines between shared locations haunted not only by three of the greatest writers his nation has produced—Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats and James Joyce—but by their fathers as well. William Wilde, John Butler Yeats and John Stanislaus Joyce were three very different men, yet they shared more than the streets around Merrion Square. Each sired a literary genius and possessed formidable, and in some cases unfulfilled, talents. And these fathers all came to influence their sons’ work in varying ways.

Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know offers richly drawn portraits of these fathers and sons, illuminating the influence rippling between generations. While Oscar Wilde may have inherited his sharp wit from his mother, William Wilde was a doctor, influential amateur archaeologist and writer whose hubris-laced court case involving alleged sexual indiscretions offered an eerie premonition of what would befall his son. John B. Yeats was a talented painter cursed with an inability to finish a canvas. His escape to New York to live out his life (funded by his son) did not preclude his voice permeating some of his son’s seminal poetry. Joyce’s father, a drunkard and raconteur, infiltrates Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses at every turn, as Joyce probes their complicated relationship, “evoking its shivering ambiguities, combining the need to be generous with the need to be true.”

As charming as it is illuminating, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know provides a singular look at an extraordinary confluence of genius.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Though it may be best suited for initiates of Napoleona, The Invisible Emperor details the deceptively calm but ultimately catastrophic interlude in the 25-year military career of one of history’s most famous soldiers, Napoleon.

Historian Mark Braude has re-created a detailed description of the emperor’s 10-month exile from France to the island of Elba. Napoleon’s new dominion lay only six miles off the Tuscan coast and 30 miles from Napoleon’s native Corsica, but to his captors, it seemed isolated enough for security and near enough for scrutiny. At the time, Elba was a French territory, which allowed for some familiarity of language and custom for Napoleon, and his guards even cultivated some loyalty toward the stocky little soldier, who whether for comfort or clever camaraderie preferred worn-out and undecorated old military garb as he wandered about the countryside.

Napoleon’s primary jailor, Neil Campbell, was an injured British colonel assigned, rather ambiguously, to “accompany” Napoleon in his new estate, which was quite lavish for an abdicated general. Still titled “emperor,” albeit only of Elba, Napoleon threw parties, ordered extensive renovations for his wife and son when they joined him in exile (they never did), had ships, horses and carriages delivered, and picked out several residences with good views. A man who once controlled nearly the entire European continent between Russian and Great Britain could now truly say he was lord of all he surveyed—86 square miles.

But if Napoleon’s weakness was stubborn ambition, his strength was strategy. Within the year, with only a thousand or so soldiers, he marched to Paris without even a skirmish. The next few months, now known as “the Hundred Days,” culminated in the Battle of Waterloo and the deaths of nearly 50,00 combatants.

Braude’s narrow focus on this “invisible” interlude dangles bits of psychological suppositions not always entirely supported, but his view of a man still caught up in his own self-image—one which, it must be admitted, was shared by many others—is intriguing.

The 107th justice of the U.S. Supreme Court has become an unlikely icon, a tiny-but-titanic 85-year-old whom popular culture has dubbed the “Notorious RBG.” She is showcased on everything from T-shirts to comedy sketches on “Saturday Night Live.” Lest this giant of jurisprudence lose her gravitas amid such fame, Jane Sherron De Hart does a daunting job of restoring Ginsburg’s impressive roots in Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life. Hart’s biography is a studious walk through Ginsburg’s own keen recollections, arm and arm with explorations of many landmark cases, as well as their historical, social and political landscapes. Ginsburg’s colleagues on the Supreme Court, including the first female justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, and her fellow opera lover, the mercurial Antonin Scalia, are here as well, coloring the historical record and shedding up-close-and-personal light on the daily work of the court.

During her first year at Harvard Law School in 1956, Ginsburg was one of nine females in a class of 552, and the dean routinely asked her, “Why are you . . . taking a place that could have gone to a man?” Later, despite a stellar academic record, she had trouble landing a job. As she noted, “To be a woman, a Jew, and a mother to boot” was “a bit too much” in 1959.

By the time Ginsburg was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by President Carter in 1980, her record of advocating for equal rights for women and men had made her a hero among feminists. Nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton, she has served since as a strident voice on both liberal and conservative courts. She is known for distilling legalese into language the press and public can understand, and her opinions and dissents have buttressed groundbreaking cases that involve such issues as abortion, immigration and gender equality.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” De Hart leaves no doubt that, in Justice Ginsburg’s hands, that arc will undoubtedly continue to bend.

Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you: Al Capone was sent to prison for tax evasion and not for murder. Fewer people know that the equally notorious Lucky Luciano was brought down in 1936 for compulsory prostitution. And almost nobody knows that the lawyer who brought Luciano to justice was a black female attorney working on Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey’s team. Eunice Hunton Carter, Invisible author Stephen L. Carter’s grandmother, was brilliant, ambitious and courageous. The fact that so few know her name has far more to do with bias than her ability or her determination.

Hunton Carter was the daughter of William and Addie Hunton, both prominent civil rights advocates. Addie Hunton in particular bore fearless witness to racial discrimination wherever she found it, whether in the heart of Klan territory or on the Western Front of World War I. Their daughter inherited their intellect, talent, drive and fortitude. With magnificent self-discipline, she achieved an impressive array of accomplishments, including earning a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Smith College, earning a J.D. from Fordham while doing social work full time, successfully negotiating the byzantine Harlem social pyramid and heading the largest division of the New York District Attorney’s Office. She was a tireless campaigner for the Republican party.

With this record, Hunton Carter should have been a judge or a prominent elected official. Instead, she was stymied, disadvantaged by her race and her gender, as well as by her brother’s communist leanings. A lesser woman would have thrown in the towel. Instead, Hunton Carter persisted, and she launched a new career as an international peace advocate.

In Invisible, Yale law professor and bestselling author Stephen L. Carter meticulously details his grandmother’s accomplishments and her disappointments. His admiration for this remarkable woman is infectious. Ultimately, the reader is forced to ask, “What if?” What if Hunton Carter had lived in a world where race and gender were irrelevant? What else would she have accomplished? And what would we have gained?

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, October 2018

Frederick Douglass was the most famous African-American of the 19th century, and his life story continues to inspire people around the world. An escaped slave who fled brutal treatment, he became a radical abolitionist, world-renowned author of three classic autobiographies, a noted journalist and editor, a public intellectual, one of the greatest orators of his time and a prominent government official. Yale historian David W. Blight brilliantly captures this legendary figure and his times in the magnificent Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, one of the best biographies of recent years. Blight’s portrait of Douglass is engrossing, moving, nuanced, frightening—and certainly thought-provoking.

Douglass is a complex figure, and he lived in a transformative time—from 1818 until 1895. His slave owner’s wife taught him to read before he escaped as a young man, and the only weapon he had against racism were words, both written and spoken. Extremely intelligent and ambitious, he thrilled and challenged audiences throughout the country and abroad with his oft-eloquent words. He frequently drew on his study of the Bible and was an Old Testament-like prophet himself, decrying the actions of not only slave owners but also other abolitionists with whom he disagreed. Douglass was both secular and religious, an advocate of self-reliance, deeply moralistic and yet pragmatic, a philosopher of democracy and natural rights.

Douglass’ turbulent life was full of pressures and controversy at each stage. He traveled widely and was frequently away from his dysfunctional family. His first wife, Anna, was largely illiterate, but she devoted her life to him and their five children during their 43 years of marriage. The need for money was a constant concern for Douglass, both to fund his newspapers and to help support his adult sons and son-in-law.

There are generous quotations from Douglass’ passionate speeches and writings woven throughout Blight’s biography. One of the many quotes that might best sum up Douglass’ lifelong work comes from a speech he gave in 1893: “Men talk of the Negro problem. There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, patriotism enough to live up to their Constitution.”

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.