Thackeray
  • Published: 31 October 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448129461
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 528

Thackeray

Formats & editions
EBook
31 Oct 2012
Paperback
15 Sep 2011
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'Brilliant... A most enjoyable and skilful biography' - A. N. Wilson

Vanity Fair, published in serial parts in 1847-8, made William Makepeace Thackeray famous 'all but at the top of the tree', he told his mother, 'and having a great fight up there with Dickens'. Behind him lay an extraordinary life - an intense, Anglo-Indian childhood, a fortune lost by his early twenties, a disastrous marriage to a wife who went mad and left him to bring up two small daughters in near penury.

But his later life was no less troubled. As D.J. Taylor shows in this incisive biography, Thackeray was a complex, touchy man, acutely sensitive to criticism and fearful of the publicity that accompanied his passage through life.
  • Published: 31 October 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448129461
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 528
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About the author

D J Taylor

D.J. Taylor's novels include English Settlement, which won a Grinzane Cavour Prize, Trespass and Derby Day, both of which were long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and Kept: A Victorian Mystery. His other books include After the War: The Novel and England Since 1945, Thackeray, Orwell: The Life, which won the 2003 Whitbread Biography Prize, and Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918–1940. He lives in Norwich with his wife, the novelist Rachel Hore, and their three sons.

Also by D J Taylor

The Prose Factory
The Windsor Faction
Derby Day
Ask Alice
Bright Young People
Kept
On The Corinthian Spirit
See all

Praise for Thackeray

A compelling biography... Taylor succeeds always in evoking a rich sense of context...without losing the narrative momentum

Michael Slater, New Statesman

A richly detailed book... Taylor writes with verve and affection and is shrewdly perceptive

John Carey, Sunday Times

An accomplished, responsible, imaginative reconstruction of life, and of a life. Thackeray has come home

Victoria Glendinning, Spectator

He's a gift of a subject to DJ Taylor (a novelist who loves to teem, and teems with brio)

Guardian

Outstanding... On every page there is evidence of a formidable critical and imaginative intelligence at work... A splendid book

Frank McLynn, Evening Standard

Taylor's awareness of the task of biography is just one of the many delights of this fond, yet not overly reverent account.'

Independent on Sunday

Wonderful... An outstanding biography. It is unlikely there will be a better one for years to come

Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday