Book description
A Book of Secrets
is a masterfully atmospheric treasure-trove of hidden lives,
uncelebrated achievements and family mysteries. Acclaimed biographer
Michael Holroyd peers into dusty corners to bring a company of unknown
women into the light; Alice Keppel was the mistress of both the second
Lord Grimthorpe and the Prince of Wales; Eve Fairfax was Lord
Grimthorpe's abandoned fiancée and sometime muse of Auguste Rodin; and
the novelist Violet Trefusis was the lover of Vita Sackville-West.
Taking the reader on a journey of discovery from Ravello to Paris, from
Kirkstall Grange in Yorkshire to Vita Sackville-West's home at Knole,
A Book of Secrets
lucidly gives voice to fragile human connections. Besides the Lives
of Augustus John, Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey (which was filmed as Carrington
), Michael Holroyd has written two volumes of memoirs, Basil Street
Blues
and Mosaic.
His most recent book, A Strange Eventful History
, winner of the James Tait Black Prize, was a biography of two great
theatrical dynasties which included Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, and her
son Edward Gordon Craig. He has been president of the Royal Society of
Literature and is the first non-fiction writer to have been awarded the
British Literature Prize. He lives in London and Somerset with his wife,
the novelist Margaret Drabble.
