Book description
>
Accused of cowardice, Ismay became, according to one headline, The Most
Talked-of Man in the World'. The first victim of a press hate campaign,
his reputation never recovered and while other survivors were piecing
together their accounts, Ismay never spoke of his beloved ship again.
With the help of that great narrator of the sea, Joseph Conrad, whose
Lord Jim
so uncannily predicted Ismay's fate - and whose manuscript of the story
of a man who impulsively betrays a code of honour and lives on under the
strain of intolerable guilt went down with the Titanic
- Frances Wilson explores the reasons behind Ismay's jump, his desperate
need to make sense of the horror of it all, and to find a way of living
with lost honour.
For those who survived the Titanic
the world was never the same again. But as Wilson superbly
demonstrates, we all have our own Titanic
s, and we all need to find ways of surviving them. i> and watched her
go down again on numerous occasions, but out of the wreckage Frances
Wilson spins a new epic: when the ship hit the iceberg on 14 April 1912
and a thousand men prepared to die, J Bruce Ismay, the ship's owner and
inheritor of the White Star fortune, jumped into a lifeboat with the
women and children and rowed away to safety. Titanic< 'A writer's
writer who will no doubt inspire her own cult following' Amanda Foreman
On Literary Seductions: 'Psychologically rich and wise' Alain de Botton
On The Courtesan's Revenge: 'A wonderful biography ... witty and sharp'
Jane Ridley, Spectator On The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: 'Passion is
the keynote of Wilson's fine biography' Sunday Times >
Accused of cowardice, Ismay became, according to one headline, The Most
Talked-of Man in the World'. The first victim of a press hate campaign,
his reputation never recovered and while other survivors were piecing
together their accounts, Ismay never spoke of his beloved ship again.
With the help of that great narrator of the sea, Joseph Conrad, whose
Lord Jim
so uncannily predicted Ismay's fate - and whose manuscript of the story
of a man who impulsively betrays a code of honour and lives on under the
strain of intolerable guilt went down with the Titanic
- Frances Wilson explores the reasons behind Ismay's jump, his desperate
need to make sense of the horror of it all, and to find a way of living
with lost honour.
For those who survived the Titanic
the world was never the same again. But as Wilson superbly
demonstrates, we all have our own Titanic
s, and we all need to find ways of surviving them. i> and watched her
go down again on numerous occasions, but out of the wreckage Frances
Wilson spins a new epic: when the ship hit the iceberg on 14 April 1912
and a thousand men prepared to die, J Bruce Ismay, the ship's owner and
inheritor of the White Star fortune, jumped into a lifeboat with the
women and children and rowed away to safety. Titanic<
