Victoria Glendinning

Victoria Glendinning ( born April 23, 1937 in Sheffield ) is a British novelist and biographer.

She comes from a Quaker family. Her father was a British banker Frederic Seebohm. Glendinning grew up in York, went to Millfield School in Somerset and studied modern languages ​​at Oxford University with a degree. Besides, she had trained as a social worker with a psychiatric component. Thereafter she devoted herself to the upbringing of children before they started writing in the late 1960s, first for the magazine Nova and then after her first biography appeared in 1969, for a short time for the Times Literary Supplement. In the 1970s she moved due to the position change of her husband to Dublin in the late 1970s, she was back in England.

She is an honorary vice-president of the British PEN Club, serving as its director from 2000, and Vice -President of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1998, she was CBE.

She was married three times. In her first marriage, she married in 1958 her Spanish tutor in Oxford Nigel Glendinning (later Professor ), with whom she has four sons and they got a divorce in 1981. One of her sons is Matthew Glendenning, which she edited the book Sons and Mothers, another mathematician Paul Glendinning and the philosopher Simon Glendinning (Professor at the London School of Economics). In his second marriage, she married the writer and literary critic Terence de Vere White (1912-1990), who edited the literary section of the Irish Times to 1977. In 1996 she married the businessman and engineer Kevin O'Sullivan.

She wrote biographies of Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell, Vita Sackville- West, Rebecca West ( whom she knew personally and Glendinning as a biographer wished ), Leonard Woolf, Anthony Trollope, Stamford Raffles and Jonathan Swift. Glendinning also wrote novels and hosted the radio. She lives in the country in Somerset ( Bruton ) and is a passionate gardener.

Writings

  • A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969 ( biography of her great-aunt Winnie Seebohm, one of the first students at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1885 and was died at the age of 22 )
  • Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977
  • Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981 ( awarded the Duff Cooper Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize ) German Translation: Edith Sitwell, Frankfurt Publishing Company 1995
  • German translation: Vita Sackville- West, Fischer TB 1997 Frankfurt Publishing Company 1990 Books Gutenberg 1992
  • German Translation: Rebecca West, Zurich, Ark. 1992, Goldmann 1995
PEN International Integrated Authority File
803161
de