Diana Souhami's Books

Edith Cavell

By: Diana Souhami

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Edith Cavell was born on 4th December 1865, daughter of the vicar of Swardeston in Norfolk, and shot in Brussels on 12th October 1915 by the Germans for sheltering British and French soldiers and helping them escape over the Belgian border. Following a traditional village childhood in 19th century England, Edith worked as a governess in the UK and abroad, before training as a nurse in London in 1895. To Edith, nursing was a duty, a vocation, but above all a service. By 1907, she had travelled most of Europe and become matron of her own hospital in Belgium, where, under her leadership, a ramshackle hospital with few staff and little organization became a model nursing school. When war broke out, Edith helped soldiers to escape the war by giving them jobs in her hospital, finding clothing and organizing safe passage into Holland. In all, she assisted over two hundred men. When her secret work was discovered, Edith was put on trial and sentenced to death by firing squad. She uttered only 130 words in her defense. A devout Christian, the evening before her death, she asked to be remembered as a nurse, not a hero or a martyr, and prayed to be fit for heaven. When news of Edith's death reached Britain, army recruitment doubled. After the war, Edith's body was returned to the UK by train and every station through which the coffin passed was crowded with mourners. Diana Souhami brings one of the Great War's finest heroes to life in this biography of a hardworking, courageous and independent woman.

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540

Publisher

Quercus

Published Date

ISBN 10

1623652391

ISBN 13

9781623652395

Gluck

Her Biography

By: Diana Souhami

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Gluck

Her Biography

By: Diana Souhami

Diana Souhami’s critically acclaimed biography of lesbian painter Hannah Gluckstein—the woman, the artist, the legend To her family, Hannah Gluckstein was known as Hig. To Edith Shackleton Heald, the journalist with whom she lived for almost forty years, she was Dearest Grub. And to the art world, she was simply Gluck. She was born in 1895 into a life of privilege. Her family had founded J. Lyons & Co., a vast catering empire. From the beginning Gluck was a rebel. At a time when only men wore trousers, she scandalized society with her masculine clothing—though she always dressed with style and turned androgyny into high fashion. Her affairs with high-profile women shocked her conservative family, even while she achieved fame as an artist. During the 1920s and thirties, Gluck’s paintings—portraits, flowers, and landscapes, presented in frames designed and patented by her—were the toast of the town. At the height of her success, when wounded in love, her own obsessions caused her to fade for decades from the public eye, but then, at nearly eighty, her return to the spotlight ensured her immortality.

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184

Publisher

Open Road Media

Published Date

ISBN 10

1497683351

ISBN 13

9781497683358

Selkirk's Island

The True and Strange Adventures of the Real Robinson Crusoe

By: Diana Souhami

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Selkirk's Island

The True and Strange Adventures of the Real Robinson Crusoe

By: Diana Souhami

Winner of the Whitbread Biography Award: The true story of the shipwrecked Scottish buccaneer who inspired Daniel Defoe’s novel. This action-filled biography follows Alexander Selkirk, an eighteenth-century Scottish buccaneer who sailed the South Seas plundering for gold. But an ill-fated expedition in 1703 led to shipwreck on remote Juan Fernández Island off the coast of Chile. Selkirk, the ship’s master, was accused of inciting mutiny and abandoned on the uninhabited island with nothing but his clothing, his pistol, a knife, and a Bible. Each day he searched the sea for a ship that would rescue him and prayed for help that seemed never to come. In solitude and silence Selkirk gradually learned to adapt. He killed seals and goats for food and used their skin for clothing. He learned how to build a house, forage for food, create stores, plant seeds, light a fire, and tame cats. Then one day, a ship with wooden sails appeared on the horizon. The crew was greeted by a bearded savage, incoherent and fierce. Selkirk had been marooned for four years and four months. Now he was about to return to the world of men. The story of a verdant, mysterious archipelago and its famous castaway is both a parable about nature and a remarkable account of the survival of a man cut off from civilization.

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Page Count

175

Publisher

Open Road Media

Published Date

ISBN 10

1497683742

ISBN 13

9781497683747

Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

A Biography

By: Diana Souhami

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Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

A Biography

By: Diana Souhami

Alice Keppel, the married lover of Queen Victoria's eldest son and great-grandmother to Camilla Parker-Bowles, was a key figure in Edwardian society. Hers was the acceptable face of adultery. Discretion was her hallmark. It was her art to be the king's mistress and yet to laud the Royal Family and the institution of marriage. Formidable and manipulative, her attentions to the king brought her wealth, power, and status. Her daughter Violet Trefusis had a long tempestuous affair with the author and aristocrat Vita Sackville-West, during which Vita left her husband and two sons to travel abroad with Violet. It was a liaison that threatened the fabric of Violet's social world, and her passion and recalcitrance in pursuit of it pitted her against her mother and society. From memoirs, diaries, and letters, Diana Souhami portrays this fascinating and intense mother/daughter relationship in Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Her story of these women, their lovers, and their lovers' mothers, highlights Edwardian - and contemporary - duplicity and double standards and goes to the heart of questions about sexual freedoms.

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258

Publisher

Macmillan + ORM

Published Date

ISBN 10

1466883502

ISBN 13

9781466883505

Coconut Chaos

Pitcairn, Mutiny and a Seduction at Sea

By: Diana Souhami

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Coconut Chaos

Pitcairn, Mutiny and a Seduction at Sea

By: Diana Souhami

A unique travelogue in which the author journeys to Pitcairn Island—of Mutiny on the Bounty fame—with detours to eighteenth-century Tahiti and beyond. It started with a coconut . . . In the early hours of April 27, 1789, Fletcher Christian, master’s mate on the HMS Bounty, took a coconut from a pile on the quarterdeck. This random, seemingly inconsequential act set in motion a snowballing series of events that culminated in a revolt. In this strikingly original book, equal parts travelogue, memoir, and time-travel adventure, Diana Souhami moves across time and place, from eighteenth-century Tahiti to modern-day Pitcairn Island, from Knightsbridge to Tauranga, Mangareva to Tubuai. Along with Fletcher Christian, the sprawling cast of characters includes the unforgettable Captain William Bligh, who is cast adrift in an open boat on ferocious seas with eighteen men and no maps or supplies. Along the way, Souhami also introduces us to Pitcairn Island sex offenders, the Native American crew of a seventeen-thousand-ton ship called the Tundra Princess, her own elderly mother, and a mysterious lesbian aristocrat known as Lady Myre. Weaving together history, destiny, and chaos theory, this captivating adventure is for anyone who has ever yearned to travel to an exotic, faraway place.

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198

Publisher

Open Road Media

Published Date

ISBN 10

1497683734

ISBN 13

9781497683730

Coconut Chaos

Pitcairn, Mutiny and a Seduction at Sea

By: Diana Souhami

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Coconut Chaos

Pitcairn, Mutiny and a Seduction at Sea

By: Diana Souhami

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198

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Open Road Media

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ISBN 10

1497683734

ISBN 13

9781497683730

Edith Cavell

By: Diana Souhami

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Edith Cavell

By: Diana Souhami

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540

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Quercus

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ISBN 10

1623652391

ISBN 13

9781623652395

Gluck

Her Biography

By: Diana Souhami

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Gluck

Her Biography

By: Diana Souhami

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184

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Open Road Media

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ISBN 10

1497683351

ISBN 13

9781497683358

Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

A Biography

By: Diana Souhami

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Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

A Biography

By: Diana Souhami

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258

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Macmillan + ORM

Published Date

ISBN 10

1466883502

ISBN 13

9781466883505

The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

By: Diana Souhami

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The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

By: Diana Souhami

Diana Souhami’s Lambda Award–winning biography is a fascinating look at one of the twentieth century’s most intriguing lesbian literary figures. Born in 1880, Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall was a young unwanted child when her parents put an end to their tempestuous marriage by filing for divorce. She had already made tentative forays into lesbian love when her father died, leaving her an heiress at eighteen. Her income assured, Hall moved out of her mother’s house, renamed herself John in honor of her great-great-grandfather, and divided her time among hunting, traveling, and pursuing women. She began to write—songs, poetry, prose, and short stories—and achieved success as a novelist, but it was with the publication of The Well of Loneliness in 1928 that Radclyffe Hall became an internationally known figure. Dubbed the “bible of lesbianism,” the book caused a scandal on both sides of the Atlantic. Though moralistic in tone, because of its subject matter it was tried as obscene in America and in the United Kingdom, where it was censored under the Obscene Publications Act. The Trials of Radclyffe Hall is a fascinating, no-holds-barred account of the life of this controversial woman, including her torrid relationship with the married artist Una Troubridge, who was Hall’s devoted partner for twenty-eight years.

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259

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Open Road Media

Published Date

ISBN 10

1497683343

ISBN 13

9781497683341

The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

By: Diana Souhami

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The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

By: Diana Souhami

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259

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Open Road Media

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ISBN 10

1497683343

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9781497683341

A Higher Form of Killing

Six Weeks in World War I That Forever Changed the Nature of Warfare

By: Diana Preston

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A Higher Form of Killing

Six Weeks in World War I That Forever Changed the Nature of Warfare

By: Diana Preston

In six weeks during April and May 1915, as World War I escalated, Germany forever altered the way war would be fought. On April 22, at Ypres, German canisters spewed poison gas at French and Canadian soldiers in their trenches; on May 7, the German submarine U-20, without warning, torpedoed the passenger liner Lusitania, killing 1,198 civilians; and on May 31, a German Zeppelin began the first aerial bombardment of London and its inhabitants. Each of these actions violated rules of war carefully agreed at the Hague Conventions of 1898 and 1907. Though Germany's attempts to quickly win the war failed, the psychological damage caused by these attacks far outweighed the casualties. The era of weapons of mass destruction had dawned. While each of these momentous events has been chronicled in histories of the war, celebrated historian Diana Preston links them for the first time, revealing the dramatic stories behind each through the eyes of those who were there, whether making the decisions or experiencing their effect. She places the attacks in the context of the centuries-old debate over what constitutes “just war,” and shows how, in their aftermath, the other combatants felt the necessity to develop extreme weapons of their own. In our current time of terror, when weapons of mass destruction-imagined or real-are once again vilified, the story of their birth is of great relevance.

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Page Count

508

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

1620402130

ISBN 13

9781620402139

A Pirate of Exquisite Mind

Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer: The Life of William Dampier

By: Diana Preston

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A Pirate of Exquisite Mind

Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer: The Life of William Dampier

By: Diana Preston

Darwin took his books aboard the Beagle. Swift and Defoe used his experiences as inspiration in writing Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe. Captain Cook relied on his observations while voyaging around the world. Coleridge called him a genius and "a man of exquisite mind." In the history of exploration, nobody has ventured further than Englishman William Dampier. Yet while the exploits of Cook, Shackleton, and a host of legendary explorers have been widely chronicled, those of perhaps the greatest are virtually invisible today-an omission that Diana and Michael Preston have redressed in this vivid, compelling biography. As a young man Dampier spent several years in the swashbuckling company of buccaneers in the Caribbean. At a time when surviving one voyage across the Pacific was cause for celebration, Dampier ultimately journeyed three times around the world; his bestselling books about his experiences were a sensation, influencing generations of scientists, explorers, and writers. He was the first to deduce that winds cause currents and the first to produce wind maps across the world, surpassing even the work of Edmund Halley. He introduced the concept of the "sub-species" that Darwin later built into his theory of evolution, and his description of the breadfruit was the impetus for Captain Bligh's voyage on the Bounty. Dampier reached Australia 80 years before Cook, and he later led the first formal expedition of science and discovery there. A Pirate of Exquisite Mind restores William Dampier to his rightful place in history-one of the pioneers on whose insights our understanding of the natural world was built.

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Page Count

392

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0802718132

ISBN 13

9780802718136

Murder at Wrotham Hill

By: Diana Souhami

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Murder at Wrotham Hill

By: Diana Souhami

Dagmar, a gentle, eccentric spinster, was the embodiment of Austerity Britain's prudence and thrift. Her murderer Harold Hagger, with his litany of petty crimes, abandoned wives, sloughed-off identities and army desertions, was its opposite. With their characters so indelibly marked, their tragic meeting seemed in some way destined. Featuring England's first celebrity policeman, Fabian of the Yard, the celebrated forensic scientist, Keith Simpson, and history's most famous and dedicated hangman, Albert Pierrepoint.

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Page Count

320

Publisher

riverrun

Published Date

ISBN 10

0857382853

ISBN 13

9780857382856

Gertrude and Alice

By: Diana Souhami

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Gertrude and Alice

By: Diana Souhami

The story of their life together. From letters, memoirs and the published writings of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, this is the story of one of the most solid marriages of the century.

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Page Count

308

Publisher

Harper San Francisco

Published Date

ISBN 10

0062509152

ISBN 13

9780062509154

Gwendolen

A Novel

By: Diana Souhami

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Gwendolen

A Novel

By: Diana Souhami

[Gwendolen] is also the heroine of George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda and is writing to Deronda"--Cover flap.

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Page Count

336

Publisher

Macmillan

Published Date

ISBN 10

1627793402

ISBN 13

9781627793407

Natalie and Romaine

By: Diana Souhami

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Natalie and Romaine

By: Diana Souhami

Natalie Barney,'the wild girl of Cincinnati', and Romaine Brooks were both rich, American and grandly lesbian. They met in Paris in 1915 and their tempestuous affair lasted more than fifty years. By the end of their lives together, Natalie and Romaine had entertained, slept with, fallen in love with, tutored or tortured a range of figures including Gertrude Stein, Colette, Edith Sitwell, Gabriele d'Annunzio and the ballerina Ida Rubinstein. But among this tumult there was an enduring and loving relationship that supported a liberating spirit of culture, style and candour. In this vivid double biography, Souhami writes with complexity and skill, drawing the reader into a different world and capturing for ever her subjects' extraordinary lives.

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Page Count

240

Publisher

Quercus Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1780878826

ISBN 13

9781780878829

Greta and Cecil

By: Diana Souhami

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Greta and Cecil

By: Diana Souhami

A dual biography that reveals the secret life and the extraordinary relationship of Hollywood's legendary pair: Greta Garbo and Cecil Beaton, celebrated Hollywood photographer who immortalized her image.

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Page Count

271

Publisher

Harper San Francisco

Published Date

ISBN 10

006250830X

ISBN 13

9780062508300

Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

By: Diana Souhami

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Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

By: Diana Souhami

Alice Keppel, the married lover of Queen Victoria's eldest son and great-grandmother to Camilla Parker-Bowles, was a key figure in Edwardian society. Hers was the acceptable face of adultery. Discretion was her hallmark. It was her art to be the king's mistress and yet to laud the Royal Family and the institution of marriage. Formidable and manipulative, her attentions to the king brought her wealth, power, and status. Her daughter Violet Trefusis had a long tempestuous affair with the author and aristocrat Vita Sackville-West, during which Vita left her husband and two sons to travel abroad with Violet. It was a liaison that threatened the fabric of Violet's social world, and her passion and recalcitrance in pursuit of it pitted her against her mother and society. From memoirs, diaries, and letters, Diana Souhami portrays this fascinating and intense mother/daughter relationship. Her story of these women, their lovers, and their lovers' mothers, highlights Edwardian - and contemporary - duplicity and double standards and goes to the heart of questions about sexual freedoms.

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Age

Page Count

320

Published Date

ISBN 10

0007624093

ISBN 13

9780007624096

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