Elaine Feinstein Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Circle (1970)
  2. The Amberstone Exit (1972)
  3. The Glass Alembic (1973)
  4. Children of the Rose (1975)
  5. The Ecstasy of Dr Miriam Garner (1976)
  6. The Shadow Master (1978)
  7. The Survivors (1982)
  8. The Border (1984)
  9. Mother’s Girl (1988)
  10. All You Need (1989)
  11. Loving Brecht (1992)
  12. Dreamers (1994)
  13. Lady Chatterley’s Confession (1995)
  14. A Dark Inheritance (2001)
  15. The Russian Jerusalem (2008)

Collections

  1. Matters of Chance (1972)
  2. The Silent Areas (1980)

Non fiction

  1. Lawrence And The Women (1963)
  2. Bessie Smith (1985)
  3. Marina Tsvetayeva (1989)
  4. Pushkin (1998)
  5. After Pushkin (1999)
  6. Ted Hughes (2001)
  7. Anna of All the Russias (2005)
  8. It Goes with the Territory (2013)

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Elaine Feinstein Books Overview

The Circle

Feinstein’s triumph is to write so well that she makes Lena’s predicament not only moving, in a perfunctory dismissive way, but also painful…
she has an accurate and acute feeling for language, and pauses, and silence.’ Guardian Lena’s seemingly contented family life is coming apart at the seams. Her husband Ben has been having an affair with the au pair, and as their relationship slides he retreats more and more into his work in a science lab. Sons Alan and Michael may appear happy enough, but this is far from the case – both are responding to a physical world which they alone inhabit. And Lena – desperately lost and seeking an identity of her own, both inside and outside of her family unit – increasingly finds solace at the bottom of a bottle. An exploration of just how lonely – and how magic – a marriage can be, The Circle is a poignant, poetic and incredibly assured debut novel.

A Dark Inheritance

Rachel O’Malley is a writer, divorced and bored with her life. A chance meeting takes her to Rome, where the exploration of a bestseller and its author leads to a series of revelatory meetings. Also in the city are Joshua, a lover from another era, and Franco Cellini, a politician with connections.

The Russian Jerusalem

Beginning in present day St. Petersburg, this novel explores the landscape of 20th century Russian literature through imagined encounters with the great writers of Russia’s literary past. With poet Marina Tsvetaeva as the guide, meet the ghosts of writers such as Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, and Joseph Brodsky, whose worlds are interspersed with original poems, new translations of Russian poems, and striking images of Stalinist propaganda. This book reconstructs the tragic lives of many Russian writers, often Jewish, during the long period of Soviet terror and re establishes them at the heart of the European literary tradition.

After Pushkin

How do you convince the English speaking public that Pushkin’s genius is as great as the Russians claim? This question, raised at the bicentenary of Pushkin s birth, is the catalyst for a collection of new translations, versions of and responses to the poetry of Pushkin by some of the best poets writing in English today.

Ted Hughes

The first biography since his death of one of the greatest English poets of the twentieth century. Although Ted Hughes‘s genius was recognized early and he ended his days as England’s Poet Laureate, his life was dogged by tragedy and controversy. His marriage to the poet Sylvia Plath marked his whole life, and he never entirely recovered from her suicide in 1963. Many people have held his adultery responsible for Plath’s death; in this insightful book, Elaine Feinstein explores an altogether more complex situation, and throws a sad new light on his relationship with his lover Assia Wevill, who also killed herself along with their young daughter. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews with childhood friends, fellow undergraduates, poets, and critics, Feinstein gives a portrait of a large spirited, magnetic personality intrigued by the forms of magical experience that preoccupied Shakespeare and Yeats, but who was nevertheless a down to earth Yorkshire man, whose poetic vision encompassed not only his love of the natural world but also all the evidence of human brutality in the past century. 16 pages of b/w photographs.

Anna of All the Russias

This comprehensive biography of the legendary Russian poet a rich narrative of the dramatic life behind the extraordinary work draws on a wealth of new material, including memoirs, letters and journals, and interviews with Akhmatova’s surviving friends and family. Anna Akhmatova began writing in the years before World War I, a time when, according to Akhmatova herself, to think of a woman as a poet was absurd. Her genius would rise above categorization, but this superb biography makes clear how heavily she paid for the political and personal passions that informed it. A fierce poise, forged by Anna s lonely childhood, carried her through her father s resistance to her writing which prompted her to change her name from Gorenko to Akhmatova, a name taken from a Tartar ancestor and her flawed but passionate love affairs. We see Akhmatova s work banned from 1925 until 1940, and banned again following World War II, when the Union of Soviet Writers labeled her half nun, half harlot. We see her steadfast resistance to Stalin during her hopeful but unsuccessful attempt to win her son s release from prison. We see her abiding loyalty to such friends as Mandelstam, Shostakovich and Pasternak as they faced Stalinist oppression. And we see how, through everything, Akhmatova continued to write, her poetry giving voice to the Russian people by whom she was, and still is, deeply loved. Anna of All the Russias takes us into the days and nights of an icon. It is a revelation of both the artist and the woman.

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