Miranda Seymour | The New York Review of Books

A Hectic Life

The bicentenary of Lord Byron’s death is an opportunity to ask what a witty dandy with the flamboyant attitudes of a raucously chauvinistic age can offer today’s world.

Byron: A Life in Ten Letters

by Andrew Stauffer

Jane Austen and Lord Byron: Regency Relations

by Christine Kenyon Jones

April 4, 2024 issue

As Pluck Would Have It

Antonia Fraser’s new biography of the hectically adulterous Lady Caroline Lamb celebrates her as a woman who resisted convention.

Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit

by Antonia Fraser

November 23, 2023 issue

Consider the Publisher

Behind Mary Wollstonecraft was a courageous publisher and his network of eighteenth-century London’s most radical minds.

Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age

by Daisy Hay

April 20, 2023 issue

‘Turbulence and Misery’

Anguish, provoked by her acute sense of physical and social inadequacy, was essential for Jean Stafford’s literary talent to flourish.

Jean Stafford: Complete Novels

edited by Kathryn Davis

Jean Stafford: Complete Short Stories and Other Writings

edited by Kathryn Davis

July 21, 2022 issue

Our Trojan Moment

Pat Barker’s trilogy-in-progress is the most recent attempt to give a powerful voice to Homer’s silenced women.

The Women of Troy

by Pat Barker

December 2, 2021 issue

Promethean Women

Both Mary Wollstonecraft, darling of twentieth-century feminists, and her visionary daughter Mary Shelley continue to influence us today.

Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics

by Sylvana Tomaselli

Artificial Life After Frankenstein

by Eileen Hunt Botting

Frankenstein: The 1818 Edition with Related Texts

by Mary Shelley, edited and with an introduction and notes by David Wootton

February 25, 2021 issue

‘The Awful Force of Inanimate Things’

Machines in the Head: Selected Stories

by Anna Kavan, edited and with a foreword by Victoria Walker

May 28, 2020 issue

The Magnetic Polymath

Selected Writings

by Alexander von Humboldt, edited and with an introduction by Andrea Wulf

Alexander von Humboldt: How the Most Famous Scientist of the Romantic Age Found the Soul of Nature

by Maren Meinhardt

Humboldt’s Mexico: In the Footsteps of the Illustrious German Scientific Traveller

by Myron Echenberg

December 5, 2019 issue