Maggie Hemingway (1946–1993)
Autor/a de The Bridge
Obres de Maggie Hemingway
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
- Data de naixement
- 1946-03-17
- Data de defunció
- 1993-05-09
- Gènere
- female
- Nacionalitat
- England
UK - Lloc de naixement
- Orford, Suffolk, England, UK
- Lloc de defunció
- London, England, UK
- Llocs de residència
- London, England, UK
Deal, Kent, England, UK - Educació
- University of Edinburgh
- Professions
- publishing executive
novelist - Biografia breu
- Maggie Hemingway was born in England but moved to New Zealand with her family at age three. Returning to England as a teenager, she read French and English at Edinburgh University and graduated in 1967. She married Michael Dias, with whom she had two daughters. The couple separated in the late 1970s, and she moved to London and worked in publishing. Her first novel, The Bridge (1986) was published to critical acclaim and won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize from the Royal Society of Literature. It was adapted into a film in 1992. Her subsequent novels included The Postman's House (1991), based on her experiences in Czechoslovakia before the Velvet Revolution. She collaborated with her partner, composer David Matthews, on three vocal works. She died at age 47 of aplastic anemia.
Membres
Ressenyes
The Bridge de Maggie Hemingway
This brilliant novel by Maggie Hemingway (1946-1993) offers a purely speculative glimpse into the love life of the British landscape painter Philip Wilson Steer (1860-1942). In the early summer of 1887, Philip arrives in Walberswick, on the Suffolk coast, as he had each year since completing his education, intending to use the time to sketch and paint. Also summering in Walberswick is Isobel Heatherington, who arrives with her three daughters, Sophie, Marie and Emma, to take up residence in Quay House. Isobel’s husband, preoccupied with business dealings, stays behind in London. Philip initially spots Isobel from a distance, in the company of her daughters, and is instantly smitten by the young woman’s delicate beauty and mournful air of vulnerability. Then, by chance, Philip meets the girls on the beach. This leads to an invitation to lunch, followed by further invitations to outings in the countryside. Ultimately, Philip becomes a fixture at Quay House and an intimate of the Heatherington family, which includes Isobel’s watchful Aunt Jude. The attraction between Isobel and Philip springs up quickly and soon develops into an ardent though unacknowledged passion, leaving them confused, heartsick, sleep-deprived and at war with forbidden urges. Isobel, bored with her marriage, emotionally detached from her husband, resents her position as someone who is under constant observation—whose every mood, gesture and stray glance is noted and discussed—and longs for even a moment of unfettered solitude to do as she pleases. Philip, emotionally reticent, devoted to his art, is a novice where love is concerned. However, he knows one thing for certain: that in Victorian England what he and Isobel feel for each other has the power to destroy them both. Maggie Hemingway tells her story from a variety of points of view, seamlessly and effortlessly moving from one to another, sometimes within a single scene. Hemingway’s sympathetic depiction of two people struggling against unruly desires to adhere to the oppressive moral restrictions of Victorian society is suspenseful and deeply moving. What elevates the book to triumphant near-classic status is Hemingway’s evocative, atmospheric prose, which endows the village of Walberswick and the natural beauty in which the characters are immersed with a bright immediacy that is often so vivid as to seem magical. The Bridge, the first of Maggie Hemingway’s four novels, won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and was adapted into a movie in 1992.… (més)
This fascinating novel tells the story of Robert, a boy who yearns to be released into the world beyond the isolated hamlet where he lives with his parents. For Robert, life is elsewhere. The train passing by has convinced him that a world of adventure and opportunity exists; all he has to do is get there. Midway through his adolescence he is sent away by his parents, to a small village to live with his aunt and uncle, who treat him like an indentured servant. Subject to his aunt’s taunting and capricious household rules, Robert finds life even more restricted than before. So he plots his escape. As he gazes at the canal that meanders through the village, Robert's yearning for that world where good things await him intensifies. Finally, deemed unmanageable by his aunt, he is sent away again, this time to the city, where he expects to find adventure and make something of himself. The city however is not only disappointing, but dangerous and confusing as well. The people he meets are lazy, degenerate or hopelessly deluded. In the city his failures accumulate. He finds menial work, but life seems to be at a standstill. Once again the world fails to live up to expectations, the object of his dreams and passions remains tantalizingly out of reach. Still, he does not give up the search. When, after great effort, he attains success in love and secures the attention of the girl of his desires, she turns out to be something other than what he expected and the affection he craves does not materialize. Maggie Hemingway’s second novel is a dystopian masterpiece, a book that presents a nameless world that is endlessly bleak and harrowing, where there is no hope of redemption or reward and where people prey upon one another in order to survive. The world she draws is dark and damp, repugnant and dripping with menace, but her prose is so richly textured and filled with such precise and vivid detail that one cannot help but be pulled in: seduced and repelled in equal measure as the story unfolds and this Dickensian landscape comes frighteningly into focus. Robert’s innocence and optimism stand in stark contrast to the world in which he finds himself, and in the end we recognize that we are all Robert, and his world is our world. Stop House Blues is a brilliant and haunting novel by a writer who died too soon and too young.… (més)
Premis
Estadístiques
- Obres
- 4
- Membres
- 18
- Popularitat
- #630,789
- Valoració
- 4.5
- Ressenyes
- 2
- ISBN
- 13
- Llengües
- 1