John Aubrey: My Own Life - Hardcover

Scurr, Ruth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0701179074 ISBN 13: 9780701179076

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2015

Synopsis

Shortlisted for the COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD

No.1: Telegraph Best Books for Christmas
'Light, ingenious, inspiring, a book to reread and cherish' Hilary Mantel

'A delight...the book I would take with me to a desert island' David Aaronovitch
I was born about sun rising in my maternal grandfather’s bedchamber on 12th March 1626. St. Gregory’s Day, very sickly, likely to die.

John Aubrey loved England. From an early age, he saw his England slipping away and, against extraordinary odds, committed himself to preserving for posterity what remained of it – in books, monuments and life stories. His Brief Lives would redefine the art of biography yet he published only one rushed, botched book in his lifetime and died fearing his name and achievements would be forgotten.

Ruth Scurr’s biography is an act of scholarly imagination: a diary drawn from John Aubrey’s own words, displaying his unique voice, dry wit, the irreverence and drama of a literary pioneer. Aubrey saw himself modestly as a collector of a vanishing past, a ‘scurvy antiquary’. But he was also one of the pioneers of modern writing, a journalist before the age of journalism, who witnessed the Civil War and the Great Fire of London in the company of some of the influential men and women, high and low, whose lives he would make his legacy.

John Aubrey’s own life was a poignant personal and financial struggle to record the doings of great men and the relics of antiquity, the habits of Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton and Thomas Hobbes, the stones of Stonehenge and the stained glass of forgotten churches. In this genre-defying account, rich with the London taverns and elegiac landscapes of an England he helped to preserve, Ruth Scurr has resurrected John Aubrey as a potent spirit for our own time.

About this title

Review:

"My Own Life is light, ingenious, inspiring, a book to reread and cherish. The vigour and spirit on every page would delight John Aubrey, that most individual of thinkers and writers, who has found a biographer of originality and wit. It is reverent, charming, poignant: it is made of the same ingredients as its subject." (Hilary Mantel)

"Extraordinary" (Mary Beard Spectator)

"An audacious and successful attempt to write a biography in the subject’s own words. Scurr has ingeniously edited Aubrey’s swift, vivid prose into a coherent account of the life lived by one of the most interesting (and interested – in everything) writers of our most exciting century, the seventeenth. Irresistible" (Philip Pullman Guardian)

"To me this book is a delight and...it is the one that I would take with me to a desert island" (David Aaronovitch The Times)

"Writing a biography of a biographer that doubles as an experimental analysis of biography itself is a formidable and astonishing achievement. That it is also profoundly affecting is what makes John Aubrey: My Own Life a triumph" (Stuart Kelly The Times Literary Supplement)

"In an act of daring ventriloquism, Scurr here tells Aubrey’s life story in his own words, stitched together from his scattered manuscripts. The result is a triumph of historical imagination, as vivid and endearing as its subject’s own" (Kathryn Hughes Guardian)

"Scurr confidently walks an imaginative life between historical fact and fiction. Her Aubrey – curious yet self-effacing- is a very English hero" (Sunday Times)

"Scurr’s judgment and scholarship in constructing Aubrey’s own account of events are so flawless that she allows us almost to forget that she is there" (Alexandra Harris Guardian)

"An extraordinarily original piece of biography... gripping, moving, and beautifully rendered" (Neel Mukherjee New Statesman)

"Another writer of brief lives, Lytton Strachey, feared that in our modern civilization John Aubrey would 'never come into existence again'. But that is exactly what he does in Ruth Scurr's absorbing and imaginative biography. In these pages his purchase on posterity returns with all his ingenious visions and impulses. Scurr is no less a pioneer biographer than Aubrey himself." (Michael Holroyd)

Book Description:

Genre-busting diary-biography of perfect seventeenth-century gentleman John Aubrey. Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award.

About this edition

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0701179074
• ISBN 13: 9780701179076
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 544