Elusive Subject: A Biographer's Life

Grosskurth, Phyllis

ISBN 10: 1551990369 / ISBN 13: 9781551990361

Published by Macfarlane, Walter and Ross, Toronto, 1999

About this Item

About new book, unmarked, in barely rubbed DJ. ; 259 pages.

Seller Inventory # 32731

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Elusive Subject: A Biographer's Life
• Publisher: Macfarlane, Walter and Ross, Toronto
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1551990369
• ISBN 13: 9781551990361
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition; First Printing.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Biography/Memoir

About this title

Synopsis

When Phyllis Grosskurth was a girl, she imagined herself growing up to be a detective, a sleuth on the trail of the wicked, the dangerous, the ones who didn’t want to be found out. Some time later, when she started reading books far beyond her years, her ambition changed to that of writer. Her destiny combined both; today she is the tireless discoverer of secret lives, whose international reputation for daring scholarship has made her, in the words of one critic, "Canada’s premier biographer."

In Elusive Subject, the eager examiner of others' lives looks fearlessly at her own – a personal life as eventful, passionate, and revealing of her times as any of her subjects’. Her other life was that of biographer, where the detective’s instincts lead her to complex figures: the Victorian essayist John Addington Symonds, sex researcher Havelock Ellis, psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, and finally the poet Byron. This rich and captivating memoir chronicles the adventures of an exceptional literary career, while candidly charting the growth of an ambitious and talented woman who has all her life tested the conventions of her times.

About the Author

Phyllis Grosskurth’s biographies include the Governor General’s Award winner John Addington Symonds, and Byron: The Flawed Angel, hailed as the definitive short biography by The New York Times. She reviews frequently for The New York Review of Books and the Globe and Mail and lectures on the history of psychoanalysis and the art of biography.