A Bluestocking Knits

,

Booking Through Thursday (on Wednesday): Biographies

Published by

Bluestocking

on

Booking Through Thursday was on vacation last week, and today’s questions are early in anticipation of the Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow.

This week’s questions are brought to you by Nicki.

  1. Biographies and autobiographies—do you read them? Absolutely — biography is one of my favorite genres.  Some of the memorable ones include (casting a mental eye over our bookcase full of them), Janet Morgan’s biography of Agatha Christie and of course Dame Agatha’s own autobiography — Ben Yagoda’s biography of Will Rogers — anything by Antonia Fraser — Claire Tomalin and Park Honan on Jane Austen — Hermione Lee’s magisterial biography of Virginia Woolf — many, many others.  I might also include collected letters and diaries — Gwen Harwood’s Blessed City is an old favorite, and Barbara Pym’s A Very Private Eye (tho’ I’ve not actually read any of her novels, yet), as well as the complete diaries and letters of Virginia Woolf.  Shirley Nicholson’s A Victorian Household might also fit into this category.  Let’s toss a knitting book in here as well — Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Knitting Around contains some delightful autobiographical "digressions."
  2. If so, whose life story has inspired you most and why? I don’t think that I could possibly narrow it down to one, but I do remember being hugely impressed as a child by biographies (which I still remember vividly) of Helen Keller and Florence Nightingale!
  3. If not, why not? How could I not be inspired by Helen Keller and Florence Nightingale?!

2 responses to “Booking Through Thursday (on Wednesday): Biographies”

  1. Mary Avatar
    Mary

    Would that have been the biography of Helen Keller that was part of a children’s biography series? If it was, I had the same experience with the book. I still think of it sometimes – the scene where Annie is spelling water into Helen’s hand as the water pouts out of the pump and she finally gets it. Ah! Funny thinking about it now.
    I’m sure I read every book in the series (it would be fun to go back and look at the library cards for those books), but I read that Helen Keller biography over and over.

    Like

    Reply
  2. Jeanne Avatar
    Jeanne

    Mary, I can picture the book almost perfectly — a paperback I’d bought through the Scholastic classroom service — I think it was by Lorena Hickok, although I can’t seem to track it down now. Heavily fictionalized, but still very memorable. The water pump scene is now confused in my memory with the same scene from the movies (at least two!), but the book itself is still vivid for me, too!

    Like

    Reply

Leave a comment

Knitting, reading, other stuff.

Let’s connect

Recent posts