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Article: Happy families: Stella Tillyard explains how she came to write multiple biographies of 18th-century families, most recently that of George III whose brothers and sisters were enmeshed in webs of intrigue, something that affected the King's wider relations with his subjects.(POINT OF DEPARTURE)
- Article from:
- History Today
- Article date:
- March 1, 2006
- Author:
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I USED TO THINK, looking back at my career, that years of it, at the beginning, had been, if not wasted, then at the best marking time until I worked out what I really wanted to do. I studied English as an undergraduate, at Oxford, which then, in the late 1970s, hardly had a reputation for dynamism or innovation. But we certainly read a good deal and learned to write to a deadline.
Occasionally, despairing of getting through primary sources, I would try to blag my way using biographies. I remember two that particularly impressed me, Leslie Marchant's threevolume Life of Byron, and Michael Holroyd's Lytton Strachey. Holroyd's book would have been a decade old when ...