For readers of Prairie Fires and The Peabody Sisters, a fascinating, insightful biography of the most famous sister novelists before the Brontës. Before the Brontë sisters picked up their pens, or Jane Austen's heroines Elizabeth and Jane Bennet became household names, the literary world was celebrating a different pair of sisters: Jane and Anna Maria Porter. The Porters-exact contemporaries of Jane Austen-were brilliant, attractive, self-made single...

"History meets memoir in two true-life love stories between two sets of writers--one unfolding in nineteenth century Rome, one in present-day Paris and London--which both reveal the longings and ambitions of the very contemporary Nell Stevens. In 1857, English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell completed her most famous work: the biography of her dear friend, the recently deceased Charlotte Bront. As publication loomed Elizabeth was keen to escape the reviews...

"Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Brontë thought their detecting days were behind them, but a terrifying new discovery draws them into a devlish new mystery. Haworth Parsonage, February 1846: It's been six months since the case of the vanished bride, and the Brontë sisters- Anne, Emily, and Charlotte-have received a steady dribble of inquiries made to Bell Brothers and Company solicitors, but nothing to really thrill them. Having found a publisher for...

"One does not need to have read a single word of The Pickwick Papers to be enthralled by the story of how this extraordinary novel came to be. The creation and afterlife of this masterpiece is the subject of Stephen Jarvis's novel ... This vast, intricately constructed, indeed Dickensian work is at once [an] ... homage to a much-loved book, tracing its genesis and subsequent history in ... detail, and a damning indictment of how an ambitious young...

"August, 1856. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens are spending the summer at Knebworth House, the magnificent Hertfordshire home of fellow writer Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton, where they are putting on a charity performance of one of Lord Edward's most successful plays, The Lady of Lyon. But the dress rehearsal is disrupted by the discovery of a body lying in the centre of the stage, shot to death. With everyone involved in the play coming under suspicion,...