Joseph Severn

Joseph Severn
Author: Grant F. Scott
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 662
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351924850

This is the first modern scholarly edition of the letters and memoirs of Joseph Severn, English painter and deathbed companion of John Keats. It includes letters from a remarkable collection of never-before-published correspondence held by descendants of the Severn family. Scott's unprecedented access to hundreds of new letters has resulted in a major revisionist work that challenges traditional ideas about Severn's life and character. The edition includes new information about Severn's early artistic success in Italy, an extraordinarily thorough record of his day-to-day activities as a working artist in England, and surprising details about his experience as British Consul in Rome. The volume represents a significant work of recovery, printing in full three important memoirs that have until now appeared only in inaccurate excerpts and offering thirty-three illustrations that demonstrate the range of Severn's talents as a painter. Scott makes a compelling case for a revaluation of Severn, whose friends also included Charles Eastlake, William Gladstone, Leigh Hunt, John Ruskin, and Mary Shelley. This collection will prove valuable not only to literary biographers and Keats scholars, but also to art and cultural historians of the Romantic and Victorian eras. Adding significantly to the volume's usefulness are a detailed chronology of Severn's life and artwork, and appendices containing an index of the newly discovered letters and a ledger of Severn's patrons, paintings and commissions.

To Where we Once Belonged

To Where we Once Belonged
Author: Cindy Lowe
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2015-10-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1784623881

This novel is inspired by the reality of true events in a small coastal town during the Second World War, some of the characters are based on people who lived, others are purely fictitious. It is a fact realised only in recent years that the town of Colwyn Bay and its population deserved huge recognition for its vitally important administrative role during wartime in feeding the nation. This function is now celebrated annually at a festival each April since the publication of ‘Colwyn Bay Accredited’. The prologue describes a young girl fascinated by the diary of her great grandmother written as a teenager during the war years. We visit Spain, and continue on to Liverpool and North Wales in an obscure seemingly insignificant area. Set in the 21st century, stories of the past and wartime years surface in memories of the characters, all of whom have their own agenda for returning, and many have connections to each other. Rita, retired to the Costa Blanca is an ageing former singer, famous and successful in the past, and now wealthy but widowed and lonely. There has been a family rift with her brother and she has no children of her own. An explanation of the appearance of the mysterious stranger at The Metropole is eventually revealed in a surprising twist. A glimpse of the future is disclosed. Themes of regeneration, the downward spiral of society, in comparison to attitudes during former times of challenge and adversity, and nostalgic curiosity about the past in a hometown are explored. Many mysteries are explained but some things will never be known.