{"title":"Miranda Seymour","description":"\u003cp\u003eMiranda Seymour's works invite readers into richly woven narratives that blend personal history with vivid portraiture. Her books, such as \u003cem\u003eI Used to Live Here Once\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eI, Vera\u003c\/em\u003e, explore complex lives with sensitivity and depth, offering intimate insights into the subjects she portrays.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eRooted in biography and memoir, Seymour's writing shines through its careful attention to detail and emotional resonance. Each title reflects a commitment to uncovering the truths behind remarkable lives, making her work compelling for those who appreciate thoughtful and evocative life stories.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"i-used-to-live-here-once-by-miranda-seymour-9780008353254","title":"I Used to Live Here Once","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAn absolute belter of a biography’ MARINA HYDE\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eA \u003cem\u003eTimes\u003c\/em\u003e Literary Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2022\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eAn \u003cem\u003eLA Times\u003c\/em\u003e Best Book of the Year 2022\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAn intimate, revealing and profoundly moving biography of Jean Rhys, acclaimed author of \u003cem\u003eWide Sargasso Sea\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAn obsessive and troubled genius, Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling and unnerving writers of the twentieth century. Memories of a conflicted Caribbean childhood haunt the four fictions that Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in England. Rhys’s experiences of heartbreak, poverty, notoriety, breakdowns and even imprisonment all became grist for her writing, forming an iconic ‘Rhys woman’ whose personality – vulnerable, witty, watchful, and angry – was often mistaken, and still is, for a self-portrait.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eMany details of Rhys’s life emerge from her memoir, \u003cem\u003eSmile Please\u003c\/em\u003e and the stories she wrote throughout her long and challenging career. But it’s a shock to discover that no biographer – until now – has researched the crucial seventeen years that Rhys spent living on the remote Caribbean island of Dominica; the island which haunted Rhys’s mind and her work for the rest of her life.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eLuminous and penetrating, Seymour’s biography reveals a proud and fiercely independent artist, one who experienced tragedy and extreme poverty, alcohol and drug dependency, romantic and sexual turmoil – and yet was never a victim. \u003cem\u003eI Used to Live Here Once\u003c\/em\u003e enables one of our most excitingly intuitive biographers to uncover the hidden truth about a fascinatingly elusive woman. The figure who emerges for Seymour is powerful, cultured, self-mocking, self-absorbed, unpredictable, and often darkly funny. Persuasive, surprising and compassionate, this unforgettable biography brings Jean Rhys to life as never before.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Arotahi Agency","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46627794092268,"sku":"9780008353254","price":57.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/26452443482190.jpg?v=1751889989"},{"product_id":"i-vera-by-miranda-seymour-9780008650391","title":"I, Vera","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePrincess Vera Giedroytz was a towering, sweet-faced lesbian Princess who habitually wore a man’s suit, played billiards with brilliance, and regularly performed true medical miracles of surgery, while on occasion forcibly ejecting an inquisitive Rasputin from her operating theatre by throwing him down the stairs.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1909, already lauded as a genius, Vera had been appointed by the doomed Tsarina to teach the women of the Romanov family how to assist Vera with her operations. Previously, while working for Cesar Roux at the world’s best known medical institute in Lausanne, Vera had become the world’s first woman surgeon. Later, back in Russia in 1905, she had supervised and revolutionised frontline surgery in the Russo Japanese War. She won the Red Cross’s highest honours—and saved the life of an enemy soldier, the Prince of Japan, while working in nightmarish conditions: a hospital train under fire; a clay-sealed tent in temperatures that regularly reached 22°C below zero.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1919, Vera was sent to Kiev, where her hospital reforms, innovative work and academic papers crowned an extraordinary career as the only female surgeon in the world—and the first to demonstrate the life-saving abdominal procedure that Vera had evolved while working as the sole physician in a factory near her family home outside Moscow, following her return from Lausanne. In Kiev throughout the 1920s, Vera managed to combine a professional career with an unexpected burst of literary achievement. The Princess-Surgeon’s prose, including a Chekhovian diary of her years as a factory doctor, has been compared to that of Pasternak.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1930, after founding a Ukraine hospital for facial reconstruction and being invited to head a senior department of the Kiev Medical Institute, Vera and her widowed lover (and medical assistant) Countess Maria Nirod were seized one midnight, and taken away at gunpoint during the Soviet purge of scientific intellectuals. Their whereabouts for the next ten months was never disclosed. Vera’s pension was cancelled. The hospital and institute were closed. Living in extreme poverty, still with her lover and the Countess’s children, an uncowed Vera died in 1932 of uterine cancer—for which, fearing malicious intervention, she refused treatment. She was 61.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe Princess’s name was banished from official Soviet medical records and her tremendous contribution to medicine and the revolutionising of wartime surgery remains unacknowledged to this day. Now, Miranda Seymour recovers this lost story of a brilliant, politically outspoken woman who chose to make Ukraine her homeland, someone adored by her friends and patients, and whose achievements outrank even those of Florence Nightingale in \u003cem\u003eI, Vera\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"HarperCollins New Zealand","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47380785070316,"sku":"9780008650391","price":31.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/0630790468fb4e7894640b4856a102ff.jpg?v=1773306133"}],"url":"https:\/\/bookhero.live\/collections\/miranda-seymour.oembed","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}