Summary
Summary
Anna Quindlen first visited London from a chair in her suburban Philadelphia home - in one of her beloved childhood mystery novels. She has been back to London countless times since, through the pages of books and in person, and now, in Imagined London, she takes her own readers on a tour of this greatest of literary cities. While New York, Paris, and Dublin are also vividly portrayed in fiction, it is London, Quindlen argues, that has always been the star, both because of the primacy of English literature and the specificity of city descriptions. She bases her view of the city on her own detailed literary map, tracking the footsteps of her favorite characters: the places where Evelyn Waugh's bright young things danced until dawn, or where Lydia Bennett eloped with the dastardly Wickham. With wit and charm, Imagined London gives this splendid city its full due in the landscape of the literary imagination.
Author Notes
Author Anna Quindlen was born in Philadelphia on July 8, 1953. She graduated from Barnard in 1974 and serves on their Board of Trustees.
Quindlen worked as a reporter for the New York Post and the New York Times and wrote columns for the Times. She won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary before devoting herself to writing fiction.
She has written both adult fiction (including Object Lessons, Black and Blue and One True Thing, which was made into a motion picture starring Meryl Streep) and children's fiction (Happily Ever After and The Tree That Came to Stay). Her title Alternate Side made the bestseller list in 2018.
Currently, she is a columnist at Newsweek. Her title Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake made The New York Times Best Seller list for 2012. (Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This latest entry in National Geographic?s series of famous writers on famous cities is like the British dish bubble and squeak: a hash of thrown together bits and pieces that might be tasty but isn?t very filling. An avid reader, Quindlen (Living Out Loud, etc.) developed an acute case of literature-induced Anglophilia at an early age. As a precocious youngster, she was enchanted by the terrace houses, green squares and horse-drawn carriages of the written worlds of Daniel Defoe, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens and Henry James?s London. Later swept away by Virginia Woolf and the Mitford sisters, Quindlen doesn?t actually visit London until her mid-40s while on a trip to promote one of her own books. Quindlen?s narrative essays, while thematic, lack enough specific locations to make them consistently interesting. While she comments on the extraordinary fact that one can still find one?s way around London based on 18th-century literary plot points, she doesn?t take explicit literary tours herself, leaving readers to wonder to what extent the expectations of a lifelong love affair with the London of her mental library are met. Instead, Quindlen shifts the focus away from herself and toward her experience of traveling with her 20-something writer son, comparing and contrasting their generational impressions of the city. Map not seen by PW. (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Booklist Review
Best-selling novelist and Newsweek columnist Quindlen has always been an indefatigable reader, and British novels set in London, indisputably the capital of literature, have been a particular passion. Quindlen acquired a vivid impression of the city from absorbing Dickens, Eliot, Galsworthy, Doyle, Woolf, and Lessing, writers for whom London was as much a living character as their indelible protagonists. But she admits she was reluctant to travel there and obliterate the imagined with the actual. Finally, a book tour sends her to this fabled place, and she does revel in London's evocative complexity as she undertakes pilgrimages to literary landmarks. Deftly contrasting the London frozen in the amber of great fiction with today's city, Quindlen discerns the key lesson of English literature: the unvarying nature both of social problems and personal dramas. The continuity that links, for instance, characters and predicaments in Monica Ali's Brick Lane (2003) to those in Dickens' works. A consistently enlightening and enjoyable writer, Quindlen presents a smart, bookish, wry, and stimulating portrait of the most literary of cities. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2004 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Quindlen indulges her love of London with a short but satisfying tour of the real and the imagined city. Though she has visited London innumerable times in the pages of literature, she did not make her first real trip there until 1995. Here, she takes the reader with her as she discovers her imagined London and recalls the pages and places of writers from Shakespeare and Dickens to Kathleen Winsor, Martin Amis, and Zadie Smith. Musing on London as literary home for both writers and their stories, Quindlen finds a familiar presence in the streets, squares, and landmarks, notes the blue enamel plaques designating writers' houses, recognizes the slang, and runs into literary ghosts around every bend. Recommended for public and undergraduate libraries, and all Anglophiles. [Quindlen's book is the latest entry in the "National Geographic Directions" series, in which literary greats e.g., Robert Hughes in the recently released Barcelona reflect on their favorite places. Ed.] Melissa Stearns, Franklin Pierce Coll. Lib., Rindge, NH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.