This episode, we welcome to the podcast biographer Sarah LeFanu whose wonderful book Something of Themselves: Kipling, Kingsley, Conan Doyle and the Anglo-Boer War was released in 2020.
About Sarah
LeFanu
More recently,
Sarah added Conan Doyle to her growing list of subjects when he featured as one
of three writers in Sarah’s group biography, Something of Themselves:
Kipling, Kingsley, Conan Doyle and the Anglo-Boer War, which was published
in 2020 and the following year shortlisted for the prestigious Elizabeth
Longford Prize for historical biography.
She has recently
completed an account of her research and writing of that book, which will be
published in October this year - Talking to the Dead: Travels of a
Biographer.
https://sarahlefanu.wordpress.com/
Something of
Themselves: Kipling, Kingsley, Conan Doyle and the Anglo-Boer War (Hurst Publishing, 2020)
Sarah LeFanu
compellingly opens an unexplored chapter of these writers’ lives, at a turning
point for Britain and its imperial ambitions. Was the South African War, as
Kipling claimed, a dress rehearsal for the Armageddon of World War One? Or did
it instead foreshadow the anti-colonial guerrilla wars of the later twentieth
century?
Weaving a rich and
varied narrative, LeFanu charts the writers’ paths in the theatre of war, and
explores how this crucial period shaped their cultural legacies, their shifting
reputations, and their influence on colonial policy. (Source).
You can purchase the book from the publisher here.
Coming soon: Talking
to the Dead: Travels of a Biographer (SilverWood Books, released 27 October
2023)
Talking to the
Dead: Travels of a Biographer
is a journal that covers the five years (2015–2020) of her research and
writing, taking her from libraries and archives in England to old battle sites
in South Africa, and recording her conversations with the living and the dead. Talking
to the Dead is about South Africa then and now, about Britain then and now,
about imperialism and the beginning of its end, about the biographical process,
and also, intertwined with these subjects, about the experience of living with
the painful chronic condition polymyalgia rheumatica.
For life writers,
for lovers of historical biography, for all readers of Rudyard Kipling, Mary
Kingsley and Arthur Conan Doyle. (Source).
You can purchase the book from the publisher here.
Other works by
Sarah LeFanu
Rose Macaulay: A
Biography (SilverWood
Books, 2013)
Dreaming of
Rose: A Biographer’s Journal
(Handheld Press, 2021)
S is for Samora:
A Lexical Biography of Samora Machel and the Mozambican Dream (Hurst Publishers 2012)
In the Chinks of
the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (SilverWood Books, 2012)
Related episodes of Doings of Doyle
We briefly discussed the case of George Edalji with Sarah.
You can find out more in our interview with Shrabani Basu, author of The
Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer (2021), in Episode
16.
Next time on Doings of Doyle
Our return to Baker Street coincides with that of Sherlock
Holmes in ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’ (1903). You can read the story
here: https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/The_Adventure_of_the_Empty_House
Acknowledgements
Thanks to our sponsor, Belanger Books (www.belangerbooks.com),
and our supporters on Patreon
and Paypal.
Image credits: Thanks to Alexis Barquin at The Arthur
Conan Doyle Encyclopaedia for permission to reproduce
these images. Please support the encyclopaedia at www.arthur-conan-doyle.com.
Music credit: Sneaky Snitch Kevin MacLeod
(incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
YouTube vide created by @headlinerapp.
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