Written Lives (Spanish: Vidas Escritas) is a collection of biographical sketches of famous literary figures, written by Spanish author Javier MarÃas and originally published in 2000. Margaret Jull Costa's English translation was published by New Directions in 2006.
Authors featured include:
- Djuna Barnes
- Joseph Conrad
- Arthur Conan Doyle
- Isak Dinesen
- Marie du Deffand
- William Faulkner
- Henry James
- James Joyce
- Rudyard Kipling
- Malcolm Lowry
- Thomas Mann
- Yukio Mishima
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Rainer Maria Rilke
- Arthur Rimbaud
- Laurence Sterne
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
- Ivan Turgenev
- Oscar Wilde
There is also, towards the end of the book, a section entitled 'Fugitive Women', which includes shorter sketches of Emily Brontë, Julie de Lespinasse, Violet Hunt, Vernon Lee, Adah Isaacs Menken and Lady Hester Stanhope. The final chapter, 'Perfect Artists', looks more generally at the tradition of the literary artist.
Famous quotes containing the words written and/or lives:
“And cried, ‘Before I am old
I shall have written him one
Poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.’”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future. Suburbia lives imaginatively in Bonanza-land.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)