Writing a biography, especially of someone who isn’t already the subject of a published book, can mean searching for living relatives who may have documents or stories that shed light on their life, as Jane Dismore explains. Then, once you find them, you have to persuade them to let you have those stories — or […]
Lady Dorothy Mills, explorer and writer
She was a pioneering explorer, a travel writer writer and novelist, an earl’s daughter who reinvented herself, a woman with a drive to “be something”. So why haven’t more of us heard of Lady Dorothy Mills? Her biographer, Jane Dismore, aims to change that. When Lady Dorothy ‘Dolly’ Mills was a young girl, a female […]
Damned Souls: an aristocratic Victorian scandal
Among the late 19th-century circle of aristocratic artists and wits known as the Souls, adulterous affairs were accepted. But when a relationship between two unmarried Souls resulted in a pregnancy, the scandal that followed threatened to destroy careers and exposed the group’s conventionality. Jane Dismore’s latest book tells their story. It was not until she […]