Hawksley, Lucinda

views updated

Hawksley, Lucinda

PERSONAL:

Education: Earned an M.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—London, England. Office—Christopher Sinclair Stevenson, 3 South Terrace, London SW7 2TB, England. E-mail—info@lucindahawksley.com.

CAREER:

Writer and educator.

MEMBER:

Society of Authors, Friends of the Charles Dickens Museum (patron).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Ed Lacy Travel-Writing Award.

WRITINGS:

(With Dennis Hardley) The Magic & Mystery of Scotland, Dempsey Parr (Bristol, England), 1998.

Essential Pre-Raphaelites, Parragon (Bath, England), 1999.

Endangered Animals, Parragon (Bath, England), 2000.

A Tale of Two Cities (based on the novel by Charles Dickens), illustrated by Bob Harvey, Usborne (London, England), 2002.

(Editor, with Ian Whitelaw) Yoga, DK Publishers (New York, NY), 2003.

Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel, André Deutsch (London, England), 2004, published as Lizzie Siddal: Face of the Pre-Raphaelites, Walker (New York, NY), 2006.

Katey: The Life and Loves of Dickens's Artist Daughter, Doubleday (London, England), 2006.

Also author of London and Scotland. Contributor to books, including Bradman's Business Travellers' Guide to Europe. Contributor to periodicals, including Motoring & Leisure and Vegetarian.

SIDELIGHTS:

Lucinda Hawksley, the great-great-great granddaughter of Charles Dickens, is the author of travel books and works of art history, as well as the critically acclaimed biographies Lizzie Siddal: Face of the Pre-Raphaelites and Katey: The Life and Loves of Dickens's Artist Daughter. In Lizzie Siddal, Hawksley examines the life of Elizabeth Siddal, the wife of nineteenth-century poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A thin, striking redhead who worked in a millinery shop, she was plucked from obscurity by Rossetti and became the subject of numerous paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including John Millais's masterwork Ophelia. "I haven't found someone before Lizzie who became famous purely for being a model," Hawksley told Bookseller contributor Benedicte Page. "Lizzie was painted by all the group. Holman Hunt hadn't even met her when he wrote to say, ‘Can I paint you, because I've heard you're wonderful?’ I think they all wanted to find the ‘ideal woman.’" Siddal, who suffered from depression and an addiction to laudanum, died at the age of thirty-two; seven years later, Rossetti had her body exhumed to retrieve a manuscript that had been buried with her. "Hawksley offers a fresh and affecting perspective on this still scandalous and tragic story," noted Booklist critic Donna Seaman. Alison Hood, writing in BookPage, remarked that the author "provides a compassionate portrait of this muse who was also a talented artist and poet in her own right."

In Katey, Hawkins looks at Catherine Elizabeth Macready Dickens, one of the great novelist's ten children. An artist in her own right, Katey survived a tumultuous upbringing and a loveless marriage to pursue a career as a painter. She later remarried, to Italian artist Carlo Perugini, and formed strong friendships with J.M. Barrie and Bernard Shaw. According to John Carey, writing in the London Sunday Times, Katey "was well worth writing and is well worth reading." Carey added: "Hawksley battles gamely against the shortage of raw material, and even when she fails her biography has the distinction of making you want to know more about its subject, rather than, as so often, less."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, August 1, 2006, Donna Seaman, review of Lizzie Siddal: Face of the Pre-Raphaelites, p. 24.

Bookseller, July 16, 2004, Benedicte Page, "Tragedy of the Ideal Woman," p. 28.

Spectator, October 30, 2004, Richard Shone, "The Girl Who Played Ophelia," p. 49.

Sunday Times (London, England), August 6, 2006, John Carey, "Love among the Artists," review of Katey: The Life and Loves of Dickens's Artist Daughter.

Times Literary Supplement, November 19, 2004, "A Life Too Thin," p. 29; September 1, 2006, "Unhappy Legacies," p. 4.