By the age of 30, the young woman who was born Aurore Dupin in 1804 in a Paris garret had become the internationally renowned George Sand. Her enormous and radical corpus would grow to include 70 novels, travel writing, plays, autobiography and political writing. But despite this prodigious talent, Sand was simultaneously a figure of scandal. Cigar-smoking, cross-dressing and promiscuous, she seemed to break all the rules society set for women. Was her iconoclasm simply an act of courage, a declaration of absolute autonomy? Or did her sexual and emotional relationships with the leading figures of her day form part of her dialogue with the world around her? Award-winning poet and biographer Fiona Sampson rehabilitates an artistic and intellectual giant who still speaks to us today.

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." With these words, Elizabeth Barrett Browning has come down to us as a romantic heroine, a recluse controlled by a domineering father and often overshadowed by her husband, Robert Browning. But behind the melodrama lies a thoroughly modern figure whose extraordinary life is an electrifying study in self-invention. TWO-WAY MIRROR is the first biography of Barrett Browning in more than three decades. With unique access to the poet’s abundant correspondence, Fiona Sampson holds up a mirror to the woman, her art, and the art of biography itself.

We know the facts of Mary Shelley’s life in some detail. But there has been no literary biography written this century, and previous books have ignored the real person, despite the fact that Mary and her group of second-generation Romantics were extremely interested in the psychological aspect of life. In this probing narrative, Fiona Sampson pursues Mary Shelley through her turbulent life, much as Victor Frankenstein tracked his monster across the arctic wastes. Sampson has written a book that finally answers the question of how it was that a 19-year-old came to write a novel so dark, mysterious, anguished and psychologically astute that it continues to resonate two centuries later.