Sally Beauman Biography
Sally Beauman was born in England, in Devon, educated at a girls' school in
the West Country, and then read English Literature at Girton College, Cambridge
where she graduated in 1966. She has an MA in English Literature.
Immediately after graduating, she went to live in America for three years,
first in Washington DC, and then New York. During her time there she travelled
extensively, visiting most of the states in the union: her experiences in the
South in the year prior to the assassination of Martin Luther King, provided
some of the background for her first novel, Destiny.
She began work as a journalist on the then newly launched New York magazine,
and continued to write for it and other American publications after her return
to England. She has written as a critic and reporter for numerous newspapers and
magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Sunday Times, the Daily
telegraph, the Observer, the New York Times, and the New Yorker: it was an
article about Daphne du Maurier, commissioned by Tina Brown and published in the
New Yorker that eventually led to her writing her widely praised and
best-selling Rebecca's Tale, a novel that revisited and reimagined du Maurier's
Manderley.
She received the Katherine Pakenham prize for her journalism, and became the
youngest-ever editor of Queen magazine (now Harper's and Queen). But after the
birth of her son, she found the demands of journalism and motherhood hard to
combine, so she turned to full time writing. Her first book was non-fiction, the
definitive study of the UK's greatest theatre company: The Royal Shakespeare
Company: A History of Ten Decades (Oxford University Press,1982) -- her husband
Alan Howard whom she met when interviewing him prior to his Hamlet at Straford
upon Avon, was playing many leading Shakespearean roles with the RSC at this
time.
She then turned to fiction. Her first book, the controversial Destiny (1986)
earned her a record sum for a first novel: published in the US by Bantam, it
became a New York Times number 1 bestseller, and went on to top the bestseller
lists in the UK, Canada, Australia and South Africa. It has never been out of
print since, and - widely misunderstood when first published - is now seen as a
feminist, genre-subversive novel, a study of a materialist woman in a
materialist man's world.
Destiny was followed by six other novels, Dark Angel, the study of a
Victorian family's decline; the three linked modern thrillers, Lovers & Liars,
Danger Zones and Sextet; Rebecca's Tale, her re-examination of du Maurier's
Rebecca, which won her the du Maurier prize, and her latest book, the
critically-acclaimed The Sisters Mortland: all have been best sellers, and all
have been translated into more than 25 languages world-wide.
Bibliography
Novels
- Destiny (1987)
- Dark Angel (1990)
- Lovers and Liars (1994)
- Secret Lives (1994)
- Danger Zones (1996)
- Sextet (1997)
- Deception and Desire (1998)
- Rebecca's Tale (2001)
- The Landscape of Love (2005)
aka The Sisters Mortland (USA 2006)
Non fiction
King Henry V (1976)
Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades (1982)
This biography was last updated on 07/06/2011.
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