Beyond the Book: Background information when reading The Sisters Mortland

Beyond the Book

This article relates to The Sisters Mortland

About the author: Sally Beauman was born in Devon, England and read English Literature at Girton College, Cambridge where she graduated in 1966. 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 traveled 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 (1987). It 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.

Since then she has published about 10 novels. She has also published two non-fiction works, King Henry V (1976) and The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades (1982). For more biographical details and a full bibliography see BookBrowse.

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This "beyond the book article" relates to The Sisters Mortland. It originally ran in February 2006 and has been updated for the February 2007 paperback edition. Go to magazine.