Eavan Boland is the author of Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time. Against Love Poetry is her most recent collection of poems.
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (Penguin, $17). I’m always struck by the difference between “the past” and “history.” For that reason, this seems the most eloquent of all the First World War memoirs. Maybe because it’s not written from the center of the action at all, but from a quiet corner—a young woman watching her world disintegrate.
Burned Child Seeks the Fire: A Memoir by Cordelia Edvardson (Beacon, $10). Edvardson is the daughter of a German poet I admire, Elizabeth Langgässer. She spent part of her adolescence in Auschwitz as Mengele’s assistant. This is a searing Holocaust memoir, only recently translated.
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Dead as Doornails by Anthony Cronin (Lilliput, $18). The best account of Irish literary life in the ’50s. A bittersweet critique of the waste, exuberance, and self-destruction of writers like Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan, and Myles na Gopaleen. It begins as memoir and ends as elegy.
Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer by Richard Holmes (out of print). Just the perfect book of and about biography. The main biography in this series of linked portraits is of the biographer himself: part snoop, part groupie of the lost lives of his heroes. Plus magical, subversive reconstructions of 19th-century writers like Stevenson, Shelley, and Wollstonecraft.
Charlotte Mew and Her Friends by Penelope Fitzgerald (out of print). An essential book. Fitzgerald reconstructs the quirky, wounded life of a wonderful poet—a sexual and literary outsider in 19th-century London.
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