Books by James Haydock

There is a man blazing a trail across the silver screen, delivering performances of such blistering intensity that he has united critics and casual moviegoers alike. That man is Tom Hardy, and Living Life to the Max traces his rise to the top.

My name is Jonathan Blue. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, I worked many hours each day for acceptance as a writer. In my youth, I dreamed of becoming a classical scholar at Oxford or Cambridge. When the fantasy was shattered by a stupid excess of emotion, I attempted to begin a new life in America. A year later, I was living in a London slum with a drunken wife. In grim poverty, I wrote about poor people struggling to survive in slums among the worst in the world. They were my neighbors, and from them came inventive and motive force. In maturity I lived with a delicate and beautiful woman, but in failing health for a short time. Then like a turbulent river, I dashed unimpeded to the sea.

Bonheur was and is my name. Every person in my native France knew the name meant sunshine, well-being, happiness. But how does one find happiness in a prison known worldwide for its coarse and brutal inhumanity? Fifteen painful years, prime years of youth, I endured in that terrible place determined to escape. Though I planned each escape carefully, something always went wrong, and I found myself trying to survive in soul-shattering solitary confinement. I was small of statue and not very strong compared to the hulking convicts I lived with, and yet I need not remind you that strength comes in many forms.

Half biography and half critical study, this book about George Gissing is for the general reader. It draws a parallel between the women in Gissing's life and the women in his novels. His books span the last two decades of the nineteenth century and are memorable for their portraits of women. Only a few women played active roles in Gissing's life, but all exerted a lasting influence. Their imprint allowed him to portray women vividly and with unerring realism, though at times in variable tones of gray...in charcoal. Gissing's feminine portraiture, rendered in shades of somber experience, is one of the most striking features of his work and one of the most valuable for the reader of today. It derived from his intense and abiding interest in the women of his time and the way they lived their lives. His portraits of women, warm and human, were shaped in all their detail by an essential sympathy that made them neither topical nor contemporary but timeless. Some of the women in his life became models for fictional women as alive today as when he first created them.