Autobiography and Biography Titles

Note: a catalogue with more information (publisher/date, number of tapes and reader) is available from FAB.

Author, title, synopsis, catalogue number:

Adelman, Marci (ed)
Long time passing
Lesbian studies. This book tells the lives and experiences of earlier and older lesbians. Showing their courage, sexiness, sometimes loneliness and great courage and vitality.
151

Adie, Kate
The Kindness of Strangers
Autobiography: as her book reveals, Kate Adie’s life has been even more eventful than we can imagine. It encompasses Adie’s reporting from Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Tiannanmen Square and the 1991 Gulf War.
184

Bell, Barbara
Just Take Your Frock Off
Autobiography: The daughter of a mill worker, had her lesbian ‘initiation’ in 1928. Since then she has never had time to be lonely. She found women like her in the Girl Guide camps, London in the Blitz and a Watford approved school to name a few! She has counselled and buddied lesbians and gays with aids.
132

Brandt, Kate
Happy Endings
Biography: Lesbian writers talk about their lives and work. Intimate portraits of the lesbian writers whose books have shaped our lives.
127

Calana, Laurel & Covina, Gina
The New Lesbians: Interviews With Women Across The US and Canada
Although from the late 70s, this book gives fascinating insight into the lives of lesbians in the US and Canada.
241

Collis, Rose
A Trouser-Wearing Character : The Life and Times of Nancy Spain
This fascinating biography reconstructs the life and career of one of Britain’s most extraordinary post-war female characters. From ‘Good Housekeeping’ to ‘The News of the World’; from Woman’s Hour to ‘What’s My Line?’ and including, of course, her famously camp crime novels.
130

Curb, Rosemary & Manahan, Nancy (Eds)
Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence
Stories by 49 current and former nuns about convent life. They discuss why they entered; chose to leave or stay; religious beliefs today; relationships with other women; ways they recognised their lesbianism.
029N

Fischer, Erica
Aimee and Jaguar
In the Berlin of 1942, Lilly Wust was married to a soldier and was the mother of four children. Her quiet domestic life was forever changed when she met and fell in love with Jewish Felice Schragenheim. Aimee and Jaguar, as the two called one another, embarked on an ecstatic affair. After only a year, their happiness was destroyed when Felice was taken to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Erica Fisher has documented this extraordinary story after talking to 80-year-old Lilly, and to friends of the two women.
266

Gardiner, Jill
From the Closet to the Screen: Women at the Gateways Club, 1945-1985
Frequented in its 50 year history by ordinary women and those in the public eye, such as Dusty Springfield and Maureen Duffy, the Gateways on Chelsea’s King’s Road became the most famous lesbian club in the world, featuring in the movie “The Killing of Sister George” in 1968. Eighty women recall this secret world, many of them speaking publicly for the first time. Their stories are moving, humorous, romantic and erotic, during a period of social transformation.
196

Glendinning, Victoria
Vita: The life of Vita Sackville-West
Vita was an aristocrat, poet, novelist, broadcaster, gardener and a passionate and complex woman
036N

Greer, Germaine
Daddy We Hardly Knew You
Biography: Driven to know if the father who returned from World War II a cold and vacant man had loved her once, Greer follows a trail of false leads and outright lies to know the truth about the man who called himself Reg Greer. To the dismay of her sharp-tongued, eccentric mother, but to the pleasure of herself and her siblings, she finds someone who, concealing his origins in poverty and illegitimacy, rises to middle-class security on the strength of his own wit and resourcefulness.
108

Haley-Banez, Lynn & Garrett, Joanne
Lesbians in Committed Relationships: Extraordinary Couples, Ordinary Lives
Four lesbian couples celebrating long-term, monogamous relationships detail their lives together through a series of candid and emotional narratives that are at once heart-warming and heart-wrenching. This is a rich, layered history of four loving, working relationships that cross racial, socio-economic, age and education boundaries.
232

Izumo, Marou; Maree, Claire (Maree, Claire, translator)
Love upon the Chopping Board
Autobiography: Marou Izumo writes of her life in Tokyo and Fremantle in this book which explores international lesbian culture. Marou Izumo and Claire Maree met at a bar in Tokyo. Separated by 20 years in age, their cultural origins, and visas requirements, they have managed to maintain their relationship through these vicissitudes. An autobiography, a love story, a collection of cross-cultural reflections.
145

Johnson, Susan E
Staying Power: long term lesbian couples
A study of 108 couples who have been together 10 or more years, 7 are profiled: from 52-year to 13-year relationships. Via direct quotes from detailed interviews we learn the nature of commitment for these women: their differences, their commonality, friendships, support systems and how they handle issues of power and equality.
168

Kenyon, Olga (Ed.)
800 years of Women’s Letters
Women’s History: Explores the tradition of female letter-writing from the 12th Century to the present day. Famous (Jane Austen, Queen Victoria, Virginia Woolf) and lesser-known women reveal their day-to-day lives and the restricted world they inhabited.
153

Lee, Hermione
Virginia Woolf
Biography: an enthralling portrait of a genius of her time with a rich use of detail. Hermione Lee creates a fresh and vivid characterisation of Virginia Woolf at every stage of her life. This intimate portrayal makes us feel that we know her.
203

Liddington, Jill
Female Fortune: Land, Gender and Authority
Biography: Lesbian land-owner Anne Lister (1791-1840) is best known for her diaries of the 1830s. Anne embarked on an affair with a neighbouring heiress and consolidated their estates in a dynastic lesbian marriage. An account of this story, with key selections from previously unpublished diaries.
155

Lorde, Audre
The Cancer Journals
Health: Grief, terror, courage, the passion for survival and far more than survival are here in the personal and political searchings of a great poet. Lorde is the Amazon warrior who also knows how to tell the tale of battles, what happens and why, what are the weapons and who are the comrades she found. More than this her book offers women a new and deeply Feminist challenge.
118

Maka, Gwen
Riding with Ghosts
Travel: An Englishwoman’s 4,000 Mile Solo Cycle Ride from Seattle to Mexico
137

Manning, Rosemary
The Corridor of Mirrors
Autobiography: How does one conduct a successful public career as principal of a school and novelist, yet keep the most central facts of one’s private life secret? Rosemary deals with her early hopes for a changed world through socialism, her relationships with friends and lovers, and her late – and she feels crucial – encounter with the women’s liberation movement.
102

Neild, Suzanne & Pearson, Rosalind (Eds)
Women like Us
Autobiography: Nineteen brave and sometimes brash women from a variety of backgrounds give riveting accounts of their lives, the pain of keeping separate essential aspects of their lives, the eventual relief of coming out, their struggles and joys. Covering such landmarks in lesbian history as the Gateways Club, the first lesbian magazines Arena 3 and Sappho.
208

Penelope, Julia & Woolf, Susan J., (eds)
The original coming out stories
Biography: The coming out stories is out again with 15 new stories, this revived and enlarged edition is more than just as good it’s better. The process of coming out remains an intensely emotional and often painful experience. The stories of the first edition recorded the struggle of contributors to name their lesbian identity. This edition shows that the process we call coming out is only a little less difficult now.
134

Penelope, Julia (Ed.)
Out of the Class Closet: Lesbians Speak
Lesbian Non-fiction: A wide-ranging anthology in which lesbians from diverse classes, races and ethnic backgrounds, tell their stories. They articulate with insight and wit theories of class difference amongst lesbians.
221

Phillips J., Leaska M.A., & Trefusis V.K. (eds)
Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West 1910-21
In a series of ecstatic and scandalous escapes, the lovers led their desperate husbands and tyrannical mothers a chaotic bohemian dance from London to The Continent. Violet’s letters contain some of the best writings of the later novelist. By turns precocious, pleading, reproachful, scholarly, crafty, reckless, passionate. A moving testament to her love.
242

Rosen, Ruth; Davidson, Sue (eds)
The Mamie Papers
The letters of a Jewish prostitute in Philadelphia and a Bostonian ‘society lady’ earlier this century in the United States. Offers an unprecedented autobiographical account of life as a poor working-class woman.
040N

Rowbotham, Sheila
Promise of a Dream: remembering the sixties
Autobiography. In this evocative memoir, Sheila Rowbotham vividly recounts her progress through one of the most influential decades of the twentieth century, giving her wry and intimate portrait of the years which shaped her as a passionate socialist and feminist
223

Rule, Jane
Lesbian Images
Biography: Exactly what it is to be a lesbian is seriously and clearly set out in this remarkable study. The trenchantly reasoned introductory and historical sections of the book are followed by fascinating evidence from the work of a variety of authors of their interaction with their culture.
174

Starr, Vicky
K D Lang: All You Get Is Me
Unauthorised biography of the singer k d lang’s rise from her childhood on the Canadian Prairies.
265

Stewart-Park, Angela & Cassidy, Jules
We’re Here: conversations with lesbian women
Biographical: Women of various ages and backgrounds talk about themselves, their preference for other women, the women’s movement, pressures of society, their particular problems and the decisions they have had to make.
172

Toksvig, Sandi
The Gladys Society
Autobiography: Sandi was 8 when she first landed in America. Part travelogue, part memoir this is Sandi’s often hilarious and sometimes moving account of her journey to the United States 30 years on.
178

Toksvig, Sandy
The Travels of Lady Bulldog Burton
Travel biography: Celebrated Victorian traveller, parasol promoter and, of course, the inventor of the double-gusset underpants, Lady Bulldog Burton’s diaries provide a fascinating insight into her escapades.
179

Valentine, Penny; Wickham, Vicki
Dancing with Demons
Biography: The authorised biography of Dusty Springfield. One of the great female pop icons, Dusty dominated the 1960s with a string of top 10 hits. So what lay behind that unforgettable voice and stage persona? What were ‘the demons’ that beset Dusty? With the co-operation of her family, friends and former lovers, this book at last makes sense of the tensions which her fame and sexuality brought.
169

Whitelaw, Liz
The Life and Rebellious Times of Cecily Hamilton: Actress, Writer, Suffragist
Biography. In the early years of this century, Cecily Hamilton was celebrated as playwright, novelist, actress, suffragist and peace campaigner, with friends such as Vera Britain, George Bernard Shaw, H G Wells.
233

Winters, Kelly
Walking Home
Travel: A woman’s pilgrimage on the Appalachian Trail, which stretches from Georgia to Maine. Kell quit her job, left an unhealthy relationship and set foot on the trail moving northwards for six months. Captures the sense of majestic isolation and quirky community; staggering beauty and startling terror; exhilaration and futility that exist in outdoor adventure. Filled with courage, healing, strength and lasting love.
157