Books like Bram Stoker by Barbara Belford

Barbara Belford’s concise biography traces the hidden life of Bram Stoker, best known today as the author of Dracula and, in his own era, as a pioneering manager of London’s Lyceum Theatre. Growing up in a sickly childhood steeped in Irish folklore, Stoker pursued journalism and the arts, forging a lifelong friendship with Walt Whitman and, later, a correspondence that led him to America with actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. The book also explores his early friendship with Oscar Wilde, their rivalry for Florence Balcombe—who became Stoker’s wife—and his interactions with prominent Victorian literary and theatrical figures such as Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, James Whistler, Lord Tennyson, and George Bernard Shaw. Through these episodes, Belford paints a portrait of a man who balanced Victorian modesty and domestic duty with a passionate devotion to the stage and to the ghosts of his own imagination.

First publish date: 1996