Brenda Maddox Explained

Brenda Maddox
Birth Name:Brenda Murphy
Birth Date:February 24, 1932
Birth Place:Bridgewater, Massachusetts, U.S.
Alma Mater:Harvard University
London School of Economics
Occupation:Biographer
Journalist
Notableworks:
Children:Bronwen Maddox
Bruno Maddox
Awards:Suffrage Science award (2011)

Brenda, Lady Maddox (Murphy; February 24, 1932 – June 16, 2019) was an American writer and biographer, who spent most of her adult life living and working in the UK, from 1959 until her death.[1] She is best known for her biographies, including of Nora Barnacle, the wife of James Joyce, and for her semi-autobiographical book, The Half-Parent: Living with Other People's Children.

Education and early life

Born Brenda Murphy in Bridgewater, Massachusetts in 1932, she graduated from Harvard University (class of 1953) with a degree in English literature.[2] [3] She also studied at the London School of Economics.

Career

She was a book reviewer for The Observer, The Times, New Statesman, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and regularly contributed to BBC Radio 4 as a critic and commentator. Her biographies of Elizabeth Taylor, D.H. Lawrence, Nora Joyce, W. B. Yeats and Rosalind Franklin[4] have been widely acclaimed. She received the Los Angeles Times Biography Award, the Silver PEN Award, the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, and the Whitbread Biography Prize.

Maddox lived in London and spent time at her cottage near Brecon, Wales where she and her husband, Sir John Maddox (d. 2009), were actively involved within the local community. She was vice-president of the Hay-on-Wye Festival of Literature, a member of the Editorial Board of British Journalism Review, and a past chairman of the Broadcasting Press Guild. Maddox had two children and two stepchildren.

Her best-known biography, that of James Joyce's wife Nora Barnacle, was made into a 2000 movie, Nora, starring Susan Lynch in the title role and Ewan McGregor as Joyce.

Her biography of the scientist James Watson was published in 2017.[5]

Awards and honours

Maddox was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 1999.[6] She won the Suffrage Science award in 2011.Web site: Suffrage Science Life Sciences 2011 by MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences. Issuu.com. March 8, 2011 . November 23, 2022.

Bibliography

The Story of a Marriage,[11] UK edition: The Married Man: A Life of D. H. Lawrence (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994)

The Dark Lady of DNA[13]

The First Lady[16]

Novelist, Lover, Wife[17]

Personal life

Brenda met John Maddox, then a science correspondent for The Guardian, while visiting Europe in 1958. They married in 1960, and settled in London, where she raised two stepchildren and had three more children of her own.[1] She died on June 16, 2019, aged 87.[20]

Notes and References

  1. News: Brenda Maddox obituary. Rocco. Fiammetta. 2019-06-28. The Guardian. 2019-07-02. en-GB. 0261-3077.
  2. News: Brenda Maddox, Biographer Who Revealed Joyce's Muse, Dies at 87. Genzlinger. Neil. 2019-06-27. The New York Times. 2019-07-05. en-US. 0362-4331.
  3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/brenda-maddox-biographer-of-james-joyces-wife-and-other-overlooked-lives-dies-at-87/2019/06/28/0670f0b0-9927-11e9-916d-9c61607d8190_story.html Article in The Washington Post
  4. https://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2002/oct/darklady/ NPR: Rosalind Franklin: Dark Lady of DNA
  5. Maddox, Brenda, James Watson, London: Bloomsbury, 2017; New York: Harper, 2018.
  6. Web site: Royal Society of Literature All Fellows . Royal Society of Literature . August 10, 2010 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20100305070326/http://www.rslit.org/content/fellows . March 5, 2010 . mdy .
  7. Beyond Babel: New Directions in Communications London: The Trinity Press, 1972;
  8. The Half-Parent: Living with Other People's Children London: Andre Deutsch, 1975;
  9. Who's Afraid of Elizabeth Taylor? A Myth of Our Time New York: M. Evans & Co., 1977;
  10. Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce also published as Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988);,
  11. D.H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994);,
  12. Yeats's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W.B. Yeats (New York: HarperCollins, 1999);
  13. (New York: HarperCollins, 2002);,
  14. "Mother of DNA" New Humanist, 117 (2002): 3.
  15. https://archive.today/20121223224939/http://www.bjr.org.uk/data/2002/no2_maddox.htm "The woman who cracked the BBC's glass ceiling"
  16. Maggie: The First Lady (London: Coronet, 2004);,
  17. George Eliot: Novelist, Lover, Wife (London: HarperPress, 2009); also published in the USA as George Eliot in Love (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
  18. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/reading-the-rocks-9781408879580 Reading the Rocks: How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life
  19. Freud's Wizard: The Enigma of Ernest Jones, also published as Freud's Wizard: Ernest Jones and the Transformation of Psychoanalysis (London: John Murray, 2006)
    Da Capo Press, 2007
  20. News: Brenda Maddox. The Daily Telegraph. June 22, 2019. June 22, 2019.