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Represented By: Ivan Mulcahy
She became a full-time writer and educator after an early career as a BBC World Service radio producer and a PhD about Timbuktu in the European cultural imagination.
Her biography of Britain’s first fertility guru, Doctor of Love: James Graham and his Celestial Bed, was reviewed in academic journals and tabloids alike. This was followed by three critically acclaimed historical novels for young adults: A World Between Us, That Burning Summer and Liberty’s Fire. All were loosely inspired by her own family’s radical history. Her adult fiction debut, Mr Peacock’s Possessions, a Robinsonade set on a remote volcanic island in nineteenth-century Oceania, was a Book of the Year in The Times and The Sunday Times.
Lydia has just completed her novel Olga and Castor, which tells the story of the long and complicated three-way relationship between Olga Kosakiewicz, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Represented By: Ivan Mulcahy
She became a full-time writer and educator after an early career as a BBC World Service radio producer and a PhD about Timbuktu in the European cultural imagination.
Her biography of Britain’s first fertility guru, Doctor of Love: James Graham and his Celestial Bed, was reviewed in academic journals and tabloids alike. This was followed by three critically acclaimed historical novels for young adults: A World Between Us, That Burning Summer and Liberty’s Fire. All were loosely inspired by her own family’s radical history. Her adult fiction debut, Mr Peacock’s Possessions, a Robinsonade set on a remote volcanic island in nineteenth-century Oceania, was a Book of the Year in The Times and The Sunday Times.
Lydia has just completed her novel Olga and Castor, which tells the story of the long and complicated three-way relationship between Olga Kosakiewicz, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Author: Lydia Syson
Genres: Literary Fiction
It portrays the intertwined lives of all three during the years immediately before the older couple — charismatic, established, ambitious — found fame. Not long after she escaped this complicated, overwhelming, thrilling but destructive arrangement, Olga Kosakiewicz was fictionalised by Beauvoir as the disruptive, crazed and needy third of a tortured ménage-a-trois in her first published novel, L'Invitée (1943), translated as She Came to Stay. Versions of Olga, a compelling, confused and unpredictable young woman, appear in Sartre's novels too, muddled up with her younger sister Wanda, who later became Sartre's lover. Building on recent, less censorious reassessments of the feminist and philosopher as a pioneer of personal authenticity, fluid sexuality and open, unorthodo relationships, OLGA AND CASTOR combines fact, fiction and philosophy to illuminate the importance of Beauvoir’s early thinking to the way we love and live now. Whether a family is forged by blood or existentialist experiment, can we ever be free of its peculiar torments? I believe there is mass readership, perhaps especially of young women, whose curiosity can easily be coaxed to understand Beauvoir’s formation fully and fairly. For example, the very best way to understand how she went from indifference about ‘women’s issues’ to becoming the passionate driver of the 1970s ‘women’s right to choose’ campaign is to learn about the horrific backstreet abortion to had to organise for her longtime lover and friend Olga.
Author: Lydia Syson
Genres: Non-Fiction, Biography
Dr Graham set out to bring the sublime into the sex life of every married couple.
Widely considered the world’s first sex therapist, he guaranteed both ecstasy and fertility to the users of his infamous Celestial Bed, a contraption which harnessed all the most exciting developments of the Enlightenment. Electricity, magnetism, mind-altering gases and music all played a part in this astonishing invention, luxuriously designed to produce pleasure and perfect babies.
Graham’s medical career took him from his native Edinburgh to America and back again, and he crossed paths with many of the most famous individuals of his day. The doctor’s well-publicised efforts to overturn medical orthodoxy provoked both admiration and ridicule. He was crowned “the King of Quacks”.
The first and only comprehensive biography of James Graham, Doctor of Love is a portrait of a remarkable eighteenth-century celebrity, revealing a character of great complexity: startlingly progressive, extraordinarily arrogant and touchingly humane. He was the epitome of his era, yet utterly one of a kind.