Family Business

Description

A charming biography of the first John Lewis and how he changed the British high street - from Victoria Glendinning, winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, the James Tait Black Prize and (twice) the Whitbread Prize for Biography. John Lewis' father died in a Somerset workhouse, orphaning him at the age of seven. Raised by an aunt, he worked as an apprentice to a local draper from the age of fourteen, slowly earning enough to open his own small shop - and then expand. This brilliant biography captures how Lewis and his brother rose up to change the business world, covering the immense falling out between generations, the passionate advocacy for the concept of Partnership, the social and political activity of Oxford Street. This is a history for anyone with an interest in the foundation of the British high street or business from nineteenth century London to today. In the final chapter, looking at retail and recession, Glendinning will look at what the like future of John Lewis might be.

Victoria Glendinning is an award-winning biographer and novelist. Her biographies include A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter, Elizabeth Bowen: Portait of a Writer, Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Biography), Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (winner of the Duff Cooper Prize and the James Tait Black Prize), Rebecca West, Anthony Trollope (another Whitbread Prize for Biography), Jonathan Swift and Leonard Woolf. Her novels include The Grown-ups, Electricity and Flight. Victoria is a Vice-President of English PEN, a Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Trustee of the Man Booker Foundation, and was awarded a CBE in 1998.

Praise for Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville West (winner of the Whitbread Prize) 'A biography that conceals nothing... gives her life in fact the strangeness, subtlety, complexity and ambivalence missing from her fiction' Observer 'Surely the definitive biography' Harold Acton 'Superb... much more than just a record of events but an opening up of understanding and experience' Fiona McCarthy, The Times 'It required both literary skill of the highest order and a rare imaginative compassion to fashion a work of art out of life... superb' Dervla Murphy, Irish Times 'Her modest, masterly, well-written treatment of a subject so absorbing in both intimate detail and public ramification is as good as it could be' Country Life 'Again and again, I found myself turning to my battered paperback of Victoria Glendinning's Whitbread prize-winning biography of Sackville-West' Guardian