Brenda Maddox is well known as the distinguished, award-winning biographer of Nora Barnacle, the wife and muse of James Joyce, and Rosalind Franklin, the biologist who, with Watson and Crick, unravelled the secrets of the double helix but was marginalised by her more fêted male colleagues. Her study of the marriage of W B Yeats paid tribute to the part played by the poet’s wife, George, in his mystical writings. With these books Maddox opened a new field for biography, the recovery of unjustly neglected women of the twentieth century.

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