Amanda Foreman is the author of the award-winning best seller, ‘Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire' (Harper Collins UK; Random House US),and 'A World on Fire: A Epic History of Two Nations Divided (Allen Lane UK; Random House US). She lives in New York with her husband and five children. She is the daughter of Carl Foreman, the Oscar-winning screen writer of many film classics including, The Bridge on the River Kwai, High Noon, and The Guns of Navarone.
She was born in London, brought up in Los Angeles, and educated in England. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University in New York. She received her doctorate in Eighteenth-Century British History from Oxford University in 1998.
‘Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire’ was a number one best seller in England, and best seller for many weeks in the United States. It has been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Hungarian, Romanian, Croatian, Turkish, Korean and Mandarin Chinese. The book was nominated for several awards and won the Whitbread Prize for Best Biography in 1999. It has inspired a television documentary, a radio play starting Dame Judi Dench; and a movie, titled ‘The Duchess’, staring Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes.
She is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, and divides her time between London and New York. In addition to her writing and lecturing, she has served as a judge on almost every major literary prize on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award. The Library Journal of America has even named a prize after her.
Presently, she writes the popular Wall Street Journal column “Historically Speaking.” Foreman's next book, The World Made by Women: A History of Womankind from the Age of Cleopatra to the Era of Hillary Clinton, is slated for publication by Random House (US) and Allen Lane (UK) in 2015.http://www.amanda-foreman.com/
Przyznam, że nie mogę zrozumieć, jak i dlaczego tak się stało, że na podstawie tej książki nakręcono film tak inny w wymowie i przedstawiający fakty w tak odmiennym świetle. Książkowa Georgiana bynajmniej nie jest uciśnioną niewinnością dręczoną przez bezdusznego, niewiernego męża, a jej kochanek bynajmniej nie przypomina tego romantycznego rycerza w lśniącej zbroi, którego widzimy na ekranie. Moim zdaniem - szkoda, bo może nie powstałby tak ładny i wzruszający obrazek, ale chyba byłoby to z korzyścią dla portretu głównej bohaterki, która może nie była postacią tak idealną, jak ta ekranowa, ale przez to chyba znacznie bardziej ciekawą.