Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith [Paperback]

Andrew Wilson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 17, 2004

The life of Patricia Highsmith was as secretive and unusual as that of many of the best-known characters who people her "peerlessly disturbing" thrillers and short stories. Yet even as her work has found new popularity in the last few years, the life of this famously elusive writer has remained a mystery.

For Beautiful Shadow, the first biography of Highsmith, British journalist Andrew Wilson mined the vast archive of diaries, notebooks, and letters she left behind, astonishing in their candor and detail. He interviewed her closest friends and colleagues as well as some of her many lovers. But Wilson also traces Highsmith's literary roots in the work of Poe, noir, and existentialism, locating the influences that helped distinguish Highsmith's writing so startlingly from more ordinary thrillers. The result is both a serious critical biography and one that reveals much about a brilliant and contradictory woman, one who despite her acclaim and affairs always maintained her solitude.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

While British journalist Wilson's portrait of Highsmith (1921-1995) is neither graceful nor fluid, it is as haunting and as chilling as the stories and novels Highsmith crafted over more than 50 productive years. The author of Strangers on a Train and five novels featuring the amoral and murderous Tom Ripley, Highsmith achieved considerable critical acclaim in her native United States, but never sold well here. She was better received in Europe and that was where she made her home. The biographer's exhaustive attention to detail coupled with his access to Highsmith's journals (or "cahiers," as she called them) and letters, and extensive interviews with her friends, lovers and associates, allow him to reveal in excruciating detail this very private person. Highsmith emerges as a woman of great intelligence, candor and curiosity, but also as a racially prejudiced, anti-Semitic and insensitive boor. She was an acute observer capable of seizing a single incident and transforming it into a complex story. But she was unable to transform her own unhappy life. Instead she transmuted her troubles, her experiences, her observations into her work. One of her lovers observed, "If she hadn't had her work, she would have been sent to an insane asylum or an alcoholics' home.... She was her writing." Highsmith's work has had an important impact on both crime fiction and gay and lesbian fiction, and Wilson has impressively documented that as well as the tremendous cost Highsmith paid for her achievements. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"A tour de force, an account so generous and prescient that Highsmith seems to step from its pages like a hologram." -Los Angeles Times

"One of the best biographies I've come across in years. It's a work of exquisite scholarship and ... much more." -Boston Globe

"Highsmith ... has been lucky in her first biographer. A thorough, extensively researched, dispassionate account of her complex life."-Washington Post

"A stunningly researched and insightful account ... Sympathetic but unblinking ..."-Entertainment Weekly

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (April 17, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582344116
• ISBN-13: 978-1582344119
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 4.8 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,100,458 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

57 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting Biographical Study, November 30, 2003

By 

cameron-vale "cameron-vale" (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (Hardcover)

Fans of Patricia Highsmith's dark and disturbing fiction will undoubtedly find Andrew Wilson's biography an absolutely fascinating if occasionally harrowing reading experience. Highsmith's life was far from a happy one, in fact in many ways it could be charitably described as a disaster. Wilson movingly details her sad, troubled childhood and adolescence during which Highsmith developed an obsession with gruesome death and decay that would haunt her short stories and novels. As an adult, her many sexual encounters always ended in unhappiness. With advancing age, Highsmith became ever more distrustful and ultimately hateful of humankind. Wilson portrays a supremely talented but cold-hearted, misanthropic woman who was eminently unlikeable, even downright detestable. (One of Highsmith's publishers describes her as "the most odious woman I've ever met.") All of this sadness and despair makes us understand and appreciate her disturbing creations all the more. In addition to providing us with a detailed glimpse into the strange life of one of the finest contemporary thriller writers, Wilson adds much to our appreciation of her art by providing concise and revealing analyses of her best works. So good is this exhaustive biography that once you've finished it you'll want to immediately pick up a copy of NOTHING THAT MEETS THE EYE (or any of the other currently available Highsmith collections) and renew your acquaintance with this excellent, morbidly captivating writer.

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Weird, Unkind, and Dissolute, September 4, 2005

By 

takingadayoff "takingadayoff" (Las Vegas, Nevada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (Paperback)

"She was a weird, unkind, dissolute person." This is how her goddaughter remembers Patricia Highsmith, and after reading Andrew Wilson's biography, you may think so, too.

In Beautiful Shadow (a reference to the name of the fictional Ripley's home in France, Belle Ombre), Wilson follows Highsmith's life by following her writing, so by the end of the book, you'll have a long list of novels and stories to look for. He examines her influences, her relationships (romantic and otherwise), and her many quirks.

Highsmith was never very popular in the U.S., at least until the movie The Talented Mister Ripley, came out after her death. She was more successful in Europe, where fans even recognized her in the street. Perhaps this explains why she lived most of her adult life in Europe. She was never very comfortable anywhere, even in her own body, according to those who knew her, but she seemed less uncomfortable in Europe.

What sort of a mind comes up with the sort of strange, compelling stories that Highsmith wrote, with their amoral, yet sympathetic characters? Wilson goes a long way toward answering that question in this biography, but some questions remain unanswered, and maybe it's better that way.

41 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The wait is over, July 14, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (Hardcover)

This is probably the most insightful, compulsively readable, scholarly biography I've ever read. It delves deep into the heart of the elusive, mysterious Patricia Highsmith and provides answers to all the most important questions. Where did Highsmith get her ideas from? How did she transform her life into art? What made her the woman she was?

It's obvious that I'm not the only one who thinks so. Paul Bailey in the Sunday Times (1 June, 2003) called it `exemplary' and a `triumph'. Craig Brown - who met Highsmith on a number of occasions - writes in the Mail on Sunday, 8 June 2003, that this is a `masterly, utterly absorbing biography...One of the many virtues of Wilson's biography is the seriousness with which he takes the novels, showing them to be deeply attuned to the strange rhythms of guilt, jealousy and fantasy that affect all of us in different ways.'

He also says: 'Now that she is dead, Wilson has delved with extraordinary diligence, and everything he has unearthed is remarkable.....'

The distinguished novelist PD James, in the Sunday Telegraph, 8 June, says this:
`Andrew Wilson's fascinating, beautifully balanced and meticulously researched biography examines the dark obsessions which gave rise to Ripley, telling us as much as we are ever likely to know about Highsmith the woman and bringing us as close to understanding the writer as we are ever likely to get.'

I can't imagine any other biographer getting as close to his subject as this. Don't wait for anything else. Buy this book - now.