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As an early pioneer in the now-well-established genre of creative nonfiction, author Anne Manning used the known facts of the lives of historical personages as the canvas upon which she created a compelling narrative. In these two works, Manning brings to life the remarkable existences first of Mary Powell, the wife of renowned poet John Milton, and then Deborah, one of the poet's daughters. These books will please Milton fans or any reader interested in the ins and outs of early modern life.

A tribute to one of Ireland's most important painters.

She was rich, beautiful, and happily married, but Blanche Ames was also a political reformer par excellence who created political cartoons to defend the right of women to vote, attacked male politicians who opposed woman suffrage through political action committees, and pursued the right of women to control the number and spacing of their families at a time when birth control was anathema to the minds of many.

The original document, a journal kept by Anne Hughes at the end of the 18th century, is thought to have passed down to Jeanne Preston, who transcribed, edited or restored it so that it took on its current form.

In the Valhalla of English literature Anne Manning is sure of a little and safe place. Her studies of great men, in which her imagination fills in the hiatus which history has left, are not only literature in them-selves, but they are a service to literature: it is quite conceivable that the ordinary reader with no very keen flair for poetry will realise John Milton and ap-praise him more highly, having read Mary Powell and its sequel, Deborah's Diary, than having read Paradise Lost. In The Household of Sir Thomas More she had for hero one of the most charming, whimsical, lovable, heroical men God ever created, by the creation of whose like He puts to shame all that men may accom-plish in their literature.