Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #70590 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-03
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

Sunday Telegraph
`A fascinating, beautifully balanced and meticulously researched biography'

Daily Mail
`Excellent and outstandingly readable … Brilliant and compelling'

Sunday Times
`An exemplary biography … Wilson has fashioned a biography that does complete justice to her uneasy spirit'

Customer Reviews

stuart pe-win
I am not a big fan of literary biographies but I found this to be very readable and insightful. A "must by" for fans of her work.

Weird, Unkind, and Dissolute
"She was a weird, unkind, dissolute person." This is how her goddaughter remembers Patricia Highsmith, and after reading Andrew Wilson's biography, I think so, too. But there were all those great books and stories. . .

In Beautiful Shadow (a reference to the name of Ripley's home in France, Belle Ombre), Wilson describes quite a lot of Highsmith's writing, so by the end of the book, you may 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 recent 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 did, with their amoral and still often 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.

At Last!
As a long-time fan of Patricia Highsmith, who I have been reading since I was a teenager, I was looking forward to reading this book to find out about the author, of whom I knew very little other than the basic details of her life.

I wasn't disappointed. Beautiful Shadow interweaves the life of Highsmith and her books almost as one, and demonstrates how the two are so closely interlinked.

It's hard to believe from her books that Highsmith was most contended of individuals, and this proves to be the case.

Her story, which Wilson (although he never met her) has put together with the help of her journals and interviews with friends and contacts, is a masterful account of a tragic and tortured individual, who led a lonely life interrupted really only by the joy she gained from writing and painting.