Mark Bostridge

Background

Mark Bostridge was born in Richmond, Surrey, England. He is a brother of Ian Bostridge. They are the great-grandsons of the Millwall goalkeeper, John "Tiny" Joyce.

Education

Mark Bostridge was educated at Westminster School and later at Saint Anne's College. He was able to apply for study at Oxford University, from 1979 to 1984. At Oxford, he was awarded the Gladstone Memorial Prize for his works.

Career

Mark Bostridge has collaborated with others to produce two well-received books on British twentieth-century feminist and writer Vera Brittain: a life, co-written with Paul Berry and published in 1996 “offers a comprehensive picture of its subject,” including “her personal life, university education, war experiences, and later civilian career as a writer and lecturer,” remarked Caroline A. Mitchell in Library Journal, Brittain (1893-1970) is best known for an autobiography she published in 1933, Testament of Youth, in which she draws upon correspondence with her brother, fiancé, and several friends during World War I; she also recounts her own experiences as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse during the war. Brittain credited these experiences with turning her into a pacifist, a stance she maintained throughout World War II, despite its great unpopularity and the detrimental effect it had on her writing career.

The correspondence at the heart of Testament of Youth is reprinted along with all of the letters exchanged between friends, with explanatory notes, in the 1999 volume Letters from a Lost Generation: First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends, edited by Bostridge and Alan Bishop. Brittain’s “friends” were her only brother, Edward Brittain, her fiancé, Roland Leighton, and two other young men, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow, all of whom attended the same preparatory school and in 1914, at the start of World War I, were of age to volunteer to fight. The letters the young men wrote to Brittain and hers in return reflect a youthful naivete about war fueled by patriotic fervor, then growing disillusionment, and the necessary acknowledgment of death as each of the men was in turn killed in action. “The collection is unique because these letters span the entire war, show¬ing both male and female perspectives,” remarked Mary F. Salony in Library Journal. In a review in the London Times Literary Supplement, Caroline Moore - head described Letters from a Lost Generation as “beautifully edited and with excellent notes - though more would have been welcome,” adding that “the book makes almost unbearable reading, particularly when, one by one voices fall silent.”

Bostridge's Lives For Sale, an anthology of biographers' tales, was published in 2004. In 2008 he published Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend, the first major biography of Florence Nightingale in over half a century. In 2008, Bostridge also published Because You Died, a selection of Vera Brittain's First World War poetry and prose, to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice. Working closely with BBC Films Mark Bostridge later released a screen adaptation of Brittain's Testament of Youth.

In December 2014 Bostridge's study Vera Brittain and the First World War, containing new research about Testament of Youth's evolution, and an account of the dramatizations of the book culminating in the new film version starring Alicia Vikander as Vera Brittain and Kit Harington as Roland Leighton, was published by Bloomsbury.

Achievements

• Mark Bostridge was awarded for the Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend with Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography. His name appeared on a Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2008 and an Atlantic Magazine top book of the year.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Letters from a Lost Generation

    (Nothing in the papers, not the most vivid and heart-rendi...)

    1999
  • Vera Brittain: A Life 1996

Views

In June 2016 Bostridge was one of a group of biographers, historians, and other academics who signed a letter to The Times protesting at the erection of a statue to Mary Seacole at St Thomas' Hospital in London. In interviews Bostridge explained that he was not opposed to a statue to Seacole but to the siting of it at the hospital where Florence Nightingale founded her nurse training school in 1860, influencing the development of nursing throughout the world. Bostridge argues that Seacole was not a "pioneer nurse" as some of the statue campaigners maintain. He also points to the way in which Nightingale's enormous contributions to public health are now commonly and mistakenly attributed to Seacole by a wide range of British institutions that, he says, should "frankly know better."

Connections

Brother:

Ian Bostridge

Grandfather:

John Joyce

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series: A Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Non-Fiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures, Television, and Other Fields
  2010