With Friends Possessed

A Life of Edward FitzGerald

Robert Bernard Martin

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571300501
• Year: 2013

'[Edward] FitzGerald (1809-1883) won a small piece of immortality with his translation-adaptation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam... but in every other way he seems to have successfully avoided fulfilment. A godless Epicurean, he lived in permanent virginity, never pressing his homosexual desires beyond a number of sentimental crushes... The son of a fabulously rich heiress, he rarely travelled... Though he had many friends he also had a perverse penchant for alienating them... [Robert Bernard] Martin argues that FitzGerald's greatest achievement, outside the Rubaiyat, is his letters, which certainly have grace and a wistful charm.' Kirkus Review

'There is [] something sad about the life of this loving and never quite satisfied man... Mr. Martin's biography is splendid reading, and it is a real credit to it that he makes us feel the sadness.' New York Times

Table of contents

• Cover
• Landing Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Notes and Abbreviations
• Foreword
• CHAPTER I: Family and Childhood
• CHAPTER II: Cambridge
• CHAPTER III: Thackeray, Tennyson  and Browne
• CHAPTER IV: Mirehouse and Boulge Cottage
• CHAPTER V: Browne’s Marriage
• CHAPTER VI: Cowell and Barton
• CHAPTER VII: Euphranor
• CHAPTER VIII: Death of FitzGerald’s Parents
• CHAPTER IX: FitzGerald’s Marriage
• CHAPTER X: The Discovery of the  Rubáiyát
• CHAPTER XI: Posh
• CHAPTER XII: Letters and Readers
• CHAPTER XIII: Settling Accounts
• CHAPTER XIV: Boulge Churchyard
• Acknowledgements
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright