Beautiful Shadow

A Life of Patricia Highsmith (Bloomsburys Lives of Women, Book 1)

By: Andrew Wilson

Narrated by: Laurel Lefkow

Patricia Highsmith, author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley, had more than her fair share of secrets.

During her life, she felt uncomfortable about discussing the source of her fiction and refused to answer questions about her private life. Yet after her death in February 1995, Highsmith left behind a vast archive of personal documents—diaries, notebooks, and letters—which detail the links between her life and her work.

Drawing on these intimate papers, together with material gleaned from her closest friends and lovers, Andrew Wilson has written the first biography of an author described by Graham Greene as the “poet of apprehension.” Wilson illuminates the dark corners of Highsmith’s life, casts light on mysteries of the creative process, and reveals the secrets that the writer chose to keep hidden until after her death.

©2003 by Andrew Wilson (P)2021 by W. F. Howes, Ltd

Highsmith’s life reveals the difficulties confronting gay people in mid-century America.

The book is badly written, on a sentence-by-sentence level. In particular, the author distracts us with trivial information embedded into the exposition of important ideas.

The narrator often mispronounces familiar English words; she mispronounces one character’s name for most of a chapter, then reverts to the correct version.