Born in Brockton, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, in 1932, Brenda Lee Power Murphy graduated from Harvard University (class of 1953) with a degree in English literature and studied at the London School of Economics. She was a book reviewer for The Observer, The Times, New Statesman, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and regularly contributed to BBC Radio 4 as a critic and commentator. Her biographies of Elizabeth Taylor, D.H. Lawrence, Nora Joyce, W.B. Yeats, and Rosalind Franklin have been widely acclaimed. She received the Los Angeles Times Biography Award, the Silver PEN Award, the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, and the Whitbread Biography Prize.
Maddox was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.
Maddox lived in London and spent time at her cottage near Brecon, Wales, where she and her husband, Sir John Maddox (d. 2009), were actively involved within the local community. She was vice-president of the Hay-on-Wye Festival of Literature, a member of the Editorial Board of British Journalism Review, and a past chairman of the Broadcasting Press Guild. Maddox had two children and two stepchildren.
Books in order of publication:
Beyond Babel: New Directions in Communications (London: Andre Deutsch, 1972)
The Half-Parent: Living with Other People’s Children (London: Andre Deutsch, 1975)
Who’s Afraid of Elizabeth Taylor? A Myth of Our Time (London: Granada, 1977)
Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988)
D.H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994)
Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats – 1999
Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA – 2002
Maggie – 2003
Eminent Lives – George Eliot: Novelist, Lover, Wife – 2009
Reading the Rocks: How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life – 2017
James Watson (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); (New York: Harper, 2018)
Oak Lawn Library Friends 