Diana Barsham

Contact Details

Tel: +44 (0)1243 816456
Email: d.barsham@chi.ac.uk

Subject Leader in English

Diana Barsham is a specialist in Literary Life-Writing with a wide experience of post-graduate supervision at a number of British and American Universities. She has published both creative and scholarly work. Her book The Trial of Woman (1992) is a study of the lives of pioneering women writers associated with the Victorian Occult Revival such as Anna Kingsford, Annie Besant and Madame Blavatsky. Her critical biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Meaning of Masculinity, (Ashgate, 2000) has transformed understanding of Doyle’s career, especially his creation of Sherlock Holmes.

Diana has published a number of essays on the Holmes stories and was a contributor to Violets and Vitriol (2004), the first international collection of women’s writing on this topic. She is currently completing a book on 'Sylvia Plath, Autobiography and the Muse of Suicide'. She has also published poetry in a number of major poetry magazines, including Agenda,and was a runner up in the 2004 Ottakar Poetry Competition. She has had two plays performed, the second of which, a bio-drama about the life of Shakespeare, was commissioned in 2007.