Family Business

‘The store that changed shopping was built by a dynasty whose secrets, fights and feuds would have made gripping TV drama … Victoria Glendinning is an eminent literary biographer whose subjects include Vita Sackville-West and Edith Sitwell. So what possessed her to write about a 157-year-old commercial enterprise famous for affordable haberdashery, wedding-list glassware and cute Christmas TV commercials? The answer lies in the subtitle: Glendinning’s story of the Lewis dynasty is extremely “intimate” — a saga of family fights and obsessions, epic stand-offs and wild ambitions, stressed-out womenfolk and unhappy children. It’s Succession in tailcoats and spats … This is a vivid and eye-opening group biography, backgrounded by the rise of supermarket moguls from humble beginnings’John Walsh, Sunday Times

‘You’ll never look at John Lewis in the same away after reading this compelling survey of the family behind the department store … Glendinning’s fascination is contagious, and she blends in the ingredients of a family saga with insights into the partnership’s ethical underpinnings, acknowledging the romance of golden-age bricks-and-mortar retail as well as its uncertain future’Observer

‘She brings the Lewis family to life with wry commentary and telling detail’Financial Times

‘Lucky John Lewis. As company histories go, nobody could wish for a more skilful chronicler than Victoria Glendinning, who has a slew of biographies to her name. She calls her work an ‘intimate history’, and indeed it is full of domestic rows, curious relationships … [It offers] careful documentation of a remarkable retail experiment’Literary Review

Victoria Glendinning is an award-winning biographer and novelist. Her biographies include A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter, Elizabeth Bowen: Portait of a Writer, Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Biography), Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (winner of the Duff Cooper Prize and the James Tait Black Prize), Rebecca West, Anthony Trollope (another Whitbread Prize for Biography), Jonathan Swift and Leonard Woolf. Her novels include The Grown-ups, Electricity and Flight. Victoria is a Vice-President of English PEN, a Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Trustee of the Man Booker Foundation, and was awarded a CBE in 1998.