Posted by Jock on January 09, 2006 at 11:10:39 from 84.64.131.122 user Jock.
I’m not sure whether we have discussed Patrick O’Brian on Tarboard before. His stories about the dashing naval captain Jack Aubrey and his best friend and intelligence agent Stephen Maturin are believable in the same way that AR’s are. I received Nikolai Tolstoy’s biography The Making of the Novelist Patrick O’Brian as a Christmas present. (Highly recommended)
A striking parallel with AR is the fact that both novelists only discovered success on making a clean break in their literary and private lives.