HG Wells was born in 1866 in south London. He began writing at an early age and his first four novels established his reputation as the “Father of Science Fiction”: The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The...
“The person ...
JRR Tolkien is famous for his fantasy novels The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-55). The latter – published in three volumes: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King – is one of the best-selling...
“It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.” – Thomas Hardy The County of Dorset I have always been fond of Dorset, one of England’s smallest counties. It’s a special area of rolling countryside,...
DH Lawrence was born in 1885 in the bleak coal mining town of Eastwood, near Nottingham. His childhood home is now the DH Lawrence Birthplace Museum: worth a visit on your next literary tour of England. Lawrence wrote a total of twelve novels – including...
Elizabeth Gaskell spent her formative years in Knutsford (15 miles south of Manchester) where she’s commemorated by the Gaskell Memorial Tower in the town center. Knutsford was the inspiration for Cranford (1851-53) in her novel of the same name, lovingly dramatized in the BBC’s 2007-10 mini-series...
Ian Fleming wrote twelve full-length James Bond novels, all of which were turned into memorable movies, and two collections of short stories. The books (published between 1952 and 1966) have sold over 100 million copies to date, making Bond one of the best-selling fictional characters...
One of England’s most popular 20th Century writers, Daphne Du Maurier is best remembered for her novels Jamaica Inn (1936), Rebecca (1938), Frenchman’s Creek (1941), My Cousin Rachel (1951) and The Scapegoat (1957) and her short stories The Birds (1963) and Don’t Look Now (1971)....
It’s seventy years since the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), George Orwell’s ominously prophetic masterwork. As an allegory for our present stressful times, it’s amazingly insightful. Some of the book’s most frightening notions are even with us in reality: Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’, for example, foreshadows the...
There’s almost complete agreement that the greatest novel by an English writer is Middlemarch (1871-72), George Eliot’s sprawling account of life in a provincial town in the middle of the 19th Century. So why is she so poorly commemorated? After all, she wrote many other...