“If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.” – Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf Basics Virginia Woolf was undoubtedly one of the most important English writers of the 20th Century. In a BBC poll of 82 non-British critics, two of...
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92) is generally regarded as the greatest of the Victorian poets. He remains popular for works such as The Lady of Shalott (1832, 1842), In Memoriam (1849) and The Charge of the Light Brigade (1834), which was the partial inspiration for the...
In 1834 Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane moved into 5 (now 24) Cheyne Row, a Georgian terraced house in London’s elegant Chelsea district, where Carlyle lived until his death in 1881. It was there that he wrote his masterwork The French Revolution: A History...
Samuel Taylor Coleridge owes his fame to his masterful poetry and also to his influence on other poets, including his friend William Wordsworth. The two first met in 1795, when they set up homes a few miles apart in Somerset. Coleridge Cottage, now owned by...
EM Forster – born in London in 1879 – was a well-regarded novelist and short story writer. He was nominated 16 times for the Nobel Prize for Literature, but never won. Five of his six novels, which examine class differences and hypocrisy, were successfully adapted...
Victoria (Vita) Sackville-West was born in 1892 at Knole House (now owned by the National Trust), near Sevenoaks in Kent, and she spent much of her early life there. In 1913 she married diplomat Harold Nicholson and in 1930 they purchased Sissinghurst Castle, a run-down...
“Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.” – William Wordsworth (The Tables Turned) The English Lake District is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The citation reads: Famous for its scenic landscape of mountains, lakes, houses, gardens and parks, the Lake District...
Beatrix Potter first visited the Lake District in 1882 and fell in love with it right away. Following the success of her first three books – The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903) and The Tailor of Gloucester (1903) –...
In 1953 Sir Winston Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values". Churchill the writer is remembered today for three epic histories: Marlborough: His Life and...
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...