Anthony Trollope was a prolific Victorian novelist, best known for The Chronicles of Barsetshire (six novels, 1855-67) that describe the social affairs of the fictional county of Barsetshire. Two of the novels were splendidly adapted by the BBC as The Barchester Chronicles (1982), with the...
Geoffrey Chaucer was probably born in 1343 or 1344 in London. Today he’s remembered as the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and the “Father of English Literature”. In 1387 he started writing The Canterbury Tales, in which a disparate group of people tell stories...
“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players .” – William Shakespeare (As You Like It) Shakespeare Basics William Shakespeare is an almost mythical figure, about whom we know remarkably little. What we do know, however, is what defines him as the...
John Keats’ life spanned only 25 years (1795-1821) during which he wrote some of England’s best loved Romantic poetry. His most memorable works include On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer (1816) and Bright Star, The Eve of St Agnes, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode...
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1865, but he lived in England for most of his adult life. Today he’s probably best remembered for the short story The Man Who Would be King (1888), the poem Gunga Din (1890) and the novel Kim...
Although Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854, he was as a student at Magdalen College, Oxford from 1874 to 1878 and then moved to London. So a literary tour of England should take in the controversial sculpture “A Conversation with Oscar Wilde” on...
Dr Samuel Johnson is most famous for A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), containing over 40,000 words, which took him nine years to compile. It brought Johnson great popularity and success, but he was also a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic and biographer. Dr...
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...