Herbert Spencer

Lewes was married. He and his wife had agreed as rational free-thinkers that monogamy was unnatural. He had thus tolerated her relationship with his friend Thornton Hunt , and supported her children by Hunt, who...

As she moved on intellectually from her religious youth, she became steeped in the Higher Criticism of the Bible, and increasingly interested in alternative explanatory systems, particularly those of social science—including Herbert Spencer ...

Herbert Spencer went to great lengths to keep secret GE 's letters to him (so entirely unconventional in their frank avowal of carefully considered but socially unsanctioned feelings); it is remarkable that he did not...

This essay begins from the seventeenth-century salonnière (who was also a maxim-writer in the manner of her friend the duc de La Rochefoucauld , and may indeed have influenced him). It assesses the relative state...

Nevertheless, in the month of publication Lewes had written to Herbert Spencer at his wife's behest to deny categorically that the novel was hers. Spencer soon cooled in his relationship to the Leweses (out of...

They made a friend of George Meredith some time before 1890 and visited him often. (When he sent them a signed copy of Modern Love, they were inspired to dance a Dionysic dance...

The Shirreffs were a sociable family whose friends and acquaintances were varied. The scientist Mary Somerville , geologist Sir Charles Lyell , and Sir William Grove , inventor of the Grove battery, were numbered among...

She had, however, a delight in meeting and observing people with cultural capital. Other acquaintances included James Anthony Froude , writer; Jane, Lady Franklin (widow of the Arctic explorer, and a traveller in her own...

Quotations about sympathy on the title-page come from George Henry Lewes (in his life of Goethe) and from Arnold Toynbee . EL 's earliest heroine, then Espérance de Mabillon, makes a cameo appearance with her...

Instead of travelling out entirely by sea, as was usual, the two women went overland through Europe, visiting Vienna and proceeding down the Danube through Budapest on their way to Constantinople. After a pause...

While in India CN contracted a serious fever, which kept [her] a prisoner for seven weeks. She had been ill before this, and had been barred from scientific studies for some weeks by a...

Of the three poems named in the overall title, the first two employ ottava rima (rhyming abababcc), and the third a six-line stanza with one fewer ab. A Modern Apostle follows the career of the...

CN had meanwhile, three years before Gladstone's essay, given up writing poetry, which she came to see as essentially lightweight. Her friends tended to blame for this the influence of Robert Lewins , who later...

CN presented several papers on evolution and sociology to the sociological section of the Birmingham Natural History Society (devoted to the principles of Herbert Spencer ).

CN argues here that absolute knowledge is impossible because of the unavoidable element of subjectivity. Although this sounds as if anything beyond our senses must be essentially unknowable, so that even its existence becomes...