Geoffrey Chaucer

JB 's true attitude to her own poetic vocation is hard to fathom. In An Expostulatory Epistle to Sir Richard Steele upon the Death of Mr. Addison she calls herself the meanest of the tuneful...

SL 's frame story delightfully introduces the series. Her narrator is a male poet, poverty-stricken but eager for fame. Having been driven out of his house by bailiffs, he goes sightseeing and is snowed in...

ML met fellow art student Stephen Haweis at the Académie Colarossi . He was an example of pure British privilege who deliberately defied convention. His father, the Rev. H. R. Haweis, was a fashionable...

Here, she said later, she came to life under the influence of her tutor, Dorothy Bednarowska , who taught me to read on the nuance and complexity of Chaucer 's Troilus and Criseyde. This...

She was also taught, perhaps between schools, by her father. By the age of eleven she had devoured the poetry of the British Classics from Chaucer to Beattie , as well as Burns ,...

Thereafter, she taught herself, studying philosophy, Latin, German, Italian, French, political economy, and theology. She was very well read and took a particular interest in the writings of Caroline Norton , Felicia Hemans

As a young adult CC took on her own education. With varying degrees of success she studied grammar, elocution, French, and the violin. She also discovered the public library. Colleagues at work got her to...

Lady Charlotte received a standard home education. She soon found that she loved serious learning and set out to pursue it. Studying on her own, she discovered and devoured Chaucer (from whom as an old...

Julian of Norwich may have been a learned woman; but if so it is not clear who taught her. She seems to have had a reading knowledge of Latin, and to have known the work...

To educate herself further, she read widely, setting herself literary exercises, writing verse imitating or dramatising Chaucer , Spenser , and Browning . However, she writes that at that time, I had read no really...

After an immediate burial at St Anne's Church, Soho, Dryden was given a Westminster Abbey funeral and buried in the grave of Chaucer . Poets lamenting his death included the all-female contributors to The...