William Makepeace Thackeray

MRM 's letters regularly indulge in analysis of books. She comments on works by both men and women, in English and French, and her opinions shift a good deal with age. She reacted with horror...

In the summer of 1852 Elizabeth and Alice Thompson (later AM ) began their education under their father's instruction. Recording her daughters' lessons, Christiana Thompson writes, Dear little angels do their writing . ....

Stoney's first wife had died in early 1775, after alleged beatings and starvation, leaving him everything she owned (like her successor's, it was colliery money). The wedding between Stoney and the Countess of...

Stoney (henceforward Bowes) was described by a close friend as considering all females as natural game. He set out from the wedding onwards to assert his power: among other things he refused to let...

At a very early age Emma Martin could recite See'st thou my home is where yon woods are waving by Felicia Hemans . After leaving school she continued to study music with Dr Zacariah or Zechariah Buck

Harriet Martineau was amazed when AM first read her one of these tales, The Admiral's Daughter, and felt that their hostess later that evening (Sarah Wedgwood ) must have been almost equally amazed...

But the context is still the fashionable jungle. Mr Perry can conceive of no higher glory than wealth and social success, and is ruthless in pursuit of these for his daughter and thus himself. Fat...

Two things about this novel gave offence initially and had a long-term effect on its reputation: its treating the nasty topic of deformity, and its involving the hero emotionally with three women (his mother as...

Most of the letters here are addressed to CL 's mother, her editor-sister, and two close friends who were also relations, her aunt Theresa Earle and her cousin Adela Smith . Hating the round...

As well as horticultural and artistic friends and associates, JL and her husband had literary friends, who included Robert Chambers and his wife Anne , Elizabeth Gaskell , Mary Howitt , Julia Kavanagh , Charles Dickens

ELL 's My Literary Life appeared posthumously, edited by Beatrice Harraden : titled thus on the title-page and spine, it is in the half-title and elsewhere called Reminiscences of Dickens , Thackeray , George Eliot

Through the theological writer Dr Robert Herbert Brabant (an early admirer of George Eliot), Lynn at this time met Walter Savage Landor , whom she had long admired, and with whom she became close friends...

She was said to have moved there as a result of her quarrel with the editor of the Morning Chronicle. She shared a two-room apartment up five flights of stairs with a young Anglo-French...

Her one-paragraph preface says these pieces were written long since,in the days of crinoline,croquet, and the violent purples of the then new aniline dyes.

The merits of annuals in general were debated, and with some their contents became a byword for poor literary quality. Thus although Christian Isobel Johnstone considered LEL's Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book for 1836 to...