William Makepeace Thackeray

Kemble describes AP in this setting as looking already like a poet, with a preternaturally thoughtful, mournful expression for a little child. She had, however, a strong sense of herself and her opinions, as...

AP 's health was poor from an early age. A letter from William Thackeray describes her at the age of fourteen as vomiting basins of blood. She went to Italy for a year in 1853-54...

Here AP 's wide literary connections paid off handsomely. Contributors to The Victoria Regia included some of the most prominent names in literature of the day, mingled with less prominent writers who were also feminists:...

Felix Charlemont fights in the Napoleonic wars, and one battle scene verbally prefigures Thackeray 's account of Waterloo in Vanity Fair: The roar of artillery and musketry continued long after Charlemont fell; at length...

JP 's use of historical figures and her descriptions of the Kościuszko Uprising of 1794 made many readers suppose that the first volume especially was history, not fiction. A friend of the family felt sure...

Fifty years after its publication, Ann Taylor Gilbert still used The Scottish Chiefs as a measure of a book which had really absorbed her.Thackeray 's J. J. Ridley in The Newcomes,...

Joseph Parkes , Bessie's father, was a solicitor and a Unitarian of Radical sympathies. In 1833 he was secretary to a parliamentary commission on municipal reform, which recommended important changes in local government. At about...

The success of AO 's first novel introduced her to England's literary circles. She knew the BrowningRobert Browning s, the CarlyleThomas Carlyle s, the ThackerayWilliam Makepeace Thackeray s, Tennyson , and Swinburne . She also kept company with Mary Louisa Molesworth .

COCE headed her book with two lines from Thomas Campion : Alas, poor book . . . go spread thy papery wings. / Thy lightness cannot help or hurt my fame. She walks a...

But her reputation was such that even friendships were minefields: a friendly relationship with Thackeray exposed her firstly to a direct snub from his friend, or lover, Jane Brookfield (who refused to meet the notorious...

H. F. Chorley , reviewing for the Athenæum, considered this the most melancholy tale he could recall, and argued that it was not wholesome or an accurate depiction of nature to argue via fiction...

The review of Adam Bede is indeed most perceptive as well as detailed. AM begins by noticing how novels have been expanding their empire: how many have been added to their readership by the newer...

Responses to More's tracts, as to most of her work, reflected their deliberately controversial project. She was widely praised for them among her own class. Someone said she let the poor know that the rich...

SM was influenced by spiritualism, though she was often unsure whether to be amazed or amused. For news of the movement, she and her husband read the Tribune and the Albion from New York. John Moodie

LMM attended a one-room schoolhouse across the road from her grandparents' farmhouse, completing her time there in 1892. The following year, she went to the Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown for teacher training. Her...