Daniel Defoe

At a very young age, JR imagined that God was a book. She was so slow to read that her parents were concerned, but then suddenly found herself able to read even the longer words...

FB 's blindness meant that she did not have a formal education, and she very early felt the want of it. From the age of seven, when she heard a sermon she did not...

The child Ethel Richardson was a great reader. She identified with male fictional characters, and cherished three books which her father gave her almost on his death-bed: The Pilgrim's Progress by Bunyan , Robinson Crusoe...

On her own the child AW was always reading. At eight she identified in someone else's house a photograph of Booker T. Washington —and asked, Why don't you give it to me, please? After...

Writing by SJD suggests that some of her early reading included Sterne and Defoe . She also had access to Blackwood's and the Cornhill Magazine, and romantic novels by Mary Cecil Hay and Mary Jane Holmes .