William Shakespeare

Eva read the usual children's books, but the great discovery was her first Shakespeare play, As You Like It. She received this as a present on her ninth birthday and built an imaginative life...

HSW 's family encouraged her in the regular pursuits of a young, middle-class Victorian woman. From her father she inherited an enthusiasm for poetry—she especially liked Shakespeare , Coleridge , and Whitman —and she read...

She must have been well educated. She has a good grasp of history and politics, and of canonical English fiction from Richardson to her own most respected immediate female predecessors. She took a wry interest...

JJ studied English at Trinity College, Dublin . She had trouble getting in, and once she was there she became disillusioned with what was on offer—just sitting in a class of an enormous size, listening...

Looking back on her early education, MC wrote I managed to develop into a curiously determined independent little personality, with ideas and opinions more suited to some clever young man. . . . I instinctively...

In India, RG later wrote, it was thought there were five things a girl needed to know if she were to take her place in any sort of society: to dance, to play the...

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...

In later years she expanded her reading to include Shakespeare , Southey , Scott , Wordsworth , and Tennyson . She also read Henry Drummond 's Natural Law in the Spiritual World and hisTropical Africa and Charles Lamb 's Letters.

Lady Florence was at first educated at home in Scotland. After a first, unsuccessful attempt to place her in a convent she had, in France, an Irish Catholic governess whom she calls Miss O'Leary...

Whether or not TT 's education was Puritanical (most sources about her life have no higher status than gossip) she was well read in the emergent canon of English literature, from Shakespeare and Milton through...

ESVM said her mothergave me poetry. In her mother's Shakespeare she encountered the passage in Romeo and Juliet about Death seeking Juliet as his paramour, and she later hyperbolically described the encounter: how...

She loved reading and was passionately devouring Shakespeare by the age of six. She found it easy to remember poetry, and won a wager by committing Reginald Heber 's Europe, a poem of over...

JR attended the local Catholic convent school where whites were in the minority. Most of the girls were coloured (of mixed blood). Mother Mount Calvary, the Superior of the convent, gave her extra instruction in...

Grandmother Brudend and a paternal aunt educated Eliza with poetry and stories. The letters of Elizabeth Singer Rowe were important in her reading. It was said, however, that her grandmother over-encouraged her in precocious display...

Mary Howitt , a friend of the Smith family, wrote approvingly of Benjamin Leigh Smith's unorthodox methods of childrearing: Objecting to schools he keeps his children at home, and their knowledge is gained by reading...