Napoleon I, Emperor of France

A masquerade ball was held at Burlington House, Piccadilly, to celebrate the abdication of Napoleon and his confinement on the island of Elba: this was HW 's last grand public appearance.

Anne Thackeray witnessed as a small child the second funeral of Napoleon in Paris. Her memories of this event were published in Chapters from Some Memoirs, 1894.

In her youth Jane Welsh composed verse translations from texts by Goethe and Pierre Cardenal , and of Chateaubriand 's Atala. She also wrote a number of original short poems; two of those that...

In prose the opening tale, Julia de Clifford, presents a well-meaning but thoughtless and impulsive heroine who progresses from dressing up as a ghost to scare the servants, to plunging her lover into despair...

One of the last names she drops is that of Madame du Beauharnais , later Josephine Bonaparte, whom she represents as genuinely attached to her first husband (though neither of the pair were faithful).

Here they met the Italian romantic poet Ugo Foscolo , who had come to France to join Napoleon 's army and had been put in charge of the detained Britons.

PJ 's father was George Henry Martin Johnson , Onwanonsyshon, a Mohawk chief. He was at one time an interpreter for the Anglican church. He had a life-long interest in Napoleon and decided to name...

Patrick Brontë was an Irish protestant from a large, respectable farming family of limited means. He took to books from an early age, opened a school for the gentry at the age of sixteen, became...

CM writes in her unpublished autobiography about the eleven siblings of her father, Francis Julian Mackworth . His family were Welsh coal-owners of the more liberal persuasion. He was killed while serving as an...

It is hard to gauge the degree of Beckford's hostility towards his sister years after he published these novels. On 4 May 1817 he wrote with studied restraint that he did not think her insincere....

In her earliest years in Paris she was the mistress first of the comte d'Artois (who much later reigned as Charles X ) and then of the duc de Chartres (later duc d'Orléans , later...

The title-page quotes Shakespeare 's Richard II about the deposing of a king. The novel opens with precision: at five o'clock on 22 June 1791, with aristocrats fearful for their fate in the aftermath of...