Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy

Though FTJ did not receive much formal education, she read voraciously. Important discoveries were theBrontësisters , Jane Austen , and Constance Garnett 's translations of Tolstoy .

She read voraciously, preferring writers with the geographical rootedness which she herself lacked: George Eliot , Thomas Hardy , Charles Dickens , and from beyond the English tradition Marcel Proust , James Joyce , Henry James

It was, she said later, through reading that I passed from childhood to adulthood, first through a chance encounter with Eliot 's Adam Bede (and that was the end of the school stories)...

ZS went to Malorees Junior School and then to Hampstead Comprehensive . She was a shy, quiet girl and an overweight, anti-social adolescent, who used reading as an escape and refuge. She also loved...

Before attending school and after she left, Doris educated herself by reading. Her parents possessed copies of the classics, like Scott , Dickens , and Kipling . She read widely in the nineteenth century—her favourites...

MEC had a complicated relationship with her poor and working-class students. Although reading Tolstoy inspired her charitable acts, the idea of freely mixing with the lower classes repelled her. She eventually settled on the controlled...