Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy

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...

PH went to various schools. She was removed from her first NewYork public school because her grandmother objected to her making friends with black children. Then came a small and select private school which she...

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...

In 1891 Edward Garnett brought home with him a Russian political exile, Felix Volkhovsky , who encouraged CG , then pregnant, to learn Russian. As a result of this friendship, she and Edward became acquainted...

This sets out to explore the effects of various technological media on the novel genre. It begins with the apparent forcible entry into a story by Jane Austen of a great German contemporary of Austen:...

It was later, when she began on a story about one of her Athenry aunts, when all of a sudden I knew that I had a facile gift. She then discovered for the first time...

OS 's belated preface explains her anti-realist method, directed against the influence of Zola and Tolstoy , whose predictability she disliked. Here nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange coming and going of feet...

Sometimes ET sets out to shock the reader, as when she remarks that Pilate is her favourite biblical character: the model of a detached, fair, and judicious colonial governor. Sometimes she writes persuasively, as...

Martha comes to see her marriage as repeating a terrible mistake already made by her mother: she is horribly metamorphosed, entirely dependent on her children for any interest in life, resented by them, and resenting...

Lessing spoke here of visiting a four-room school in Zimbabwe, looking out on miles of charred stumps which she remembered as having been long ago the most wonderful forest I have ever seen. It...

Most of the stories concern love, and some make creative use of the lives or works of other authors, like Tolstoy and Daphne Du Maurier . In The Closing DoorRT created a character who...