Daniel Defoe

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...

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 .

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...

Mary Anne's education consisted largely of the cosmopolitan polishing of the colonial ruling class; she felt later that she had had to manage her own learning without being taught. Her favourite book was Defoe 's...

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...

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...

SW 's father, the Rev. Samuel Annesley (1620-96), was an eminent as well as a philoprogenitive London dissenter. During the interregnum he had been a presbyterian chaplain in the parliamentary navy. He then became rector...

The bigamy scandal generated twenty-six topical publications. It provoked such works as a play by either Thomas Parker or John Holden , 1664. Later MC 's death by hanging made her an ideal subject for...

Robinson is the name both of the island and of one of its two long-term occupants, a recluse who has bought the island and exiled himself there out of disillusionment with human society. Behind this...

Her poem played its part in the establishment of Bath as a resort which was respected and fashionable, on both medical and cultural grounds. When James Leake published a revised edition of A Tour of...

In a preface CC says she found the incident that forms the centre of this novel in The Christian Life by Dr John Scott (that is The Christian Life, from its beginning to its consummation...

Writing to Mary Russell Mitford of her hope that they might meet, HM acknowledged the influence which the spirit of your writings has had over me. Her reading included Shakespeare , Smollett ...

These gripping stories do not feature Albert Campion. Each is set in a small rural community where a culture of voracious gossip threatens the reputation and happiness of somewhat unconventional young women. In each the...

In this report FN explains how formerly nurses were women who were too old, too weak, too drunken, too dirty, too stolid, or too bad to do anything else. While she recommends introducing...

In this book Richardson's heroine Miriam, now eighteen years old, has returned from Germany and is a resident teacher at Wordsworth House, a school in fictional Banbury Park, North London, run by the Perne...