William Shakespeare

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...

MEC was educated at home. She read widely during her childhood, including works by Shakespeare and Malory . She studied poetry, history and drawing. Saturday afternoons were spent with friends, acting scenes from Scott 's...

FR denied that she knew Latin, yet she used Latin tags in her letters. As an adult she worked persistently at self-education. Her commonplace-book contains her reading notes on Plato , Aristotle , Pliny ,...

CS 's father would have liked to have her education entirely in his own hands. The first books to be her favourites were the works of W. T. Stead , and fairy stories by the...

Mr Kung despised fiction and the Sydenstricker library contained only the supposedly factual Plutarch 's Lives and Foxe 's Book of Martyrs, but Pearl read fiction avidly in both Chinese and English, devouring Shakespeare

JM adored drama: by the age of eight she was eagerly reciting Shakespeare . She was taught Latin and the rudiments of Greek by her father . She also attended French classes with Mr Roche .

MA was a fluent reader and writer by the time she was seven years old. She then attended various schools, except for a period of learning at home with a governess after she had...

With her sister, CS began her education at home with her mother as teacher. She read Shakespeare at four years old, and later learned the violin. She and Ida were concert-goers from an early age...

In her early childhood, she read Andrew Lang 's fairy tales, and particularly his Brown Fairy Book (1904). She learned history from the plays of Shakespeare , with which she became familiar in her many...

HM had discovered Shakespeare at ten years old, and since nobody told her he was difficult she found him a pure pleasure to read. In summer 1968, aged sixteen, she spent three days in Stratford...

Taught by governesses until she was thirteen, Margaret Haig Thomas learned to read at about five. She was taught German and French, and she also learned Welsh as a child but did not retain it...

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...

Attending a secondary modern school (for those children not selected for grammar school) in Essex, on the north-east borders of London, she hated school and made a habit of sitting at the back...

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...