William Shakespeare

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...

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...

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...

BB 's education (disrupted by the second war) included attending a state school (coeducational) and private schools both boys', girls', and mixed-sex. She was intellectually precocious at every stage. As a little girl at the...

Her devotion to John Bunyan 's Pilgrim's Progress remained unchanged during this period. She also read heavyweight works of theology, Hannah More 's letters, and a life of William Wilberforce . By late 1838, however...

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...

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...

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...

ESVM said her mothergave me poetry. In her mother's Shakespeare she encountered the passage in Romeo and Juliet about Death seeking Juliet as his paramour, and she later hyperbolically described the encounter: how...

She loved reading and was passionately devouring Shakespeare by the age of six. She found it easy to remember poetry, and won a wager by committing Reginald Heber 's Europe, a poem of over...

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...

In India, RG later wrote, it was thought there were five things a girl needed to know if she were to take her place in any sort of society: to dance, to play the...

Her education under her next governess, Squidge (an Austrian called Miss Fraulein by everyone but Cynthia), was a quite different matter: Beauman writes that Squidge had a heart but no mind. Nevertheless, by sixteen Cynthia...