John Milton

As a girl, Mary Eleanor Bowes received an excellent education and could speak several languages, reading French and Italian authors in the original. It was said that she did not learn Latin, but also that...

So keen was the child on her school-learned skills that she kept a piece of broken slate in her pocket for writing whenever she could manage it. She liked to copy out poetry, but...

Hester's father, James Ley , was a lawyer (in time a judge) who sat for many years as Member of Parliament for Westbury (under Queen Elizabeth, James I and Charles I). At the time of...

LHP 's elder sister Margaret (later, by marriage, Margaret Hobson ) had the distinction of being the recipient or dedicatee of Milton 's sonnet in praise of her father. Another sister, Dionysia, married the son...

The wedding was sumptuous and the bride's marriage portion was £6,000. It seems that after her wedding the bride, now My sister Brackley, was too young to be bedded, and so remained...

KP 's maternal grandfather, Daniel Oxenbridge , was a physician with an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Her uncle John Oxenbridge was a friend of Milton and Marvell .

One of these night-school students later emigrated to work for a business firm in the USA. Of all AK 's students, rich or poor, she was the one who loved learning most...

Siddons was also an author: she published The Story of Our First Parents, Selected from Paradise Lost: For the Use of Young Persons, 1822 (to make Milton accessible for her children), and left unpublished...

Margaretta married, against her father's wishes, a French Jacobin doctor; the marriage turned out unhappy. Besides her posthumous edition of her mother's works, she published a blank-verse tragedy, Belisarius, and poems including one on...

Nor was this AS 's only opportunity to marry. In 1742 she was approached with an ardent love-letter (likening her to Milton 's Eve as she first strikes love into the heart of Adam) by...

The most important friends of the young Anne MacVicar were Catalina Schuyler (whom she calls Madame, and with whom her first bond was a shared love of Milton ) and the little girl Catalina...

The title-page quotes Milton on the false dissembler (Satan). The story opens with Edmund Dudley, the lover and the poet, confiding to a married friend, Leopold Courtenay, his love for Althea, to whom he has...

Her non-religious poems show her a confident, versatile, accomplished writer. She casts a net of allusion widely—Milton , Gray , Edward Young . She imitates Pope on solitude, writes first of James Hervey 's...

The sonnets are written in strict Milton ic form. One of their favourite themes is love of nature and the countryside; one or two deal with Seward's love for Honora Sneyd . In rendering Horace...

HMB published, anonymously, a long poem entitled Creation, and Other Poems: To Which Are Added, the Bowers of Happiness, a Vision, and an Essay on Sacred Poetry, which she claimed to have written without...