John Milton

Her first school, where she went at the age of six, was a little private establishment called Leopold House, which gave a grounding in English and maths and team games. When Betty was eleven...

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 ,...

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Selected from Paradise Lost: For the Use of Young Persons, 1822 (to make Milton accessible for her children), and left unpublished...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...

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...

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 's Paradise Lost (There wanted yet the master-work); the preface quotes Samuel Johnson saying that the novelist needs to have first-hand experience of the living world, but that...

The first number, dated 1 December 1824, opens with The Editors to the Reader, in which Watts's three personae introduce themselves as sisters. They are very literary personifications, who possess, respectively, the actual spear...

The novel which emerged from so much interference during composition is naive, exaggerated, and badly structured, but highly unusual, with great intensity in its writing. Its title-page quotes Thomas Holcroft , and its epigraphs to...

The diary's first volume opens with a preface which expresses conventional modesty bluntly, without the customary effort at elegance or grace: Books generally begin with a Preface which draws in the Reader to go on...