Author profiles

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y

Anne-Thérèse de Lambert

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ATL is remembered both for the Paris salon which she ran during the early decades of the eighteenth century, which was highly influential for French literature and culture, and for her writings. These include advice-writings...
Anne-Thérèse de Lambert Photograph of a reversed engraving of Anne-Thérèse de Lambert, taken from a painting by Nicolas de Largillierre, c. 1710. She is shown from the waist up wearing (in the original) a blue velvet cloak over a gold-coloured bodice and white chemise, pinned at the front with a brooch. Her hair is powdered and frizzed in a high hair-style. The engraving contains the portrait in an oval frame with a scroll beneath, the whole apparently standing on a plinth. The scroll is engraved with her name and the salient fa

Aemilia Lanyer

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AL is an important poet, technically sophisticated and powerfully expressive. Her single known work is a composite volume dated 1611, which handles religious narrative (expanded from the gospel story), theological and feminist argument, natural description...
Aemilia Lanyer Photograph of a miniature painting of Aemilia Lanyer by Nicholas Hilliard, shown from the shoulders up, wearing a white gown with gold and black lacing, white and black beaded necklaces, and a broad lace ruff that fills most of the oval portrait. Her dark curly hair is pulled back by a low crown of white and black beads and gold.

Philip Larkin

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PL is now widely regarded as one of the leading English poets of the later twentieth century. His output was small and his chosen form is brief, tightly structured, rhyming and self-contained, using a demotic...
Philip Larkin Statue of Philip Larkin by Martin Jennings at Hull Paragon railway station in Yorkshire, unveiled 2 December 2010. Larkin is mid stride, holding a book under one arm and a hat in his other hand.

Anna Margaretta Larpent

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AML wrote a diary from the age of fifteen, which extended to span fifty years of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She became a commentator on every kind of social and cultural activity...
Anna Margaretta Larpent Photograph of a painting of Anna Margaretta Larpent by Sir Martin Archer Shee. Larpent is seated in a red upholstered chair, with stacked books in the background. She is wearing a gauzy white dress with a blue sash around the waist. She has a wide halo of curly hair with a blue band tied around it.

Marghanita Laski

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ML , a cultural force in twentieth-century Britain, published six novels, four biographies (one on multiple subjects), an anti-nuclear play, a collection of children's stories, three quasi-scientific investigations into secular and religious experiences, and various...
Marghanita Laski Black-and-white photo of Marghanita Laski. She is wearing a tassled cap and is draped in striped fabric. Therer is a small gecko brooch on her left that sits between her fingers.

Mary Latter

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ML , a mid-eighteenth-century woman living in the provinces, made no secret of writing for money. She is obsessive and wordy in style, interesting mainly for her dogged and persistent struggle to succeed. Her characteristic...

Margaret Laurence

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ML was a mid-twentieth-century Canadian who began to publish while resident in Africa, putting her gift at the service of preserving oral folk literature through translation and adaptation. Already a journalist, she next turned...
Margaret Laurence Black-and-white portrait photo of Margaret Laurence. She is wearing thick, dark rimmed glasses and has short hair.

Bryony Lavery

In a career spanning nearly forty years of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, the highly prolific BL has seen over sixty of her plays and other entertainments staged, mostly in London. She has...

Mary Lavin

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ML , an Irishwoman with US experience publishing in the mid and later twentieth century, is primarily known as a writer of short stories (nineteen collections published). She also produced some poetry (early), two novels...
Mary Lavin Black and white, three-quarter-length photograph of Mary Lavin, standing with drapery behind her, seen slightly from below. Her hair is short and rough; she wears a short-sleeved, striped dress with bows on the shoulders and fabric roses over the bust.

William Law

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Emily Lawless

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EL published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries across a wide range of forms: the novel, history, fictional autobiography, short story, poetry, and critical biography. Remembered primarily for her work on Irish themes...

D. H. Lawrence

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DHL published prolifically between 1909 and his death in 1930: poetry, novels, short stories, travel literature, and social comment. He was always a controversialist, fighting against the machanizing, dehumanizing, desexualizing tendencies of modern life, and...
D. H. Lawrence D. H. Lawrence, passport photograph (therefore straight-on head and shoulders), 24 February 1929. He is unsmiling, and his jacket, tie, beard and moustache are conspicuously neat.

Margery Lawrence

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A twentieth-century writer of popular fiction, ML published nearly thirty novels in a wide range of genres, including adventure-romance and novels of the supernatural. The generic boundaries of her novels are fluid, and many verge...

Ursula K. Le Guin

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American author of more than twenty novels (some intended for young adults), a dozen volumes of poetry, many collections of stories and essays, thirteen children's books, five translations, and a how-to book about writing. UKLG
Ursula K. Le Guin Colour photo of Ursula K. Le Guin, standing in a bookshop, apparently reading from papers in her hand, resting the other hand on a table. She has short grey hair and wire-rimmed glasses, and is wearing black pants, a white shirt, and a black vest.

Alice Dixon Le Plongeon

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Alice Dixon Le Plongeon was a writer, lecturer, photographer, and amateur archaeologist working from the 1870s. Her writings include field notes, a travel diary, a book of articles, two epic poems, several smaller poems and...
Alice Dixon Le Plongeon Black and white photograph of Alice Dixon Le Plongeon, seated, holding a caliper compass against a large piece of paper or fabric. She is wearing a long dress, decorated with buttons and ruffles, and tied with a bow at the neckline. Her hair is partially pulled back and partially left down in dark curls.

Jane Lead

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JL was a seventeenth-century mystic and visionary, a diarist, and a pamphleteer. All her literary roles were aspects of her dominant calling, that of religious leader and Heavenly Spy. Her later works used the...

Mary Leadbeater

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ML 's name is identified with that of the Quaker village of Ballitore in County Kildare, whose cultural historian she was throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Though this Irish author wrote...

Caroline Leakey

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CL is best known for her only novel, The Broad Arrow, which is based on observations made during her five-year residence in Tasmania. Her critique of the Australian penal system features a strong...

Mary Leapor

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The poetry of the labouring-class ML (who died before she was thirty) remakes standard Augustan conventions from an outsider's point of view. This poetry would be important for its sheer literary quality even apart from...
Mary Leapor Title-page of Mary Leapor's "Poems upon Several Occasions", posthumously published by subscription in 1748. A second volume followed in 1751.

Q. D. Leavis

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In her socio-anthropologicalcritical monographs and essays, QDL evaluates literature by examining it in the context of the culture from which it emerges. She focuses on intellectual, social, and moral elements of literary work, and...