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

Mary Somerville

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Eminent Scottish mathematician and scientist MS was best known as the author of four popular expository texts on science: Mechanism of the Heavens (1831), On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834), Physical Geography (1848)...
Mary Somerville Image from head-and-shoulders chalk drawing of Mary Somerville by James Rannie Swinton, 1848. She looks down, away from the viewer, wearing a white scarf and white ruffled cap, her dark smooth hair parted in the middle and pulled back. This was engraved as frontispiece to her "Physical Geography", vol. i, 1848.

Joanna Southcott

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JS , charismatic religious leader, produced sixty-five or more printed tracts (amounting to 4,500 pages) and many works in manuscript during the first thirteen years of the nineteenth century. These, she maintained, were dictated to...
Joanna Southcott Black and white photograph of a portrait of Joanna Southcott by William Sharp, done by 1812. She is seen in a frame, seated, dressed all in white with a hat and a simple dress with high neckline and long sleeves. Her hair is dark and curly. She has a stack of books on her lap, a massive one open on top. National Portrait Gallery.

Robert Southey

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Robert Southey was a Romantic poet, one of the Lake Poets with Wordsworth and Coleridge . In addition to epics, ballads, and other verse, he penned several plays and contributed regularly to the ToryQuarterly...
Robert Southey Oil painting of Robert Southey from the waist up. He is wearing a black jacket and a white shirt underneath, and he is looking slightly toward the left.

Anne Lady Southwell

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ALS , who lived in the later-sixteenth and earlier-seventeenth centuries in England and in Protestant, colonial Ireland, left a commonplace-book containing a collection of her own remarkable poems as well as a few letters...

Githa Sowerby

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Githa Sowerby's first full-length play, Rutherford and Son, was received in 1912 as a work of major importance. After this initial success, however, she produced only a handful of plays, only one more of...
Githa Sowerby Photograph of a round blue plaque dedicated to Githa Sowerby by Gateshead Metropolitan Borough Council, set in a grey stone wall. The council's name appears at the top, followed by: Katherine Githa Sowerby (1876-1970). Playwright, poet, children's author and member of the noted Sowerby glass family. In her early years she lived near here at Ravenshill." At the bottom the plaque is dated 2009.

Muriel Spark

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The publishing career of MS spanned the later twentieth century, extending beyond each end of that fifty-year period. She began writing as a poet, and went on to short fiction, literary criticism, biography, journalism, and...
Muriel Spark Black-and-white photo of Muriel Spark, 1965. Sitting at a desk, she looks directly at the camera, leaning on her papers with a cigarette in her left hand and a pencil in her mouth.

Rachel Speght

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RS stands out among authors of polemic answers to Joseph Swetnam's offensive misogynist pamphlet of 1615. Her editor Barbara Kiefer Lewalski observes that she is the first Englishwoman to identify herself solidly by name (granted...

Elizabeth Isabella Spence

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EIS began publishing just before the end of the eighteenth century and continued for twenty-five years. She issued novels, shorter fiction, and travel books, the latter put together from letters sent to friends in the...
Elizabeth Isabella Spence Engraving of Elizabeth Isabella Spence, from from "La Belle Assemblée", No. 185. She is seated, seen from the shoulders up, facing the viewer with a slight smile. She wears a dark, high-waisted dress with short sleeves and two layers of white linen at the neck, with a light shawl wrapped around her. Her curly hair spills out from her high, puffed, flower-bedecked bonnet. A book or sheaf of papers, and a quill and inkwell, are visible on a desk behind her.

Emily Spender

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ES , writing in the later nineteenth and the early twentieth century, published half a dozen novels which combine romance with, in some cases, a thesis about politics or gender politics. Her rate of output...

Jane Squire

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JS published in 1742 her single text, a scientific or crypto-scientific treatise explaining her proposed method of ascertaining longitude. She may not have solved this scientific enigma, but she is remarkable as a female mathematician...

Christopher St John

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Writing from the beginning of the twentieth century, CSJ produced novels, biography, and love-journals, as well as her work for the stage, for which she wrote translations, adaptations, and original plays. She is best...

Germaine de Staël

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GS is remembered primarily for her political activism and the salons she established following the French Revolution; history, politics, and culture were certainly among her frequent literary subjects. The same interests inform her highly successful...
Germaine de Staël Photograph of the painting of Germaine de Staël by Baron Gérard. Godefroid, 1810. She stands leaning against a stone table. She is wearing a red high-waisted dress with short puff sleeves and a small cameo brooch pinned in the centre of the bust, a black shawl folded over her arm, and a striking red and white turban on her curly hair. She holds a small sprig of green in one hand.

Freya Stark

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Famous as a twentieth-century explorer and traveller, FS was also a prominent travel-writer, essayist, autobiographer, letter-writer, geographic historian, photo journalist, and cartographer. Reprints of Stark's texts, along with recent biographies by Molly Izzard (1993) and...
Freya Stark Photograph of a head-and-shoulders painting of Freya Stark by Herbert Arnould Olivier, 1923. She sits in front of a wooden cabinet, with many drawers and an inset mirror, her arm resting on its shelf. She is wearing a simple black tunic over a sheer white blouse, and she has jaw-length brown hair tied with a black ribbon. National Portrait Gallery.

Mariana Starke

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MS had several distinct authorial careers. She is best known as a late eighteenth-century dramatist writing about colonial India, and as an early nineteenth-century travel-writer producing practical guides to Europe. Her career as...

Christina Stead

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Over a period of fifty years in the twentieth century, Australian-born CS published a short-story volume (many more stories were posthumously collected), eleven novels (one also posthumous), three translations, and a volume of novellas. Her...
Christina Stead Photograph of a gold-coloured memorial plaque to Christina Stead in the Writers Walk, Sydney (near the Opera House), created in 1991 by the New South Wales Ministry for the Arts. The plaque is set against a grey brick wall, and headed with Stead's name and dates. Below, reading downwards, come a circular emblem of the NSW state flower, telopea speciosissima, a quotation from her "Seven Poor Men of Sydney", a brief summary of her works with special mention of "The Man Who Loved Children", an encircled cross,

Flora Annie Steel

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Publishing from the 1880s through the first three decades of the twentieth century, FAS produced some thirty books. Most of her novels describe contemporary Anglo-Indian life, though some are set in Britain (seldom in England)...
Flora Annie Steel Black and white, head-and-shoulders photograph of Flora Annie Steel looking straight at the viewer. She is wearing a light dress with little visible below the neckline, and a necklace with two stones in its centre. Her probably grey hair is brushed back.

Anna Steele

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Writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, Anna Steele worked in a variety of genres, including poetry, drama, the short story, translation, and musical composition. Her six novels straddle the modes of sensationalism...

Anne Steele

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AS 's eighteenth-century poetry, hymns, and meditations, widely admired in their day, have had their distinctive qualities overlooked or obscured by mainstream critics, perhaps partly because of her Particular Baptist faith. Her co-religionists, meanwhile, have...