Amy Levy was one of seven children born to a wealthy Anglo-Jewish family. She was in many ways a pioneering woman, becoming the first Jewish woman ever to study at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1879. She had a wide circle…

Robert Bridges was a trained doctor working in London hospitals until 1882, a classicist and poet who served as Poet Laureate from 1913 until his death in 1930. Educated at Eton and Corpus Christi college, Bridges edited and published the…

Intellectually gifted Mary Coleridge was the great-grand-niece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Her parents were impressively well connected to writers and musicians in the London of the last half of the nineteenth century. Mary met weekly with friends in the late…

Chesterton is probably best known for his popular priest-detective Father Brown, who appeared in over fifty short stories. However, he was also a poet, biographer, essayist, dramatist, critic, journalist, advocate of a political movement called ‘Distributism’ and, after his conversion…

Adelaide Anne Proctor’s father was a poet, and her mother actively encouraged her daughter’s interest in poetry. She submitted her early work to Charles Dickens’s publication Household Words under the pseudonym Miss Berwick. When Dickens became aware that Miss Berwick…

Edith Nesbit was a prolific author of over forty books for children, including the enduringly popular The Railway Children. Her lifestyle, especially for a middle-class Victorian woman, was highly unconventional. A committed socialist and a significant figure within the Fabian…

Charlotte Mew was surrounded by mental ill health and death from a young age. Three brothers died while she was still a child and two other siblings were committed to mental institutions. She vowed never to marry, fearful of the…

Aphra Behn was the first female writer to make her living through her art; she was a significant seventeenth-century dramatist,The Rover being one of her best-known plays. Little is known of her early life, but we do know that she…

Anne Finch was an aristocrat acquainted with the most famous poet of the age, Alexander Pope. However, during her lifetime, her poetry was little known and would have remained obscure had not William Wordsworth praised it, particularly her depictions of nature, in an essay…

Born in Ireland in 1667, Swift spent much of his adult life in England. He was actively involved in politics, and in his self-penned epitaph describes himself as a ‘champion of liberty’. He was a prolific writer of prose satire…

In spite of needing to earn a living as a kitchen maid and her death from measles at the age of twenty-four, Mary Leapor left behind a substantial body of work. Her poetry has increasingly come to be seen as…

Christopher Smart was born in 1722 and is best remembered for his religious poems A Song to David and Jubilate Agno, both of which were written during his time at St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, London. He believed that God…

Samuel Johnson is a towering figure in the history of English literature, to the extent that the second half of the eighteenth century has sometimes been described as ‘the age of Johnson’. He was a poet, journalist, lexicographer, critic, essayist,…

Hannah More’s poem was written in support of William Wilberforce’s campaign to abolish slavery. A passionate, poetic explanation of the anti-abolitionists’ argument, this extract is part of a 294 line poem. ‘Oroonoko’, in the fourth line of this extract, is…

Robert Southey was an independently minded young man who was expelled from Westminster School for opposing flogging. He developed radical religious and political ideas and, at one stage, considered emigrating to America with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge to set…

Mary Robinson was a gifted musician, champion of the rights of women, novelist, poet and actress. She was born in Bristol to a wealthy family and received a good education, but her marriage to the thoroughly unreliable Thomas Robinson unravelled…

Felicia Hemans’s ‘Casabianca’ took on such a vibrant life of its own after her death that, somehow, its author became almost irrelevant. In fact, Hemans was an accomplished and prolific poet who wrote over twenty volumes of verse before her…

Clough suffered from periods of religious doubt throughout his life. His inability to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, which detailed the beliefs of the Church of England, meant that he felt compelled to leave his position as a Fellow at…