American poet and novelist, born in Guthrie, Kentucky, educated at Vanderbilt University, where he was a student of John Crowe Ransom's, the University of California, and Oxford University. After holding a succession of posts at American universities, he became Professor of English at Yale in 1962. His metaphorically elaborate early verse in Thirty Six Poems (1936) and Eleven Poems on the Same The…
Large town to the E of Liverpool. Born in Bury (to the NE), Richmal Crompton (author of Just William (1922) and its multiple sequels) studied here at St Elphin's Clergy Daughters? School, before moving to Darley Dale in Derbyshire. In 1915 she would return to the school to spend two years as a teacher. Anthony Burgess was posted to the military hospital at Winwick near Warrington during the Second…
Warshawski, who insists on using her initials to avoid being patronized, has left behind the Chicago public defender's office, a brief marriage, and her initial na?vet? to take on the culturally privileged social institutions whose power and authority are used to protect the guilty. Challenging the insurance industry and labor unions in Indemnity Only, the Catholic Church and organized crime in Ki…
This novel brought Timothy Findley to prominence in Canadian literary circles, though he had published his first novel a full decade before. His third novel, it won a Governor General's Award and became a film (directed by Robin Phillips, 1983); its popularity continues unabated today, and it is regularly taught in literature courses. The wars expresses a general trend in Canadian fiction of the 1…
Poet Laureate and literary historian: educ. Oxford (Trinity College); Fellow at Oxford1751?90; rector of Kiddington1771?90. The Pleasures of Melancholy 1747, The Triumphs of Isis 1749, The Union (ed.) 1753, Observations on the Faerie Queene of Spenser 1754, A Companion to the Guide 1760, The Oxford Sausage (ed.) 1764 , History of Kiddington 1783 , ?Verses on Sir Joshua Reynold's Painted Window at …
Ancient county town on the A41, 11 m. S of Coventry, home of Guy of Warwick, a legendary knight of giant size, who became a hermit. Guy of Warwick is a verse romance of the early 14th c. about his exploits in the Holy Land and against the giant Colbrand, the monstrous dun cow, and the winged dragon. He is commemorated at Guy's Cliffe (1? m. N) by a 15th‐c. chantry erected by Richard de Beauchamp…
African-American leader and writer, born in Hale's Ford, Franklin County, Virginia, educated at Hampton Institute, Virginia, and Wayland Seminary, Washington, DC. Washington was born on a Virginia plantation, the son of a slave woman and an unidentified white slave-owner; in his autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), he recalls in the first chapter the years of his childhood and, in particular, th…
In order to avoid the possibility of corruption, the law courts of Athens enlist the services of a jury of 500 men. Philocleon (?=??lover of Cleon?) has become so flattered by the power that this has granted him that he has become addicted to jury service. His son Bdelycleon (?=??hater of Cleon?) has imprisoned him in his own house to try to cure him of his judging obsession. The chorus of fellow …
American playwright, born and raised in New York City, educated at the City College of New York, and Yale School of Drama. During the late 1970s and 1980s Wasserstein produced her plays in off- and off-off-Broadway venues. Her early work, in which she experimented with chronology, language, and form, showed her at her most innovative. Uncommon Women and Others (1975) is a compelling work about a r…
T. S. Eliot's most celebrated work, first published in the Criterion in 1922; later that year an edition was produced in New York, to which notes were added to clarify allusions to or quotations from the works of some thirty-five authors, among them Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Marvell, and Baudelaire. The notes indicate the importance to Eliot's conception of J. L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance (1…
novelist and journalist: b. Leeds. Billy Liar 1959 , Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell 1989 . …
British novelist, playwright, and journalist, born in Leeds, educated at Osmondthorpe Council School. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Air Force. A prolific and seemingly effortless craftsman, mordant farce is his m?tier. His first novel, There Is a Happy Land (1957), typifies his irreverent response to life; a boy plays at being blind, drunk, or maimed, mimics all elders, and de…
Village on the A26, 5 m. SW of Maidstone. In 1931 George Orwell, who had been sleeping in London doss‐houses to share the lives of down‐and‐outs, set off with two tramps to find work in the hop fields. He describes his 18 days at Home Farm here, where they lodged on straw in a barn, in the essay ?Hop Picking?, and used his experience in the novel A Clergyman's Daughter (1935). …
British poet, born in London, educated at Leicester and Oxford Universities. His collections of poems include The Living Room (1974), From the Other Country (1977), Over the Wall (1980), Out for the Elements (1981), Selected Poems (1986), and In the Planetarium (1990). The long title poem of Out for the Elements has been regarded as his finest single work; Waterman succeeds in making this imaginat…
novelist. Affinity 1999 , Fingersmith 2002 , The Night Watch 2006 . …
See History of Crime and Mystery Writing: Formation of the Genre. …
naturalist and author: b. Wakefield; educ. Whalley (Stonyhurst College); d. Wakefield. Wanderings in South America 1825 . …
poet and lecturer: educ. Swansea, Repton, and Cambridge (Magdalene College) 1924?5; lecturer in Swansea; lives in Pennard Cliffs nr Swansea1931?41, 1946?67. Ballad of the Mari Lwyd and Other Poems 1941, The Lamp and the Veil 1945, The Lady with the Unicorn 1948, The Death Bell 1954, Letters to Vernon Watkins by Dylan Thomas (ed.) 1957 . …
, was born in Maesteg in Wales and educated at Repton and at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was a contemporary of William Empson and Kathleen …
Welsh poet, born in Maesteg, Glamorgan, educated at Repton School. He left Cambridge after one year at Magdalene College and worked at a bank in Cardiff until he underwent a severe breakdown. He described this interlude as a ?revolution of sensibility? and determined to devote himself as a poet to ?the conquest of time?. From this intention stems the cohesiveness of his ?uvre as a sustained celebr…
Market town in the Chilterns, between Reading and Oxford. In the Vale of Oxford, near Watlington, just off the Ridgeway Path, a hot‐air balloon comes free of its moorings, precipitating some unexpected and rather alarming consequences, in Ian McEwan's novel Enduring Love (1997). …
Born in Epping Forest, near London, England, Watmough spent most of his childhood in Cornwall, where he learned the idiosyncratic rhythm of his prose. Forced by the Depression to leave his boyhood home, he has forever after employed the voice of the exile in stories that describe the outsider looking homeward, back to the disintegrating family and now unfamiliar landscape. He was educated at Coope…
Canadian novelist, born in London, educated at King's College, University of London. He grew up on a farm in Cornwall, leaving Britain in the late 1940s for Paris, New York, San Francisco, and finally Vancouver. He writes that his ?persistent literary impulse probably derives from a Cornish/Celtic youthful pre-occupation with familial unity, plus the further impetus coming from a sexually marginal…
novelist and short‐story writer: pastor in Logiealmond1875?7. Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush 1894 , St. Jude's 1907 . …
poet and translator: buried in London (Smithfield: St Bartholomew‐the‐Less). Tasso's Aminta (trans.) 1585, The Tears of Fancie 1593 . …
Born in Glasgow, Scotland, and educated at Glasgow University, he came to Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, in 1872 to be a professor of logic, metaphysics, and ethics, replacing John Clark Murray, who had accepted a chair at McGill. Watson was the central figure in the Hegelian movement that dominated Canadian philosophy from the 1870s until after the First World War, and did much to shape r…
Born in New Westminster, British Columbia, she lived during her early years on the grounds of the Provincial Mental Hospital, in New Westminster, where her father, Dr Charles Edward Doherty, was superintendent until his death in 1922. She attended primary and secondary schools at the convent of the Sisters of Sainte Anne, New Westminster, and took her first two years of university at the Convent o…
Born in Rochester, England, and educated at Maldon Grammar School, Maldon, Essex, he immigrated with his family in 1926 to Duncan, British Columbia. After a year at Duncan High School he began thirteen years of work in a tidewater sawmill, meanwhile reading, writing poetry, and exploring the coasts and mountains of Vancouver Island. In 1940 he enrolled in English at the University of British Colum…
He was born and educated in Croydon, Surrey, and worked in advertising and print and television/radio journalism. The harbor town of Flaxborough and its environs in Lincolnshire is home to a bawdy population forever engaged in erotic behavior, criminal and otherwise. Introduced in Coffin, Scarcely Used (1958), Watson's series character Inspector Purbright is patient, astute, and down to earth whi…
British crime writer and journalist, born in Croydon; he wrote a number of richly comic satires of contemporary English life in the form of detective stories set in the imaginary East Anglian town of Flaxborough, beginning with Coffin, Scarcely Used (1958). The best is possibly The Flaxborough Crab (1969; US title Just What the Doctor Ordered), but Bump in the Night (1960), Lonelyheart 4122 (1967)…
British science fiction writer, born in North Shields, Northumberland, educated at Balliol College, Oxford. Among the most intellectually adventurous practitioners of the genre, Watson's work has been compared to that of O. Stapledon and A. C. Clarke. In his first and best-known novel, The Embedding (1973), an analysis of the meaning of language unites three separate plots into one complex argumen…
Canadian novelist, born in New Westminster near Vancouver, educated at the Universities of British Columbia and Toronto. Her doctorate, on Wyndham Lewis, was supervised by Marshall McLuhan. Watson's experience teaching in the Cariboo region of the British Columbia interior provided the basis for her highly acclaimed novel The Double Hook (1959), sometimes described as the first modern Canadian nov…
British poet, born at Burley-in-Wharfedale, Yorkshire; he grew up near Liverpool. Two volumes of verse, Prince's Quest (1880) and Epigrams of Art, Life, and Nature (1884), preceded his move to London, where he established himself as a literary journalist. Wordsworth's Grave (1891), the title piece of which is arguably his best poem, gained him wide notice, and Lachrymae Musarum (1892), his elegies…
When Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, he simultaneously created Dr. John H. Watson, a companion and intellectual foil who is so essential to the optimum deployment of Holmes's art that, to most readers, the two men have become firmly linked. As he recorded the character and a few titillating biographical details of Watson, Doyle could never have anticipated that every scrap of informati…
American poet, born in Berkeley, educated at M.I.T., Iowa Writers' Workshop, and at Berkeley. He became editor of This press, which produced a magazine and books that helped shape the development of Language Poetry in the 1970s and early 1980s, and of Poetics Journal with Lyn Hejinian, a key opportunity for theoretical and critical writing on the aesthetics and politics of the new poetry. His coll…
hymn writer: b. Southampton; educ. Southampton and London (Stoke Newington); buried in London (Finsbury: Bunhill Fields); commemorated in London (Westminster Abbey) and Southampton. ?Behold the glories of the Lamb? , ?O God, our help in ages past?, ?When I survey the wondrous cross?, ?Jesus shall reign where'er the sun? . …
novelist and critic: b. St Ives (Cambridgeshire); lives in London (Bloomsbury: Great James St.) 1872?3; visits Kelmscott; lives in Danes End, London (Strand: The Strand) 1873; visits Shiplake1879; lives in London (Putney) 1879?1914. Aylwin 1898 . …
journalist, editor, and novelist: b. Dulverton; childhood in Stinchcombe and Combe Florey (returns 1971); educ. Downside and Oxford (Christ Church), rusticated 1959; commissioned into Royal Horse Guards, London (Westminster) 1957; writes for Private Eye and edits Literary Review in London (Soho); lives in Chilton Foliat. Will This Do? 1991 . …
novelist: b. London (Hampstead: Hillfield Rd); educ. Lancing and Oxford (Hertford College); frequents Beckley; teaches in Aston Clinton1925?7; lives in London (Islington: Canonbury Sq.) 1928, Mells1930, Stinchcombe1937?56; stays in Chagford1944; lives in Combe Florey; buried in Combe Florey. Rossetti: His Life and Works 1928 , Decline and Fall 1928 , Edmund Campion 1935 , Brideshead Revisited 1945…
. Told in a deliberately unsensational style with an uncluttered plot line and a killer who remains just offstage, Waugh's novel was coolly received by some critics. It was not until Raymond Chandler praised it and Julian Symons included it on a list of the hundred best crime stories that readers began to recognize it as a true classic. Chief Frank Ford, the detective in the New England college …
English novelist, born in London, educated at Sherborne School, Dorset, which provided the background for his first novel, The Loom of Youth (1917), which caused a scandal for its allusions to homosexuality in a public school. This novel and Three Score and Ten (1929), also about schoolboys, later provoked Wyndham Lewis's attack on Waugh and others in The Doom of Youth (1932), which had to be with…
British journalist, critic, and novelist, born in Somerset, the eldest son of Evelyn Waugh, educated at Downside School and Oxford University. His lasting antagonism towards the British public school system is expressed in his amusing first novel, The Foxglove Saga (1960). He wrote three further satirical novels, Path of Dalliance (1963), about Oxford in the 1950s; Who Are the Violets Now? (1965),…
English novelist, born in Hampstead, London, the second son of the publisher and literary critic Arthur Waugh, and brother of Alec Waugh. He was educated at Lancing and at Hertford College, Oxford, where he read Modern History and cultivated an outrageous persona; through his friendship with H. Acton, he was drawn into a literary and artistic circle which included C. Connolly, A. Powell, H. Yorke …
British novelist, born in Somerset, the daughter of Evelyn Waugh. She has worked as a publisher's reader and written several distinctive and original blackly comic novels of domestic intrigue among affluent middle-class families. Her first, Mirror, Mirror (1973), described by Timothy Mo as ?a very fine piece of black fantasy?, was followed by others including Mother's Footsteps (1978), which portr…
a novel by V. Woolf, published in 1931. It takes as far as possible her method of expressing character and states of mind through a poetic language of recurrent images and rhythmical repetitions. It traces the lives of a group of friends (Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis) from childhood to late middle age. Each character speaks his or her thoughts in a formalized direct speech, sty…
Born in Hawkesbury, Ontario, he was raised in Prince Rupert and Vancouver, British Columbia. He attended the University of British Columbia, where he edited the student newspaper, The Ubyssey, and did graduate work at the University of California. He has worked at a wide variety of jobs in the United States and Canada, including teaching at the Kootenay School of Writing. In 1976 he won the A.J.M.…
, was born in Hawkesbury, Ontario. He took his BA at the University of British Columbia and his MFA at the University of California, Irvine. In the late 1960s he became involved with the radical left on a number of American campuses. On his return to Vancouver he experienced difficulty in finding a teaching job and wo…
Samuel Butler's semi-autobiographical novel, published posthumously in 1903. Butler began the work in 1873 and had completed his last revisions by 1884. He chose to leave it unpublished during his lifetime, chiefly because it displays what Robert Bridges termed ?his bitter onesided almost venomous regard for his own family?; in doing so, it functions on a more general level as a revelation of the …
Fainall and Mirabell are rivals, not only at the card table, but also in financial matters. Mirabell is in love with Mrs Millamant, but has incurred the displeasure of her aunt Lady Wishfort, because he insincerely paid court to her only to distract from his love for her niece. Fainall, though married to Lady Wishfort's daughter, is in love with Mrs Marwood. Lady Wishfort wants Millamant to marry …
Chremylus has been to the oracle in Delphi to find out whether it makes sense to remain poor but honest, and the god Apollo tells him to follow the first person he encounters on leaving the oracle. He dutifully follows a blind beggar, who turns out to be the god of Wealth. Chremylus persuades Wealth to have his sight restored. Now Poverty appears, arguing that it is she who benefits humankind by m…
Josef Frank has come to London from Czechoslovakia and now works in a crisp[potato chip]-making factory. He witnesses his boss Ralph Makepeace being mugged by three young people wearing balaclavas (in fact his own employees, resentful that he will not allow them to become unionized). During the police investigation, Frank, a former Czech government minister, has a flashback to his 1951 interrogati…
Unusual murder weapons are a well-established tradition in crime and mystery fiction. Since the early days of the genre, many authors have striven to demonstrate their ingenuity by creating unique weapons to do away with hapless victims. In the classical detective novel murderers employ such weapons to obfuscate the circumstances of the crime. From the perpetrator's viewpoint, the perfect murder w…
, grew up in the eastern Melbourne suburb of Blackburn. He joined with John Scott and Laurie Duggan …
Born in Niagara Falls, Ontario, he was educated there and in Toronto. From 1942 to 1945 he served first in the rcaf, and then in the Canadian army. After his discharge he enrolled at the University of Toronto and took his degree in Philosophy and English (1948). In the same year he was hired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a program organizer in the Talks and Public Affairs Department,…
The rich employer Dreissiger pays miserable amounts to the starving weavers who bring him the cloth they have woven at home. Although he promises more employment to the unhappy workers, this is in fact a move to lower their rates of pay. One of the weavers, who has not eaten meat for two years, cooks his dog and eats it, but cannot keep the meal down. Moritz J?ger, a soldier, urges the weavers to …
novelist: b. Leighton; educ. Southport1897?9; lives and m. 1912 in Meole Brace; lives in Weston‐super‐Mare from 1912; d. Hastings; buried in Shrewsbury. Gone to Earth 1917 , Precious Bane 1924 . …
Born in Victoria, British Columbia, and educated at the University of British Columbia, she ran as a ccf candidate for the provincial legislature at the age of twenty-two. In 1950 she travelled to Montreal, where she did a year of graduate studies at McGill University. Webb lived in England, Paris, San Francisco, and Toronto, then taught at ubc for four years. In Toronto she conceived the cbc radi…
, was born in Adelaide and raised in Sydney by his paternal grandparents after his mother died when he was 2. He was educated by the Christian Brothers, then joined the Royal Australian Air Force in the Second World War, and trained in Canada as a gunner. He was never involved in combat. Demobilized, he enrolled at th…
, was born in Swansea into a family whose roots were in Gower, and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Romance languages. After serving in the Second World War as an interpreter with the British Naval Mission to the French Provisional Government, he worked with Keidrych Rhys at the Druid Press in Carmarthen, and eventually as a librarian, first at Dowlais in Merthyr Tydfil and lat…
, was born in Victoria, British Columbia. She has lived and worked all over Canada, and has in recent years settled on Saltspring Island off Canada's west coast. She has been a politician, secretary, radio producer, and university lecturer. Notorious for her long silences, she has nevertheless produced a considerable …
British writers on sociology and political reform. Beatrice, n?e Potter, born in Standish, Gloucester, was encouraged in her intellectual development by Herbert Spencer (1820?1903), a friend of her wealthy family. She witnessed conditions among the poor while collecting rents on family properties in London and assisted Charles Booth (1840?1916) with research for Life and Labour of the People of Lo…
Australian poet, born in Adelaide, educated at Sydney University. Webb later moved to Canada, then to England where he suffered his first mental breakdown. His subsequent attempts to overcome schizophrenia and to resolve questions of identity are reflected in many of his poems in which, with his combination of surrealist imagery and religious intensity, he created powerful lyrical effects. A Drum …
British novelist and poet, born in Shropshire, where she spent most of her life and which she celebrated in her novels; she was educated mainly at home. Her novels include The Golden Arrow (1916), Gone to Earth (1917), The House in Dormer Forest (1920), Seven for a Secret (1922), and Amour wherein He Trusted (1929). Her most famous novel, Precious Bane (1924), set in North Shropshire after the Nap…
playwright: writes for Philip Henslowe's Rose Theatre in London (Southwark: Bankside). The White Devil 1612, The Duchess of Malfi 1623. …
, was born in Blenheim, New Zealand. After early years spent largely overseas, Wedde returned to New Zealand for university study, gaining an MA from Auckland in 1968 . He began publishing poetry in 1966 . After travelling through Asia, Europe, and North Africa, Wedde …
New Zealand poet, novelist, critic, and editor, born in Blenheim, New Zealand, educated mainly in England and at the University of Auckland. Wedde's evocative clarity of image and lyricism were already evident in his early poem sequence Homage to Matisse (1971), published while he was briefly resident in London. Made Over (1974) showed the influence of William Carlos Williams's poetics. Wedde's pu…
Julia Augustine, a black woman, has just moved into the middle house in a block of three surrounding a backyard. For ten years, contrary to racial laws she has been the lover of Herman, a white man who runs a bakery shop, and wears his ?wedding band? hidden on a chain round her neck. Both would like to acknowledge their relationship openly, but this would be possible only if they can move to New Y…
Henryk, a Polish soldier fighting in France during the Second World War, dreams of returning to his homeland. Arriving at an inn, he finds that his parents are the innkeepers and that his fianc?e Maria is also there but avoiding him. A Drunk and his companions abuse Henryk's father and calls Maria a whore. Suddenly, Henryk's Father declares that he is King; the inn becomes a palace, and the Drunk …
A noisy wedding celebration takes place in the neighbouring hall, as characters come and go in the living room where the buffet has been set out. We meet the Groom, a writer from Cracow, and Jadwiga, his pretty, simple peasant Bride. They have married in the home of the Groom's brother, a painter, who after also marrying a peasant girl is now a prosperous farmer. Politics are discussed, flirtation…
British historian, born in Northumberland, educated at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. A specialist of the seventeenth century, her books include Strafford (1935), William the Silent (1944; James Tait Black Memorial Prize), her highly acclaimed volumes on the Civil War (The King's Peace, 1955; The King's War, 1958; The Trial of King Charles, 1964), a book of essays (Velvet Studies, 1946), and the live…
Village off the B4525, 3 m. SE of Moreton Pinkney. The extension to the churchyard contains the grave of Dame Edith Sitwell (1887?1964), with a tombstone by Henry Moore. …
This ?Canadian Journal of Politics, Society, and Literature? was founded by Goldwin Smith and published in Toronto by F. Blackett Robinson for the purpose of ?stimulating our national sentiment, guarding our national morality, and strengthening our national growth?. It appeared between 6 Dec. 1883 and 20 Nov. 1896. (Charles G.D. Roberts was editor for the first three months.) The Week conveys an a…
Born in Montreal and educated at McGill University (B.A., 1947), Weintraub began his career at the Montreal Gazette, where he worked as a reporter for two years. He subsequently free-lanced as a journalist and broadcaster and held a staff position at Weekend Magazine before launching a successful and prolific career as a script writer, film producer, and director, primarily with the National Film …
Helen Tenenbaum was born in Poland and came to Toronto at the age of nine. Her formal education ended abruptly after high school when the Depression impelled her to go to work?successively as a stenographer, receptionist, and salesperson. She married the composer John Weinzweig in 1940 and has two sons. Weinzweig, who has read widely?especially the work of Conrad, Jerzy Kosinsky, John Barth, Borge…
Brendan Byrne, a bar-owner in his thirties, is serving Jack Mullen, a garage mechanic (fifties) and his friend Jim Curran (forties), occasional handyman. The talk is of the weather, betting, and especially of a new arrival in the area: a woman from Dublin, Valerie (thirties), who is renting an old house from Finbar Mack (late forties), a local hotelier. Finbar has been showing Valerie around and t…
, was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and educated at Muhlenberg College and Columbia University. He married Ren?e Karol in 1941; in 1943 the Weisses founded an influential literary magazine, the Quarterly Review. The recipient of many honours, including a Guggenheim fellowship, Weiss is the subject of a documentary film, A Year in the Life of a Poem (1988). He taught at Yale, Bard, Washington Uni…
American poet, born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Columbia University, New York. He began his academic career in 1941 at the University of Maryland. After holding a succession of posts at American universities, he was a Professor of English at Princeton from 1967 to 1987. The Catch (1951), his first collection of poetry, was followed by Outl…
British novelist and essayist, born in Shanghai, educated at Repton School and Goldsmith's School of Art, London. As a consequence of a serious bicycle accident in 1935 he became a partial invalid. All Welch's books, some of them illustrated by himself, are strongly autobiographical. Maiden Voyage (1943) recaptures with sensory richness his running away from school and going to China to join his f…
Native American writer of mixed Blackfoot and Gros Ventre descent, born in Montana, educated at the University of Montana; he has taught Native American literature at the University of Washington and Cornell University. Welch describes himself less as a traditional story-teller and more as a novelist within the Western, European-American tradition, dealing with characters in a situation of psychol…
British novelist, dramatist, and television screenwriter, born in Alvechurch, Worcestershire, educated at the University of St Andrews. She began her career as a copywriter in an advertising agency and wrote several plays for radio and television. Her novels, which frequently deal with aspects of women's experience, including the demands made upon them by marriage and motherhood and the unreasonab…
Australian part-Aboriginal writer, born in Subiaco, Western Australia; he grew up in bush country just south of Perth. As a teenager he lived in East Perth, a poor area of ?bikies, methos, migrants and Aboriginal families?. He went through secondary education, and studied for a year at the Western Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin University of Technology), Perth, but left to write Th…
poet: lives in Withyham. Poems in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, ed. W. B. Yeats, 1936, Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley 1940 . …
, was born in Berkshire. Her father died young; her mother married the Earl of Scarborough in 1899 , thus introducing Dorothy to a world in which her own subsequent marriage to Gerald, seventh Duke of Wellington, in 1914 , firmly established her. Wellesley liked to exp…
British poet, born at Heywood Lodge, White Waltham, Berkshire; she was privately educated. Her numerous collections of verse include Early Poems (1913), Lost Lane (1925), Matrix (1928), Lost Planet (1942), and Desert Wells (1946). From 1934 onwards she was W. B. Yeats's close friend; some of his letters to her were published as Letters on Poetry in 1940. He valued her work highly for the ?passiona…
Market town, now part of the new town of Telford. Philip Larkin took a job as a district librarian here in 1943, more by accident than inclination. He ran the library single‐handed, stamping the books, stoking the boiler, filing reports, and driving vagrants out of the reading room. Larkin's first collection of poems, The North Ship (1945), appeared without notice while he was working here, in 1…
The term refers to a loose association of New Zealand poets in Wellington, in the years between 1950 and 1965 . New Zealand poetry after the Second World War tended to polarize around debate on the precepts that All…
novelist: b. London (Bromley); educ. Bromley and Midhurst; lives in Uppark; apprenticed at drapery establishment in Portsmouth1881?3; student assistant teacher in Midhurst1883?4; stays in Stoke‐on‐Trent1888; lives in Folkestone1900, Little Easton; visits J. K. Jerome in Ewelme, E. Nesbit at Well Hall, London (Eltham); lives in London (Marylebone: Marylebone Rd) 1930?7; last years and d. in Lon…
Born in Mitchell, Ontario, he grew up in Orillia and attended the University of Western Ontario. After two years in Europe (1926?8), where he published Absit omen (1927), a collection of lyric poems, he returned to Canada to become a journalist with the London Advertiser, the Orillia Newsletter, and finally the Toronto Evening Telegram. From the 1930s to the 1960s (except for a stint in the Canadi…
, was born in Oxford. He read classics and English at King's College, Cambridge, has lived in Iran, and farmed in England and Italy. His farming experience is closely associated with a prevalent theme in his poetry?love of the earth and the spiritual benefit of labouring in the fields, of establishing a union and comm…
English novelist, social critic, and educator, born in Bromley, Kent, the third son of Joseph Wells, an unsuccessful small shopkeeper, and his wife Sarah, a former lady's maid. In 1880 Wells's mother left home to become resident housekeeper at Uppark, a large country house in Sussex, while her son began a series of apprenticeships, including two years at a drapery emporium. He had to work a thirte…
British poet and translator, born in Oxford, educated at King's College, Cambridge. Wells has worked as a forester on Exmoor, and much of his best writing is characterized by its depth and immediacy of response to the natural world. With work by Dick Davis and Clive Wilmer, his poetry was featured in Shade Mariners (1970), which demonstrated the survival of traditional verse forms. His collections…
novelist: b., educ., and lives in Edinburgh. Trainspotting 1993 , Filth 1998 , Glue 2001 , Porno 2002 . …
Scottish novelist, born in Edinburgh where he was brought up on a housing estate in Muirhead. He left school at sixteen, lived in London in the 1980s, then became a training officer in Edinburgh Council's housing department, gaining an MBA at Heriot Watt University. His first novel, Trainspotting (1993; filmed with screenplay by John Hodge, 1996), swiftly became a cult for its uncompromising portr…
American short-story writer and novelist, born in Jackson, Mississippi, educated at the University of Wisconsin. She worked with the Works Progress Administration, travelling throughout Mississippi and taking photographs later collected in One Time, One Place (1971) and Photographs by Eudora Welty (1989). Her first short stories, championed by Katherine Anne Porter, appeared in A Curtain of Green …
Satellite town of London, founded in 1920, just S of Welwyn and bypassed by the A1(M). The Scottish novelist James Leslie Mitchell, who wrote as ?Lewis Grassic Gibbon?, lived here from 1931 to 1935?the most productive period in his writing career. His greatest achievement was Sunset Song (1932), the first novel of a trilogy based on the land of his childhood, in NE Scotland. Cloud Howe (1933) and …
Village off the A1(M). Edward Young, rector 1730?65, wrote the long poem The Complaint, or, Night Thoughts, on Life, Death, and Immortality (1742?5), which became very popular at once. The bluestocking Mrs Chapone, who admired the man and his philosophy, wondered how he could have ?blundered so egregiously as to imagine himself a poet?, but Dr Johnson, who included him in Lives of the English Poet…
Small market town on the B5063 and the B5476, 11 m. N of Shrewsbury. William Hazlitt came here when he was 8 and lived in Noble St. for most of his early years. His father was a Unitarian minister. …
Western Samoan writer, born in Western Samoa, educated at Victoria University, Auckland. He returned to Auckland in 1987 as the first Professor of New Zealand Literature at Auckland University. His novel Sons for the Return Home (1973) was the first by a Western Samoan and, like all his work, explores the complexities of Pacific culture in the present day. Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree (1974) consi…
Born Dora Amy Elles in Musoorie, India, Wentworth was educated privately and at the Blackheath High School for Girls in London. She married twice and had one daughter with her second husband, Lt. Col. George Oliver Turnbull, who assisted her in preparing her manuscripts for publication. After 1920, Wentworth lived in Surrey, and beginning in 1923, produced novels at a steady rate. Thirty-two of We…
Timberlake, British dramatist born of Anglo-American parents; she was educated in France and America. Her first significant play was New Anatomies (1981), about the life of the nineteenth-century explorer Isabelle Eberhardt, who managed to travel in Islamic countries by adopting male Arab dress. Her subsequent work has been variously marked by a concern for women in a male-dominated society, a bel…
American novelist and poet, born in Kewaskum, Wisconsin, educated at the University of Chicago. Wescott left the University of Chicago (from where he had contributed Imagist verse to Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine) in 1919 and spent several years wandering, rather aimlessly, from country to country, including England and Germany, before settling down to a career as a full-time writer. His first …
British dramatist, born in Stepney, London, educated in Hackney; he worked as a furniture-maker's apprentice, a farm labourer's seed-sorter, a chef, and in many other capacities before writing Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), Roots (1959), and I'm Talking about Jerusalem (1960). These plays, collectively known as the Wesker Trilogy, established him as one of the more important of the socially cons…
co‐founder of the Methodist movement, hymn writer, and author of a Journal (1849): b. Epworth; educ. London (Westminster School); visits Stanton Harcourt; buried in Marylebone parish church, London (Marylebone: Marylebone High St.). …
co‐founder of the Methodist movement and author of a Journal (1731?91): b. Epworth; educ. London (City: Charterhouse); visits Buckland, and Stanton Harcourt; preaches several times in Gwennap Pit1762?88. …
novelist: b. Englefield Green. The Camomile Lawn 1984 . …
British novelist, born in Surrey, educated privately and at the London School of Economics. At the age of 70 she published her first novel, Jumping the Queue (1983), a black comedy of the upper classes about a woman intent on committing suicide. It was followed by The Camomile Lawn (1984), Harnessing Peacocks (1985), The Vacillations of Poppy Carew (1986), Not that Sort of Girl (1987), Second Fidd…
novelist, journalist, and critic: b. London (Westbourne); childhood in Edinburgh; educ. London (Richmond) 1900?1, Edinburgh; attends Academy of Dramatic Art, London (Bloomsbury) 1910?11; meets H. G. Wells in Easton; lives in Braughing, Leigh‐on‐Sea, Ibstone from 1941, London (Kensington) 1969?83. The Judge 1923 , Black Lamb and Grey Falcon 1941 , The Fountain Overflows 1956 . …
American novelist, born in Boston, the daughter of a successful black businessman; she was educated at the city's Girls' Latin School and studied journalism at Columbia University. Her first published story appeared in the Boston Post in 1928. She moved to New York in 1929, where she became a notable figure in the circle of black writers associated with Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes (see Harl…
American novelist and screenwriter, born Nathan Wallenstein WEINSTEIN in New York, educated at Brown University. West lived in Paris before returning home to work as the manager of a New York hotel where he befriended several other writers, and also worked as an associate of William Carlos Williams in editing the magazine Contact. During this time he wrote three short novels: The Dream Life of Bal…
American critic, theoretician, poet, and novelist, born in Eckington, Derbyshire, educated at the University of Birmingham and Oxford University. While his autobiography, I, Said the Sparrow (1963), offers an affectionate portrait of his early life in England, he has a particular affection for the USA where he became a resident and held academic posts at several universities including Penn State. …
, British novelist and political essayist, born in London of Anglo-Irish parents, educated in Edinburgh. She borrowed her pen-name from the passionate heroine of Ibsen's Rosmersholm. After a brief stage career, West became a journalist and political commentator, inspired by feminism and the ideas of the Pankhursts. From 1911 she wrote for the Freewoman, the New Freewoman, and the Clarion; some of…
While English translations of African oral literary traditions are numerous, there are few English translations of creative writing in African languages. A translation appeared in 1968 by Wole Soyinka of a novel written in Yoruba in 1938 by D. O. Fagunwa. The richly evocative translation was entitled The Forest of a Thousand Daemons. Fagunwa's Yoruba novels were a major influence upon the developm…
Village off the A47, 8 m. E of Swaffham. A lane leads S through the village of Little Fransham to a turn marked ?Wood Farm only?. This house on the family estate was the birthplace of Rider Haggard (1856). …
Southern suburb of the city of Nottingham, just to the S of the Trent. A young Malcolm Bradbury moved to Nottingham with his family in the early 1940s; from 1943 to 1950 Bradbury attended West Bridgford Grammar School. …
Village 9 m. SE of Salisbury, off the A36, whence Lady Mary Pierrepoint eloped to marry (1712) Edward Wortley Montagu. Nothing remains of her grandfather's house, where she spent her childhood, but his ornate tomb has been restored in the 14th‐c. Borbach Chantry, once used as the family chapel. Gilbert White was curate here for a short time and mentions how lonely he felt away from Selborne. …
an Australian literary journal, which began in 1956 showing an early preference for prose. Beginning as a student magazine at the University of Western Australia, it won Commonwealth funding in 1963. Peter Cowan and John Barnes became involved towards the end of the 1960s, and the early ?open? forum began to take on a regional stance. In later years art and poetry, as well as historical, political…
a genre of popular American fiction characteristically set in the late nineteenth century in the Western and Southwestern states and featuring cattle-ranchers, cowboys, sheriffs, and outlaws as principal protagonists. Emerson Hough was among the first exponents of the mode; its first classic is Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), which established numerous enduring features in its narrative of Wyo…
The first western hero in American fiction was James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo, who D. H. Lawrence believed was the archetypal American. Cooper's characterization of Bumppo led Lawrence to write in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) that ?the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer,? or as Richard Brookhiser put it in his essay ?Deerslayer Helped Define us…
Village off the A24, 7 m. S of Horsham. Pope used to stay at West Grinstead Park (house gone) with his friend John Caryll and while here in 1712 wrote the satirical The Rape of the Lock about the origin of a family feud mentioned by his host. Pope's Oak, under which according to tradition he wrote the poem, can be seen from the public footpath through the park. The tree is also shown in the backgr…
Belcour, son of the merchant Stockwell by a secret marriage, has made his fortune in the West Indies. His father intends to test his son before acknowledging him. Belcour befriends the impoverished Captain Dudley and gives him money. Dudley's son Charles is in love with his cousin Charlotte Rusport, but cannot marry her because he is without means. Belcour has fallen in love with Charles's sister …
American crime novelist, who also writes as Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, Curt Clark, and Timothy J. Culver; born in Brooklyn, educated at the University of New York at Binghamton, he became a full-time author in 1959. The Mercenaries (1960) placed him initially within the Hammett tradition, but in 1962 he took the pseudonym Richard Stark to write the first of sixteen novels featuring Parker, a metic…
Village on the B4232, to the W of Great Malvern. Dr Roget, author of The Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (1852), died on his annual holiday at Ashfield House, now 225 West Malvern Rd. He is buried in the churchyard of St James's Church. …
Village off the A10, 4 m. N of Puckeridge. The turning to Cherry Green leads to Button Snap, the little thatched cottage on the hill owned by Charles Lamb from 1812 until he sold it for ?50 in 1815. A plaque states that the cottage was acquired from the Royal Society of Arts by the Charles Lamb Society and ?Dedicated to Elia's Memory? on 3 September 1949. …
Village on the B1052, 8 m. SW of Newmarket. James Withers, born here in 1812, the only son of a shoemaker, was taught to read and write by his mother and started work on a farm at the age of 10. He returned here for a short time, when his mother paid for his apprenticeship as a shoemaker from a legacy, but after her death he had to take to labouring again. ?My Native Village?, from his Collected P…
Village off the A1067, 11 m. NW of Norwich where ?Parson? Woodforde was rector (Old Rectory c. 1840 on the site) from 1776 to his death in 1803. ?I breakfasted, dined, supped and slept again at home? he prefaces many entries in his Diary. He fishes in his pond; goes coursing; doses his household against the Whirligigousticon (malaria) and other agues; reads Evelina and Roderick Random; meets the f…
Small village 13 m. SE of Northampton, a favourite walk of William Cowper when he was living (1767?86) at Olney. He was often accompanied by Mary Unwin, with whom he had shared a house since her husband's death. Sometimes he came alone: Their goal was Weston Park (gone), the home of their friends the Throckmortons, who gave them a key to the gardens and to the wilderness or spinney opposite the ho…
Seaside resort on the A370, 21 m. SW of Bristol. Mary Webb lived at 6 Landemann Circus after her marriage in 1912. The first act of ?Nothing On?, the bad bedroom farce parodied in Michael Frayn's farce Noises Off (1982), is performed at the fictional Grand Theatre. …
Village close to the Shropshire border between Telford and Stafford. Weston Park has been proposed by the P. G. Wodehouse scholar Norman Murphy as the model for the Blandings estate, whose gardens, as Evelyn Waugh wrote, ?are that original garden from which we are all exiled. All those who know them long to return.? …
Market town and small seaport on the N59 and the N5, beautifully situated on the banks of the Carrowbeg, which flows into the SE corner of Clew Bay. Westport House, a modernized early Georgian mansion (the seat of the Marquess of Sligo), stands at the W end of the town (open to the public, http://www.westporthouse.ie). De Quincey stayed here in 1800 with his friend Lord Westport after they had bee…
Bathing resort, named after Kingsley's novel (1855), on Barnstaple or Bideford Bay, 3 m. NW of Bideford, on the B3236. Rudyard Kipling, who was born and had spent his childhood in India, was educated at the United Services College here from January 1878 to July 1882. He described it as ?largely a caste school ? some 75 per cent of us had been born outside England, and hoped to follow their fathers…
The daughter of English Quaker parents, she was born in Rockwood, Ontario, received her early education at home, and later studied at a Quaker school in New York State and at Pickering College in Ontario. She became a journalist and contributed to many Canadian and American periodicals; for a time she was the editor of the women's department of the Toronto Globe, using the pseudonym ?Bel Thistlewa…
Village with timber and plaster houses off the A140, the old Roman Pye Rd, 11 m. S of Diss. Richard Hakluyt was rector here from 1590 until his death in 1616, but he was also made archdeacon of Westminster in 1603 and was therefore not resident during the whole of his rectorship. …
Born in Yokohama, Japan, of Canadian parents, he left Japan shortly before the Second World War and was educated in Toronto, Ontario, and at Trinity College School, Port Hope, before taking his B.A. (1957) at Caius College, Cambridge, England. During his Cambridge years he became a member of Philip Hobsbaum's ?The Group? (a workshop of poets that included Peter Redgrove, Peter Porter, George MacBe…
, a Canadian citizen, was born in Japan, educated in Canada and Cambridge, England, and now teaches at the University of Texas. His early poems, particularly those collected in A Christ of the Ice-Floes (London, 1966 ), gained attention in England owing to his association with the Group and wi…
County town and former seaport at the mouth of the Slaney. The novelist John Banville was born in Wexford in 1945. He attended the Christian Brothers School and St Peter's College, Wexford, in the 1950s and 1960s. Somewhere on the coast of Co. Wexford, at the end of a peninsula beside the fictional town of Kilnalough, stands the Majestic Hotel in J. G. Farrell's novel Troubles (1970). Its incinera…
Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford is the central character in a series of novels by Ruth Rendell. He made his initial appearance in Rendell's first novel, From Doon with Death (1964), and has featured in over fifteen novels since. (The character also served as the basis for a popular British television series of the early 1990s.) Throughout the sequence, Wexford remains as a senior police officer i…
writer of historical romances: b. and lives in Ludlow; educ. Shrewsbury. The New Rector 1891, Under the Red Robe 1894 , The Castle Inn 1898 . …
British novelist, born in Shropshire, educated at Christ Church, Oxford. He read for the Bar but abandoned the legal profession in 1891. Having published stories in periodicals he began a successful literary career with The House of the Wolf (1890), which was followed by over twenty successful historical romances, often with French settings, such as A Gentleman of France (1893); The Red Cockade (1…
Coastal town, port, and royal watering place, overlooking Weymouth Bay and Portland Harbour, on the A353. Thomas Love Peacock was born here (18 Oct. 1785), but soon after his father's death in 1788 his mother took him to live in her father's house in Chertsey. George III used to stay at Gloucester Lodge, the Duke of Gloucester's home on the seafront, and Fanny Burney records in her Diary her visit…
, was born in Portland, Oregon, and educated there at Reed College, where he roomed with the poets Lew Welch and Gary Snyder. He served in the US Air Force during the Second World War. His growing involvement with Zen Buddhism culminated in 1973 with his ordination as a priest. He then lived on a Buddhist commune in San Francisco. Whalen is an eccentric but respected figure in recent American poe…
American poet, born in Oregon, educated at Reed College. Whalen is associated both with the Beats and with the San Francisco Renaissance. In terms of tone and conviction, his poetry most resembles that of Lew Welch; it is clear and witty, possessing a kind of classical poise which comports well with its jazz-derived flexibility. Increasingly absorbed in Buddhism, Whalen spent several years in Japa…
Town on the Calder, on the A59 and the A671. The ruined Cistercian abbey is depicted in Harrison Ainsworth's The Lancashire Witches (1848). Ainsworth stayed (1848) with Archdeacon Rushton at the vicarage at Newchurch‐in‐Pendle, a small village c. 6 m. NE, in the Forest of Pendle, while he was gathering material for the novel. Pendle appears in the story as ?Goldshaw?. Stonyhurst College, a Rom…
Island off E coast of Mainland. Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve) lived here from 1933 to 1942 with his second wife, Valda, and their son Michael. They rented a cottage (now derelict), at Sodom overlooking the Linga Sound. In another cottage nearby (later an office) the poet wrote parts of the Cornish Heroic Song for Valda Trevlyn and his autobiography, Lucky Poet (1943). …
See Novels in English 1983 to 1996: other novels 1(a). …
American novelist, born in New York to an aristocratic family and educated privately. In the 1890s she contributed short stories and poems to Scribner's Magazine, a collection entitled The Greater Inclination appearing in 1899, before writing a first historical novel, set in eighteenth-century Italy, The Valley of Decision (1902). She then turned to social satire in The House of Mirth (1905), her …
American writer, born in Philadelphia, educated at the University of California, Los Angeles. A reclusive artist, resident in France, Wharton wished to conceal his name and used the pseudonym ?William Wharton? for his writing. Only with the publication of Franky Furbo (1989), dedicated to a daughter killed in a highway accident, did he emerge from obscurity to bring attention to her death; Last Lo…
a play by James Barrie, first performed in 1908. The first act occurs in the living-room of a well-to-do Scottish family, the Wylies, and involves the capture of an apparent burglar, John Shand, who has come surreptitiously to read the books he is too poor to afford. The family offers him the money to educate himself, on condition he eventually marries the daughter of the house, Maggie. With her i…
In a French farmhouse converted into the headquarters of a detachment of US Marines, Captain Flagg is preparing to go on leave in Paris. His friend and rival First Sergeant Quirt, who is placed in charge of the men, consoles Charmaine, the local innkeeper's daughter, over Flagg's departure. A week later Flagg returns, having been imprisoned for assaulting a military policeman. Charmaine's father i…
Dr Prentice, a psychiatrist interviewing Geraldine Barclay, an attractive young orphan, for the post of secretary, requires her to get undressed for a full examination. As she lies naked behind a screen, Prentice's wife enters. With her is Nicholas Beckett, a pageboy who seduced her the previous evening in her hotel. He now demands payment for pornographic photographs taken of their lovemaking. Wh…
British writer of popular adventure tales, romances, science fiction, fantasy, and detective stories, born in London. From the publication of The Forbidden Territory (1933) and Such Power Is Dangerous (1933), until well after the Second World War, he captured a vast readership who enjoyed the large gestures of action in surroundings whose ultimate security was never in doubt. They Found Atlantis (…
, might well be described as the last nineteenth-century American poet. Throughout his long career he clung stubbornly and, some might say, heroically to a diction and manner that had long been repudiated by most of his contemporaries. The sentimental lyric, the philosophical poem, the ballad: all these forms were tak…
a series of poetry anthologies edited by Edith Sitwell which appeared annually from 1916 to 1921. The narrowness of range evident in Wheels resulted largely from the marked preponderance of work by the three Sitwells and members of their immediate circle. The prevailing tone of the early editions was compounded of fatalistic gloom in response to the First World War and bitter rejection of the soci…
, was born in Milton, Massachusetts, the descendant of two state governors and a Puritan divine expelled from Boston in 1637 for his non-conformist views, and religion and politics played as prominent a part in Wheelwright's life and poetry as they had played in his family's past. After gradu…
American poet, born in Boston, educated at Harvard and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he trained for his career as an architect. In 1923 he travelled to Florence to oversee the printing there of an issue of Secession, one of the notable American little magazines of the early 1920s; among the contributions for publication was Hart Crane's ?For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen?…
playwright: b. Stoke‐on‐Trent; plays performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company (Stratford‐upon‐Avon). The Accrington Pals 1981 , The Bright and Bold Design 1991 , School of Night 1992 , The Herbal Bed 1996 . …
Professor Arnold Rubek, an elderly sculptor unhappily married to the childlike Maja, is staying at a spa hotel, visited by a bear-hunting landowner Ulfheim and a strange lady attended by a nun. Maja develops an attraction for Ulfheim, and Rubek is only too happy to let her accompany Ulfheim to the mountains, especially when he discovers the identity of the lady. She is Irene, who inspired his grea…
the first novel by E. M. Forster, published in 1905. Set in Italy, it concerns the relationships of a group of English people who become embroiled in a disastrous and misguided plan to ?rescue? one of their number, Lilia Herriton, from what the others regard as an unsuitable marriage to a young Italian she has met on holiday in Tuscany. The novel opens as Lilia, an attractive and still youthful wi…
, was born in England, lived for some years in Italy and in 1966 took up a teaching post in Santa Barbara. A classicist and translator, he found inspiration for his own poetry in his impressively eclectic reading. The title of the first, slight, collection he published with Denis …
Small village perhaps best known now for the eponymous zoo; it was here that a young Gerald Durrell learnt about taking care of animals, being appointed assistant keeper in 1945. …
Michael Carney is a 35-year-old Irishman working in Coventry and living with his English wife Betty and his three wild younger brothers Harry, Iggy, and Hugo. Their father (?Dada?) and youngest brother Des are coming for a week's holiday. Michael hopes that Des will return to Mayo with his father and not get drawn into his brothers' violent way of life, especially as they are squaring up for a fig…
novelist: lives nr Ross‐on‐Wye1920?36. Country Dance 1932 . …
, distinguished glass-engraver and memoirist, younger brother of the designer Rex Whistler, is a graceful minor poet whose work, at first merely conventional and occasional (The Emperor Heart, London, 1936), gained depth after the death of his much-loved first wife, the actress Jill Furse, in 1944. Whistler wrote a book about her, Jill Furse: Her Nature and Her Poems 1915?1944 (London, 1945), and…
Old whaling port on the A170, 20 m. NW of Scarborough. The cross commemorating Caedmon, an Anglo‐Saxon herdsman, who in a vision suddenly received the power to compose verse, stands on the headland near the abbey he entered c. 670. Though other poems have been attributed to him, the hymn on Creation quoted by Bede is the only one thought to have survived. Mary Linskill (1840?91), novelist, was b…
naturalist: b. Selborne; educ. Oxford (Oriel College) 1740?3, Fellow at Oxford1744?55; spends holidays in Ringmer1745?80; stays in Thorney1750; visits London (Vauxhall Gardens); curate in West Dean; lives in Selborne1751?93; buried in Selborne. ?Invitation to Selborne? , The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne 1789 . …
poet: b. Nottingham; frequents Clifton; educ. and d. Cambridge (St John's College); buried and commemorated in Cambridge (St John's College). Clifton Grove and Other Poems 1803 , ?Oft in danger, oft in woe? . …
novelist: educ. Cambridge (Queens? College); teaches at Stowe1932?6; lives in Stowe1936?9, Alderney1947?64. Darkness at Pemberley 1933 , Mistress Masham's Repose 1947 , The Age of Scandal 1950 , The Goshawk 1951 , The Scandalmonger 1952 , The Book of Beasts 1954 , The Master 1957 , The Once and Future King 1958 , The Godstone and the Blackymor 1959 . …
novelist: b. and educ. Bedford; lodges in London (Strand: The Strand); lives in London (Carshalton) 1865?89, Hastings1892?1900, Groombridge1903?13; minister at Ditchling; d. and is buried in Groombridge. The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford 1881 , Mark Rutherford's Deliverance 1885 , The Revolution in Tanner's Lane 1887 , Catharine Furze 1893 , Clara Hopgood , Selection from the Rambler (ed.) 1907…
, was born in Glasgow and educated at the universities of Glasgow, Munich, and Paris. He was a lecturer in French at Glasgow in the mid-1960s, but since 1967 has lived in France. From 1983 he has been professor of twentieth-century poetics at the …
British novelist, born in London. Following her father's conversion to Catholicism, she was sent to a convent boarding school but later left in disgrace. She trained as an actress at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and afterwards toured the provinces. White began her journalistic career as Assistant Editor of Desmond McCarthy's Life and Letters and also worked as theatre critic of Time and Tide,…
West Indian playwright, born in Montserrat. Some of his plays have been produced by Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare's Theatre. At his best, in plays like ?The Nine Night? and ?Ritual by Water? (1984), he combines religious ritual and witty repartee with stark realism about life for West Indian families in Britain. His work tends to be restlessly experimental, and confronts the frustrations and …
American novelist, essayist, and critic, born in Cincinnati, Ohio, educated at the University of Michigan. His first novel, Forgetting Elena (1973), the account of an amnesiac who regains consciousness in the midst of strangers, demonstrated White's familiarity with such diverse genres as the nouveau roman, the traditional comedy of manners, and science fiction; White himself admitted the influenc…
American essayist and humorist, born in Mount Vernon, New York, educated at Cornell University; he joined The New Yorker in 1926. White's pithy, gently irreverent observations in his ?Notes and Comments? helped set the tone for the magazine throughout its heyday, and influenced his friend James Thurber, with whom he wrote Is Sex Necessary? (1929). His books of essays include Quo Vadimus? (1939); O…
British poet, born in Glasgow, educated at the University of Glasgow, and the Universities of Munich and Paris. After periods teaching at the University of Glasgow, he became Professor of twentieth-century poetics at the Sorbonne in 1983. White writes both poetry and prose in French as well as English. Wild Coal (1963), The Cold Wind of Dawn (1966), The Most Difficult Area (1968), and A Walk Along…
