Sir Edmund Gosse (Sir Edmund William Gosse) Biography

British critic, biographer, and essayist, born in London and privately educated. His childhood and difficult relations with his father, the eminent zoologist Philip Henry Gosse (1810–88), are recounted in his most highly regarded work, Father and Son, the autobiography which first appeared anonymously in 1907. Having become an assistant librarian in the British Museum in 1867, he developed a special interest in the literatures of the Scandinavian countries; his numerous publications in the field include Studies in the Literature of Northern Europe (1879). He did much to establish Ibsen's reputation in Britain, translating Hedda Gabler (1891) and The Master Builder (with William Archer, 1893); his biography of the playwright appeared in 1907. His works as a biographer also include Thomas Gray (1882), The Life and Letters of John Donne (two volumes, 1899), Sir Thomas Browne (1905), and Algernon Charles Swinburne (1917), the lastnamed having been his close friend. Firdausi in Exile (1885) is the most notable of his numerous collections of verse; Collected Poems appeared in 1911. Among his other works in a career of prolific authorship are the lectures of From Shakespeare to Pope (1885), which provoked John Churton Collins's attacks on his scholarship, and Books on the Table (1921), a collection of his literary journalism. Having emerged as a figure of considerable literary eminence in the course of the 1890s, in 1904 he became librarian to the House of Lords. Twelve volumes of his Collected Essays appeared in 1927. Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape (1984) is a biography by Ann Thwaite.