biographers-from-england

"Mrs. Ross laid in our wood, wine and servants for us, and they are excellent. She had the house scoured from Cellar to rook the curtains washed and put up, all beds pulled to pieces, beaten, washed, and put together again, and beguiled the Marchese into putting a big porcelain stove in the vast central hall. She is a wonderful woman, and we don't quite see how or when we should have gotten under way without her."

"Janet Ross was one of those -like dragons for whom the word “formidable” was practically invented. Born in London in 1842, she spent the last six decades of her life — from 1867 until her death in 1927 — as an increasingly commanding personage in the Anglo-Tuscan colony around , where she was known (and feared) as Aunt Janet. freely acknowledges near the beginning of “Queen Bee of Tuscany” that Ross “had her limitations. Though intelligent and learned, especially for an autodidact, she was by no means brilliant. She had little imagination or inner life, and she made no towering contribution to humanity.” Thus the biographer throws down his own gauntlet: Why, then, are we reading about her? Downing, a co-editor of , and a walking Who’s Who of the , provides an answer in the form of It’s Who She Knew. And Aunt Granite (as the younger generation called her) knew everybody — or at least everybody who passed through Florence, which in Downing’s telling comes to the same thing. An endless procession of now forgotten artists and writers and social somebodies made their way to her door. Major figures do show up. In 1887, Henry James pays her a three-day visit, although “nowhere in her writings,” Downing acknowledges, somewhat sheepishly, “does she so much as mention James.”"

"The great event of my life was my birthday, when I was allowed to dine downstairs, and to invite my particular friends. My fifth I well remember, for Thackeray played a trick on the "young revolutionist," as he afterwards called me, because I was born on the . My guests were , , , Bayley, and Thackeray, who gave me an oyster, declaring that it was like cabinet pudding. But I turned the tables on him, for I liked it, and insisted, as queen of the day, on having two more of his. I still possess a sketch he made for the of ' while I was sitting on his knee."

"How many of the travelers who visit now remember that she is one of the most ancient cities of Italy, and was famous when Rome was but a hamlet? They can see the ancient walls, but can they conceive that in the long history of the community settled between the rivers and the grey lines of buildings are but of yesterday? They may perhaps remember that a palace of Hadrian, one of the greatest or Roman Emperors, stood where the now stands; that temples to Apollo and to covered the sites of the churches of and in Borgo; that at the foot of the Via S. Maria grave priestesses of sang hymns in honour their goddess, who ripened the golden corn which covered the plains from the Monte Pisano to the coast; and that in a temple which stood in the Piazza S. Andrea love-sick young men and maidens presented their offerings at the shrine of Venus and made their vows to the goddess they evoked. But can they realize that in those far-off days, before our Christian era began, Pisa was a city so old that its beginnings were even then half-concealed, half-concealed, half-disclosed, in legends of her origin?"

"From the very first possessed a correct and vigorous style, and a nice sense of language, which were hereditary rather than implanted, and to these qualities was added a delightful strain of humour, shedding a current or original thought all through her writings. That her unusual gifts should have been so early developed is hardly surprising with one of her sympathetic temperament when we remember the throng of remarkable men and women who frequented the Austins' house. The Mills, the s, the s, the Carlyles, the s, Sydney Smith, , , Jeremy Bentham, and Lord Jeffrey, were among the most intimate friends of her parents, and 'Toodie,' as they called her, was a universal favourite with them. Once, staying at a friend's house, and hearing their little girl rebuked for asking questions, she said: ' My mamma never says "I don't know" of "Don't ask questions." '"

"... ... made the move, relocating to ... the . He formally entered the city in February 1865 ... Two years after this Janet arrived from Alexandria, Egypt, where she had been living with her husband Henry Ross, for the previous five years. Her trip to was planned as a short holiday. She booked a berth on a run-down steamer that took a route out from Alexandria across the Mediterranean to the southern Italian port of . From there she went by carriage northwards up the peninsula, through beautiful countryside with hills of old knotted olive trees and swathes of perfumed lavender, beneath a brilliant blue sky. Her plan was to arrive in Florence and stay for a fortnight as the guest of an old family friend and relative by marriage, , the British Ambassador to Italy. She had read about Florence, its treasures and its history. She was familiar with its great writers, Dante and Boccaccio, the unsurpassed beauty created by its painters, and the understated order achieved by its architects. She had heard stories of the proud patrician families with their age-old feuds and allegiances — names like , and — and she knew something of the story of Savonarola and how he was burnt at the stake in the . This was her opportunity to witness for herself the history that till now she had only read about in books."

"Of 's seven children, was perhaps the handsomest and most gifted; the extraordinary vigour of her mind and body was almost overpowering, but it stood her in good stead during a long and not over-prosperous life, and was tempered by an excellent judgment and a very kind heart. No one ever appealed to her in vain; and in her old age children flocked round her with delight to hear "" or one of , so well and graphically told."

"Cabbage (Red) ' alla Fiamminga.' Remove the outer leaves of a and cut it in pieces. Put it into boiling water for fifteen minutes, then dry, and place it in a sauce-pan with four ounces of , a chopped-up onion, a , two s, and a little salt and pepper. Boil slowly for about half an hour, stirring it often. When cooked, take out the bay leaf, add a little butter and serve quickly."

"Holmes is not offering a history of either or its technologies. The and are barely mentioned (perhaps because they feature in The Age of Wonder). What we have instead is a "cluster of balloon stories" drawn from life and fiction, and more from life than from fiction. Some of the footnotes are anecdotal, but the book itself is more than that; Holmes is a distinguished with a fine sense of how individual lives reflect and redirect the larger forces that flow through and around them."

"Emotions about our lost houses and gardens have to do with growing old and acquiring guilt: we are always leaving our first home and lamentingly looking back to it. The whole point of the Garden of Eden is that we are going to leave it, and then spend the rest of our time wishing we could return to it."

"At eighteen, just out of and desperate for freedom, I set off alone wandering around France for several months. My mother sent me her old copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ', as a kind of good-luck charm. A little red with a tiny map in the front. I still have it. Suddenly I thought, Here is the map and this is the journey I must make. So I went down through the , following Stevenson’s track, on foot with a , sleeping rough—but no donkey. It only lasted a couple of weeks, but for me, it was tough, very lonely, a kind of initiation. The is like a French version of the , wild and remote. I saw no one for days, but I somehow believed I saw Stevenson and met him. I slept à la belle toile and bathed in the mountain streams. I had a for fifty s in my shoe. I started keeping a notebook about Stevenson’s trip, and that’s how it all began."

"Of the many metaphors for biography, two make useful starting points. One — a disturbing image — is the autopsy, the forensic examination of the dead body which takes place when the is unusual, suspicious, or ambiguous. ... There is something gruesome about this metaphor. It is used when commentators on biography want to emphasize its ghoulish or predatory aspects. ... A contrasting metaphor for biography is the portrait. Whereas autopsy suggests clinical investigation and, even, violation, portrait suggests empathy, bringing to life, capturing the character. The portraitist simulates warmth, energy, idiosyncrasy, and personality through attention to detail and skill in representation."

"It is a brilliant vignette, prompting a meditation on the role of memory in biographical writing, and an exploration of the things that get forgotten in the writing of lives. Throughout This Long Pursuit, Holmes moves between reflections on the subjects of his career as a and sketches of himself at work. We see him lecturing on Coleridge at the , scribbling at a table in the , scurrying from the with a glossy catalogue under his arm and newly discovered stories brimming in his mind. The result is a glorious series of essays on the art of life writing and a worthy successor to his earlier volumes on the craft, and ’."

"When I was very young, I think I was aware that I was reading different kinds of books, which slightly took my teachers aback. I can remember boastfully telling my teacher, when I was about 10, that I was reading '. She clearly thought this was a bad idea. But I was a slightly odd, inward child. At home – we didn’t have television – I was reading, reading all the time."

"There is a tiny pause, right at the start of the film that caught at my heart, but I didn't think anyone else would notice it. It took me back to the work I did on my biography of Virginia Woolf. There were two documents in her archives that I found particularly distressing. One was the little soft-covered notebook she used for her diary for 1941. I knew there wouldn't be any entries after , but I couldn't help turning the blank pages that followed, unable to believe that the voice I had been living with for the past five years had stopped speaking. The other was her suicide note. (One of the suicide notes, in fact. She wrote three — two versions for her husband, , and one for her sister — unable to stop revising her work until the end.)"

"The had promulgated an essentially private, elitist, specialist form of knowledge. Its ' was Latin, and its common currency mathematics. Its audience was a small (if international) circle of s and savants. Romantic science, on the other hand, had a new commitment to explain, to educate, to communicate to a general public. This became the first great age of the public scientific lecture, the laboratory demonstration and the introductory textbook, often written by women. It was the age when science began to be taught to children, and the ‘experimental method' became the basis of a new, secular , in which the infinite (whether divine or not) were increasingly valued for their own sake."

"Talking with a younger generation of readers, I see how Shelley has become increasingly a European figure, a Dante among English poets, and an image of Faustian daring, whose writing and travels still inspire that primary spirit of adventure into a wider world of ideal possibilities. Nothing is so moving to the as finding an old copy of his book in a stranger's hands, battered and wine-stained from its voyages, its margins scrawled, its poetry underlined, its pages bent with maps and postcards, its cover bleached with sun and sea."

"Athens gave Birth and Perfection to the Art, and seems, like the true Mother, to have been most fond of it, and therefore gave its professors the greatest Encouragement. The Value that Government had for both is evident from these two Instances: Sophocles, as a Reward of his Antigone, had the Government of the City and Island of Samos confer'd upon him: And on the Death of Eupolis in a Sea-Fight, there was a Law publish'd, that no Poet for the Future shou'd go to the Wars; so great a Loss they thought the Death of one Poet to the Commonwealth."

"You lay a wreath on murdered Lincoln's bier, You, who, with mocking pencil, wont to trace, Broad for self-complacent British sneer, His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face."

"The first detailed depiction of Stonehenge to survive is a , now in the , by . De Heere was a artist who lived in London from 1567 to 1577 and seems to have made another, less distinguished, contribution to the subject by carving his name on sarsen 53. Meanwhile, despite doubts about its reliability, , remained popular and its account of Stonehenge was repeated by other authors. Only with the Renaissance, the revival of classical scholarship and the dawn of the , did it begin to fall out favour, for the nature of history writing itself was changing."

"He went about his work — such work as few Ever had laid on head and heart and hand — As one who knows, where there’s a task to do, Man’s honest will must Heaven’s good grace command."

"The Old World and the New, from sea to sea, Utter one voice of sympathy and shame! Sore heart, so stopped when it at last beat high, Sad life, cut short just as its triumph came."

"How his quaint wit made home-truth seem more true."

"gave Britain's capital cities two of their greatest landmarks, the , generally, if inaccurately, known as ,1 and, in Edinburgh, the . He built the first since 's and he r. But his influence depended not only, not even primarily, on his buildings, it was both wide and more elusive. He gave the nineteenth century a new idea about what architecture could be and mean. He saw it as moral force in society and as a romantic art. (p. 1) 1. It is in fact the bell that is called Big Ben. (p. 536)"

"Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer, To lame my pencil, and confute my pen, To make me own this hind of princes peer, This rail-splitter a true-born king of men."

"A difficulty for Hill is that many of the she celebrates will be no more than names to most readers. But she combats this by selecting details that bring them to life. , for example, co-founder of the , lived in picturesque squalor in an abandoned convent with an alcoholic wife and children who ran wild among the ruins. He eked out a living as a commercial artist and taught drawing to, among others, Gustave Flaubert, whose portrait he drew. ... Hill is a magnificent historian and commands a vast range of sources. Her great strength, as she showed in her witty book on Stonehenge, is that she is not inclined just to laugh at what seem ludicrous beliefs. Rather, she carefully unpicks them, showing what made them attractive to their cultures. Time’s Witness is a book to change the way you think about history."

"Don't know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal – you sockdologizing old man-trap!"

"Arthur Benson, one of the coterie of clever, literary-minded younger men whose company the ageing novelist relished, found himself incapable of sharing the enthusiasm of and for ."

"Today, the most famous scene from Mary's life and, perhaps, in is the stormy summer night at the on when Byron, his handsome young doctor , the Shelleys and , who was carrying Byron's child, decided to write for fun. This was the night on which Frankenstein, that best known of all Romantic works, was born. Its author was not yet nineteen. Frankenstein has become part of our lives."

"The , constructed from rosy bricks and crowned with curved stone s, stands among the meadows flanking the , in the middle of England, a hundred s to the north of London. Starting life as a modest built in the , it was enlarged twice. An ambitious owner redesigned it in the , to incorporate a large carved staircase and a grand reception room on an upper floor. In the 1820s, the House gained a courtyard, a library and a lake. The estate, easily encompassed by an hour's brisk walk, is surprisingly varied in its landscape, incorporating traces of an and a trading post."

"In 1928 Edmund Blunden's ' was widely praised for its lyrical, approach. Sassoon's ', also published in 1928, set the scene for the contrast between an idyllic, pre-war world and the savagery of war explored in his ."

"Eccentricity has not always been encouraged by the prim editors of . Invited to list his recreations, omitted motorbikes and wrote instead: , and tennis. Identifying himself as of provided a greater source of satisfaction."

"Usually dismissive of other female writers, Riding had praised Stein in the final chapter of A Survey of Modernist Poetry for using a language of divine ordinariness. It was 's idea that they should invite Miss Stein to publish something with the ."

"The s whom we admire to-day do not appear to love their s, and the s who appraise their books show no signs of doing so either. For a writer or critic to show delight in a character would would seem to-day rather naïve, an old-fashioned response left over from the days of Dickens and Surtees. Characters, it seems, are no longer objects of affection."

"Arnold Rattenbury was too young to be very active in the , but in the early he was friendly with several older Communist writers who had been. ... Although I make limiting judgements on Auden in the following pages, his centrality in the seems to me unmistakable. Unlike other hostile critics of 'orthodoxy', Mr Rattenbury does give a hostage to fortune by proposing an alternative."

"The poet and critic Bernard Bergonzi, who has died aged 87, was long associated with the teaching of 20th-century English literature at . His books shed new light on the English writing of the first world war and the 1930s, and on developments in criticism since the 60s, which he largely disliked. Monographs on HG Wells, TS Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Arnold and Graham Greene showed Bergonzi at his sensible and lucid best."

"Glendinning's biography is unusual in including almost as much about Raffles's relatives and friends as about him. This is as it should be, as they were crucial to his career as well as to his happiness; especially his two wives, the vivacious , who died in 1814, and then the strong and resourceful , who bore him his children, and fanned his reputation, and her own, after Raffles's death."

"As Wells insists, many of Verne's inventions have materialized since his time. travel is a commonplace, and the circumnavigation of the moon is more than a possibility. Well's imaginings, however, remain as unattainable now as when he wrote: no one has yet contrived to travel through time, or ; we are still unable to , nor can we ."

"He cannot be seen as an Enlightenment figure. What we think of as eighteenth-century, in terms of architecture, furniture, painting and the decorative arts, came mostly after his heyday. He died in 1745 and was isolated by deafness and dementia from the late 1730s."

"It was the patrician in Vita that first fascinated Mrs Woolf. The aristocratic manner, she noted, was like an actress's ..."

"and , the principal family historians, both wrote that it was Mr Trollope's idea that should go to America. They may have been fudging the real issues here, just as they fudged the long association of Mrs Trollope with ."

"With his wife, he founded the . He had no idea when he married Virginia Stephen how her mental instability would determine and distort his own trajectory, nor that she would become one of the most famous English authors of the twentieth century. He knew how to love, and she was the love of his life. After came change and a . In his last decade, five volumes of autobiography won him respect and recognition. He left not only distinguished books on international relations, but also satirical squibs, a great mass of literary and political journalism, a play, poetry, short stories, and two novels."

"'s letters to Ray give a very good idea of her literary influences. These were definitely not her mother's her favorites (Hardy, ', Gissing) and Elizabeth has grown out of Dostoevsky, dislikes Dickens, finds Lawrence a 'bloody crosspatch' and thinks Katherine Mansfield moaned too much. 'It is easy to see who is behind me: Jane Austen & Chekhov & EM Forster & Virginia Woolf. ...' ... Other important writers for her were Sterne (for his relationship to the reader), Richardson and Fielding. Above all she revered Jane Austen and Turgenev."

"was always to attribute depression to ill-health or, when she was much older, to the prevailing east wind. She never assumed it was a facet of her temperament or that her life could reasonably cause it."

"It’s possible, these days, to think of E. M. Forster's cultural role as the providing of stories for to make into pretty movies. For people who think that way, Nicola Beauman's new biography will be a useful corrective. Here, in a book of modest length (at last, a biography that is not longer than its subject's collected works!), is what every general reader should know about Forster's life and contacts."

"Lyra Innocentium was much valued by the devout, but it never attained to the world-wide popularity of ', and in some quarters it gave positive offence. ... Keble's chief reason for publishing Lyra Innocentium was his desire to raise money for the rebuilding of Hursley Church."

"In 1920, , Edith, and Helen Rootham instituted the Anglo-French Poetry Society, largely as a platform for Mrs. Bennett's recitations."

"A picnic is the Englishman's grand gesture ..."

"... today even our s are presented at a Garden Court, followed by a more or less picnic on the lawn. All classes and ranks share in this taste ..."

"It was at , and then at , that Georgina's literary career took wing. In 1943 her Charlotte Mary Yonge: the Story of an Uneventful Life was published. 's reputation as a writer was then at its nadir, and Georgina's book provoked a savage and contemptuous review by Mrs , but it was greeted with joy by a wide, though secret band of fans throughout the country, and led to a revival in Charlotte Yonge studies in university English literature departments, and to the foundation, a few years later, of the Charlotte Mary Yonge Society, an elite group of writers such as , and ."