Hester Chapone (1727 1801) was a British writer and advocate of women's education who is best known as the author of one of the most popular conduct books for women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Self-educated in French, Latin and Greek, Chapone published much of her work after the death of her husband in 1761. Her firm belief in the right of women to lead emotionally and intellectually fulfilled lives was much praised by contemporary feminists. These volumes, first published posthumously in 1807, contain a biography and a series of unpublished letters from Chapone to...

Hester Chapone (1727 1801) was a British writer and advocate of women's education who is best known as the author of one of the most popular conduct books for women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Self-educated in French, Latin and Greek, Chapone published much of her work after the death of her husband in 1761. Her firm belief in the right of women to lead emotionally and intellectually fulfilled lives was much praised by contemporary feminists. These volumes, first published posthumously in 1807 contain a biography and a series of unpublished letters from Chapone to...

Henry Crabb Robinson (1775 1867) was a lawyer, journalist and indefatigable diarist, who was acquainted with almost all the important figures in English and European cultural circles. His surviving writings amount to almost one hundred volumes, from which this selection was compiled in 1869. He studied at Jena where he became acquainted with Goethe and Schiller, and became foreign editor for The Times, despatching eyewitness reports on the Battle of Corunna. He travelled to Switzerland and Italy with Wordsworth, and his reminiscences of William Blake are an important source of information on...

Mary Howitt (1799 1888) was one of the most prolific female writers and translators of her day, producing over a hundred titles in her lifetime. Held in high regard by her contemporaries, Howitt was best known for her Scandinavian interests, particularly for her translations of Frederika Bremer and Hans Christian Andersen. She also published numerous collections of poetry and stories, sometimes in partnership with her husband, the writer William Howitt. This two-volume autobiography was published posthumously in 1889, and was completed and edited by her daughter Margaret. Volume 1 covers the...

American Unitarian minister George Willis Cooke (1848 1923) worked for almost thirty years in Unitarian churches across the United States before turning full-time to scholarly pursuits in 1900. Cooke, a voracious reader who was largely self-taught, attended Meadville Theological School in Illinois but never graduated. A radical in theology and politics, he was drawn to the transcendentalist authors and in 1881 published a critical study of the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Cooke's George Eliot: A Critical Study of her Life, Writings and Philosophy (1883) probably emerged from those same...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 1832) was one of Germany's greatest intellectuals. He exerted enormous influence in many fields, through works ranging from literature, linguistics and philosophy to the theory of colours and the biological sciences. Goethe's poetry and plays inspired music and opera as well as later writers, and his thought influenced philosophers including Nietzsche and Jung. Darwin himself referred to Goethe's botanical studies. The British philosopher and literary critic G. H. Lewes (1817 1878) carried out research for this hugely successful two-volume biography during a...