This four-volume edition of the letters of Mrs Elizabeth Montagu (1718 1800), the 'Queen of the Bluestockings', was edited by her nephew and adopted son Matthew (1762 1831) and published in 1809 13. The daughter of wealthy parents, and well educated in history and languages, at the age of twenty-one she married Edward Montagu, a grandson of the earl of Sandwich whose income derived from northern estates and coal mines, and began to establish a London salon attended by the intellectual cream of British society, including Johnson, Burke, Garrick, Hannah More and Hester Chapone. The letters (and...

This 1932 work covers 'every person, place, book and author named in Jane Austen's novels, fragments and juvenilia'.

This autobiography of the prominent Church of Scotland minister Alexander Carlyle (1722-1805) was eventually published in 1860, in an edition by the historian John Hill Burton (1809-81). Carlyle had left instructions to his executors to publish not only his memoirs but also his sermons and other writings, but only this book and two other items were ever produced. Carlyle states in the first chapter that he began this work on his seventy-eighth birthday, 'having observed how carelessly, and consequently how falsely, history is written'. His account of his life and times is hugely entertaining,...

In this light-hearted book, the classical scholar J. P. Mahaffy (1839-1919) analyses the art of conversation.