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Biographies of British Novelists
Novelist and critic, Ackroyd has been successful at combining these roles in his literary output. Along with his biographies of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, he has made his reputation with novels like The Great Fire of London (1982), The Last Days of Oscar Wilde (1983), Hawksmoor (1985), and Chatterton (1987).
Amis was educated at St. John's College, Oxford, and went on to become a lecturer at University College, Swansea, in Wales, and then at Cambridge from 1949 to 1963. He began his career as a poet, publishing two volumes of verse, Bright November (1947) and A Frame of Mind (1953), but he achieved overnight fame with the success of
The daughter of a French émigré, Aubin was born in England. After a series of odes written in tribute to Queen Anne in 1707, she turned her attention to novels. In 1721 she began a period in which she turned out seven successful -989- novels in eight years, including The Strange Adventures of the Count de Vinevil and His Family (1721), The Life of Madam de Beaumount, a French Lady (1721), and Count Albertus (1728).
The sixth of seven children, Austen was encouraged to read and write by her father, the Reverend George Austen. Her letters tell us little about her intimate relationships, though she did have several suitors (none of whom she ever married). Instead, she spent her life among her close family, writing her novels at Chawton, Hampshire, in the family parlor. When she was just fourteen she wrote Love and Friendship, followed by A History of England at fifteen. A year later saw A Collection of Letters and, not long after, Lesley Castle. Her major novels were published, though not written, in the following order:
Bage was a skilled philosopher, political activist, and novelist who managed to integrate his Quakerism with a commitment to Rousseauist political theory. His primitivist novels were praised by Scott. They are Mount Henneth (1781), Barham Downs (1784), The Fair Syrian (1787), James Wallace (1788), Man as He Is (1792), and his most accomplished work, Hermsprong, or Man as He Is Not (1796).
Born in Northamptonshire, Barker is notable for her depiction of the lives of educated, unmarried women in seventeenth-century England and for her persistent exploration of the separation of the public and private lives of women. After a period of exile in France, she returned to England in 1713 and began publishing her novels. Many of her poems and novels are essentially autobiographical, written in the persona of 'Galesia.' Her novels include Exilius, or The Banish'd Roman (1715), Love Intrigues (1713), A Patch-Work Screen (1723), and The Lining of the Patch-Work Screen (1726).
Raised as a Protestant in Dublin, Beckett was educated at Trinity College where he studied English, French, and Italian. He went to Paris to be an English language instructor at the École Normale Supérieure and soon after met James Joyce, who became his lifelong friend. His first published piece of fiction was a story, «Assumption» (1929). After returning to Ireland as a lecturer -990- at Trinity College, he began a five-year sojourn in Europe. Finally settling in Paris, Beckett published his volume of stories More Pricks than Kicks (1934), as well as two novels of note, Murphy (1938) and Watt (1953). He published a trilogy in French that is distinguished by its existential lyricism: Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1951; Beckett's English translation, 1958), and L'Innommable (1953; English, 1960). His most famous work remains his play Waiting for Godot (1952), a masterpiece of the theater of the absurd. Beckett received the Nobel Prize in 1969.
An immensely wealthy man who was the son of a Lord Mayor of London, Beckford was also a member of Parliament and an art collector of some renown. His major literary achievement was the Oriental novel
In 1663, Aphra Behn and her family traveled to the British colony of Surinam. She was briefly married to a merchant, after which she took as her lover John Hoyle, the son of the regicide Thomas Hoyle. In 1666, during the Dutch war, she became a spy in the service of Charles II in Antwerp and remained throughout her life a partisan of the Stuarts. Behn's literary career began in 1670 with a series of plays, of which the most popular was The Rover (in two parts, 1677–1681). In The Lucky Chance (1686) she satirizes marriage. She is best known, however, for Oroonoko, or The History of the Royal Slave, in which she hearkens back to her trip to Surinam. In its excoriation of the African slave trade and of Christian hypocrisy, it qualifies as one of the first English philosophical novels.
Upon arriving in London at the age of twenty-one, Bennett embarked on a career in writing. After some minor publishing successes, he became assistant editor and then editor of the magazine Woman in 1893. He spent ten years in Paris from 1902 to 1912, then returned to England for good. Bennett's reputation is owed mainly to his novels about the region of his childhood known fictively as the Five Towns, Anna of the Five Towns (1902) and The Old Wives' Tale (1908). He followed these successes with the Clayhanger series: Clayhanger (1910), Hilda Lessways (1911), These Twain (1916), and The Roll Call (1918). His other novels include: The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902), The Card (1911), Mr. Prohack (1922), and Riceyman Steps (1923).
Bowen was born in Dublin and spent most of her life on her family's estate in County Cork. She spent ten years in London with her husband, an experience that contributed to her facility with descriptions of urban and rural settings. Her best-known novels include The Hotel (1927), The Last September (1929), The House in Paris (1935), The Death of the Heart (1938), and The Heat of the Day (1949).
Bradbury, educated at Leicester, London, and Manchester, is a professor of literature and American studies. He has combined important critical work with a career as a satirical novelist. His best-known novels are Eating People Is Wrong (1959), Stepping Westward (1965), The History of Man (1975), and Rates of Exchange (1983).
Braddon was educated privately and became an actress early in life. She was the mistress and eventually the wife of the publisher John Maxwell, with whom she had six children. Her most famous work, Lady Audley's Secret (1862), brought her great financial success and a reputation for glamorous and violent fiction. She went on to publish prolifically, including the novels Aurora Floyd (1863), The Doctor's Wife (1864), Henry Dunbar (1864), and Ishmael (1884).
