Raj Quartet: The Jewel in the Crown (1966), The Day of the Scorpion (1968), The Towers of Silence (1971), and A Division of Spoils (1975). His last novel, Staying On (1977), elaborates upon the lives of two minor characters from the Quartet.
Scott was born in College Wynd, Edinburgh, and was educated at Edinburgh University. After an apprenticeship with his father, he was called to the bar in 1792. He became a devotee of romantic Border tales and ballads, as well as romantic French, German, and Italian poetry. His earliest publications were translations of Bürger and Goethe. Scott married a Frenchwoman, Margaret Charlotte Charpentier, in 1797, and two years later was -1009- appointed sheriff-depute of Selkirkshire. His passion for Border lore resulted in a three-volume collection entitled Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–1803), and this was soon followed in 1805 by the poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The period from 1808 to 1817 saw the publication of his bestknown poems: Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, The Bridal of Triermain, The Lord of the Isles, and Harold the Dauntless. Scott found much more success as a novelist and his work was prodigious. The better-known novels include Waverley (1814),
The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, Shelley became the wife of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1816. Her best-known novels are the Gothic classics Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), Valperga (1823),
Smith is best remembered for her novels, though she achieved success in a variety of genres. Her Elegiac Sonnets were published in 1784; her novels were all published in the years between 1788 and 1793. The two most admired novels were
Born near Dunbarton in Scotland, Smollett attended Glasgow University. Though trained as a surgeon, he never made an adequate living at it. After joining the navy as a surgeon's mate, Smollett sailed to the West Indies where he met his wife and observed corruption and mismanagement in the navy that formed part of the subject of his very successful first novel, The Adventures of
The son of a church organist, Snow was born and raised in Leicester. After working for several years as a research scientist at Cambridge, he went on to administrative posts at the university. His novels deal in some way either with the life of science or with the ascension of a lower-middle-class protagonist to fame and fortune. The major novels include Death under Sail (1932), New Lives for Old(1933), The Search (1934), George Passant (1940), The Light and the Dark (1947), Time of Hope (1949), The Masters (1951), The New Men (1954), Homecomings (1956), The Conscience of the Rich (1958), The Affair (1959), Corridors of Power (1963), The Sleep of Reason (1968), and Last Things (1970).
Sterne was raised in various military stations throughout Ireland and England. After attending Jesus College, Cambridge, he took holy orders and embarked on a career as a country pastor. When he angered ecclesiastical authorities with his Political Romance, Sterne left his parish and began work on Tristram Shandy (1759). Though controversial, the novel made him famous and he continued it with several more volumes in 1761, 1765, and 1767. Ill health sent him to France for a period, which provided much of the material for his Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1767). Sterne continues to receive intense critical attention for his highly experimental narratives, which are thought to anticipate much of what has come to be known as stream of consciousness.
Stevenson was born in Edinburgh where he later attended university, studying first engineering and then law. Because he suffered from a chronic lung disease, Stevenson spent much of his life traveling in search of a more healthful climate. His first full-length novel, Treasure Island, was published in 1883. Having achieved a measure of success, Stevenson went on in the 1880s to publish a number of enduring works of adventure and romance: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Kidnapped (1886), and The Master of Ballantrae (1889). He died in Samoa while at work on an unfinished masterpiece, Weir of Hermiston (1896).
Swift was educated at Cambridge and York Universities. Beginning with his powerful and much-praised novel Waterland (1983), he has established himself as one of the most original younger novelists now at work in England. Among his other novels are
An Anglo-Irishman by birth, Swift graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, and spent several years in the household of Sir William Temple, a retired English diplomat. After becoming an ordained minister in 1694, Swift vainly sought ecclesiastical preferment and composed during these years a satire in defense of his patron, Temple, The Battle of the Books (1697), which he published with his complex satire against what he called the 'corruptions in religion and learning,' A Tale of a Tub (1704). The author of numerous political pamphlets and poems during his long career, Swift began as a writer for the Whigs but became disenchanted with that party's sympathy for religious dissent from the Church of England and moved to the Tory side. Resident for long periods in London on ecclesiastical business, he became an intimate of Tory writers and politicians such as Pope, Gay, Arbuthnot, Prior, Harley, and Bolingbroke, who formed the famed Scriblerus Club. With the defeat of the Tories after the death of Queen Anne, Swift spent most of his time in Ireland, where he was Dean of St. Patrick's in Dublin and became a fierce advocate of Irish rights against English oppression. His greatest work,
Born in Liverpool, Taylor was a soldier in the Indian army and later became a correspondent for the Times from 1840 to 1853. His popular novel Confessions of a Thug (1839) was the product of investigative pieces he had written on Thuggee, a terrorist movement in India. His stories written after his return to England in 1860 include the historical pieces Tara: A Mahratta Tale (1843), Ralph Darnell (1865), and Seeta (1872).
Born in India to an official of the East India Company, Thackeray was raised and educated in England from the age of six. After attending Trinity College, Cambridge, he went to France and Germany, and when he returned to London studied law briefly. After working as a journalist for a time, he studied art in Paris and continued to work as a journalist upon his return to England in 1837. A popular satirist in journals such as Fraser's and Punch, he began to publish his best-known novels serially in 1848 with Vanity Fair, followed by Pendennis (1848–1849), Henry Esmond (1852), and The Newcomes (1853–1855). A lecture tour to America in 1852 led to another novel published serially, The Virginians (1857–1859).
Though he attended both Harrow and Winchester, Trollope was not successful in school, and his father's business failures drove the family to move to Bel -1012- Bel-. Trollope went on to become a clerk in the General
