When Charles Dickens died in 1870, The Times of London successfully campaigned for his burial in Westminster Abbey, the final resting place of England's kings and heroes. Thousands flocked to mourn the best recognized and loved man of nineteenth-century England. His books had made them laugh, shown them the squalor and greed of English life, and also the power of personal virtue and the strength of ordinary people. In his last years Dickens drew adoring...

How does a story begin? Sometimes it begins with a dream, and a dreamer. Mary is one such dreamer, a little girl who learns to read by tracing the letters on the tombstone of her famous feminist mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and whose only escape from her strict father and overbearing stepmother is through the stories she reads and imagines. Unhappy at home, she seeks independence, and at the age of sixteen runs away with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley,...

"History meets memoir in two true-life love stories between two sets of writers--one unfolding in nineteenth century Rome, one in present-day Paris and London--which both reveal the longings and ambitions of the very contemporary Nell Stevens. In 1857, English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell completed her most famous work: the biography of her dear friend, the recently deceased Charlotte Bront. As publication loomed Elizabeth was keen to escape the reviews...

"Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, tells her persistent suitor that 'we have all a better guide in ourselves...than any other person can be'. Sometimes, however, we crave external guidance: and when this happens we could do worse than seek it in Jane Austen's own subtle novels. Written to coincide with Austen's 250th birthday, this approachable and intimate work shows why and how--for over half a century--Austen has inspired and challenged its author...

"Meet the man who created Alice, the Mad Hatter, and Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. Lewis Carroll is the pen name of Charles L. Dodgson, a mathematician and church deacon, who taught at Oxford University. He was inspired to write his best known works, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, by one of the Dean's daughters, Alice Liddell. The books were hugely successful and brought Carroll wide acclaim, especially for the nonsense...

"A charming picture book about the Brontë siblings as children creating their own adventures."-- Provided by publisher.

In her study of the married couple as the smallest political unit, Phyllis Rose uses as examples the marriages of five Victorian writers who wrote about their own lives with unusual candor.