LIVES WELL LIVED? A pick from biography and memoir

This is a recommended study of John Keble (25 April 1792 – 29 March 1866) an English churchman and poet, and one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Movement). Keble College, Oxford (below, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keble_College,_Oxford and http://www.keble.ox.ac.uk/) was named after him. He was the author of The Christian Year (1827, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Christian_Year and the full text at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4272/4272-0.txt), a […]

For all lovers of Thomas Hardy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy) this biography is required reading. Gittings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gittings) shows us the man whose last novel, Jude The Obscure, was published in 1895 but who lived on to the ripe old age of 87, dying in 1928. Latterly the author was much more concerned with poetry (http://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/thomas_hardy_2004_9.pdf). Andrew (A.N.) Wilson devotes the first

For a time, towards the end of the eighteenth-century, William Cowper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cowper) was the foremost poet in England. But David Cecil’s biography (1929) doesn’t celebrate a life of success, rather, in Cowper’s own words, ‘the strange and uncommon incidents of my life.’ Cowper suffered from severe bouts of depression (http://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/help-information/mental-health-a-z/D/depression/). His personal tragedy however enriched English literature:

No one could have imagined a Pugin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus_Pugin and http://www.pugin.com/): ‘he is a marvellous man there is only one Pugin’, wrote his friend and admirer the artist William Etty. Inspired and inspirational, needy, driven, inadequately rewarded in his lifetime for work into which he poured his heart and soul, he seems not to have had a

Noel Annan’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Annan,_Baron_Annan) biography of Leslie Stephen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Stephen) justly won The James Tait Black Memorial prize in 1951. This is a fascinating insight into a complex and talented man, and also a window onto the pre-occupations of the Victorians. 448 in University of Chicago Press paperback edition ISBN 978-0226021065 Leslie Stephen  

First published in 1957, Maurice Cranston’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Cranston) book is recognized as the definitive biography of John Locke (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_locke). It provides that rare combination of sound scholarship, a wealth and variety of original source material, and a lively, compelling narrative. This is required reading for all those fascinated by the ideas of Empiricism and Liberalism.  

Death is something that happens to other people: and hence, it might be inferred, the popularity of biography. Those whose lives are recorded die in the last chapter: the rest of us live for ever. The point was made by Lucretius in his long poem On the Nature of Things (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura), which was intended to

The definitive scholarly biography of Charlotte Bronte (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Bront%C3%AB). Winifred Gerin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winifred_Gerin) sticks as closely as possible to Charlotte Bronte’s own words, as found in her letters and other writings. A must read for all those captivated by the author of  Jane Eyre (1847). 656 pages in Oxford paperback edition ISBN 978-0198811527 Charlotte Bronte

The long-awaited literary biography of the supreme ‘poets’ poet’. John Clare (1793-1864, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clare) is the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self, but until now he has never been the subject of a comprehensive