William Shakespeare
1564-1616
William Shakespeare is the England's most famous playwright and poet. He wrote some comedies, tragedies and history plays, among which Macbeth, Hamlet, The Tempest and As You Like it. His plays have been translated many languages across the world, and are still performed and studied today.
Frances Burney
1752-1840
Frances Burney was a successful and much-appreciated English novelist during her life-time, Burney had sunken into oblivion until feminist critics rediscovered her work, which also includes theatre plays. She is now considered to have established the tradition of the female novel of manners which inspired Jane Austen.
John Keats
1795-1821
John Keats was a Romantic poet renowned for his highly emotional odes and ballads about nature, beauty and lost love. His most famous poems are "Ode to a Nightingale" and "The Belle Dame Sans Merci." He suffered from tuberculosis and died in Rome aged twenty-seven.
Elizabeth Gaskell
1810-1875
Elizabeth Gaskell was a British novelist whose novels chronicle the tremendous social and economic changes brought about by the industrial revolution. Gaskell's novels threw light on the dire consequences of industrialization, among which poverty and greater social divides. She is the author of Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1854).
Charlotte and Emily Brontë
1816-1855 (Charlotte) and 1818-1848 (Emily)
Charlotte and Emily Brontë are two sisters who belonged to a family of writers and artists which also included their younger sister Anne and elder brother Branwell. They lived and wrote in a cramped parsonage set in Haworth, in Yorkshire. The bleak wind-swept moors that surrounded them were one of their major sources of inspiration. They published Jane Eyre ans Wuthering Heights under the pseudonyms of Currer and Ellis Bell.
Emily Dickinson
1830-1886
Emily Dickinson was an innovative American poet who wrote minimalist introspective poems about nature, death and love. She lived as a recluse until her death, dedicating herself to poetry.
Elizabeth Bowen
1899-1973
Elizabeth Bowen was an Irish novelist who was influenced by Joyce's and Woolf's modernism. Her novels explore the inner life of the mind, as in The Death of the Heart. Bowen was particularly interested in what individuals keep hidden within themselves. She also wrote ghost stories.
Kazuo Ishiguro
1954-...
Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-born English author who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. His novels mostly deal with love, loss, memory and the quest for identity. His most famous novels are The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go.