FICTION DURING THE ROMANTIC AGE - MARY SHELLEY

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was the only daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Their high expectations of her future are, perhaps, indicated by their blessing her upon her birth with both their names. She was born on 30 August 1797 in London. The labor was not difficult, but complications developed with the afterbirth. Despite expert attention, her mother sickened from placental infection and died eleven days after her birth, on 10 September. Continue reading here.

Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" 

Revising Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" 

NOVEMBER

JOHN KEATS, THE POET OF BEAUTY

John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 in Moorgate, London, England, the first child born to Frances Jennings and Thomas Keats. After leaving school in Enfield, Keats went on to apprentice with Dr. Hammond, a surgeon in Edmonton. After his father died in a riding accident, and his mother died of tuberculosis, John and his brothers moved to Hampstead. It was here that Keats met Charles Armitage Brown (1787-1842) who would become a great friend. Remembering his first meeting with him, Brown writes "His full fine eyes were lustrously intellectual, and beaming (at that time!)". Much grieved by his death, Brown worked for many years on his biography, Life of John Keats (1841). In it Brown claims that it was not until Keats read Edmund Spencer's Faery Queen that he realised his own gift for the poetic. Keats was an avid student in the fields of medicine and natural history, but he then turned his attentions to the literary works of such authors as William Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer. Continue reading here.

Here you can find a summary and an analysis of John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale". 

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE SUBLIME

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

A major figure among the English Romantic poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley led an unconventional life and died tragically young.

He was born on 4 August 1792 near Horsham in Sussex. His father was a member of parliament. Shelley was educated at Eton and at Oxford University. There he began to read radical writers such as Tom Paine and William Godwin. In 1811, he was expelled for his contribution to a pamphlet supporting atheism.  Continue reading here.

http://www.online-literature.com/shelley_percy/

http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/shelley/

https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/s/shelleys-poems/percy-bysshe-shelley-biography

ENGLISH ROMANTICISM

The historical and literary background

Thomas Gray

William Blake

The First Generation of Romantic Poets

The Second Generation of Romantic Poets

Here you can find a PDF presentation too.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR ENGLISH THROUGH READING BOOKS

Advice to improve your reading and writing

9 great novels to help improve your English

100 novels everyone should read

OCTOBER

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ELIZABETH GASKELL!

Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson was born on 29 September 1810 in Chelsea, London, England. She was the eighth child born to Elizabeth  (1771-1811) and William Stevenson (c.1770-1829), a writer and civil servant with the Treasury. Her only surviving sibling John (1798–1828), who had joined the merchant navy, disappeared while on a journey to India. An early loss for Elizabeth was her mother's death; she went to live at Heathwaite in Knutsford, Cheshire with her 'more than mother' maternal Aunt Hannah Lumb (1767-1837). Surrounded by mostly female relatives and a busy social life, Knutsford and surroundings, its famous heath and people, would provide much fodder for Elizabeth's future works. Despite the losses she suffered at an early age, she was a gregarious young lady and enjoyed the company of friends and relatives on jaunts in the Cheshire countryside. Continue reading here.

Here and here you can find my previous posts about this writer.

Why was the Cranford author considered so “fearful”?

Elizabeth Gaskell: Biography 

SEPTEMBER

I HAVE A DREAM SPEECH

"I Have a Dream" is a public speech delivered by American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on 28 August 1963, in which he called for an end to racism in the United States and called for civil and economic rights. Delivered to over 250,000 civil rights supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the speech was a decisive moment of the American Civil Rights Movement. 

A DEVASTATING AND HEARTBREAKING EARTHQUAKE

The earthquake that struck central Italy in the early hours of Wednesday has killed almost 300 people. Among scenes of devastation, dozens of emergency services staff and volunteers have been working night and day in the hope of finding people alive in the mangled wreckage of homes in demolished towns.

The earthquake was powerful enough to be felt in Bologna to the north and Naples to the south, both more than 220 km (135 miles) from the epicentre.

Here you can read Beppe Severgnini's article about "Italy's fragile beauty".

THE SECRET GARDEN

"The Secret Garden"  is a novel by  Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was initially published in serial format beginning in 1910, and was first published in its entirety in 1911.

It is now one of Frances Hodgson Burnett's most popular novels, and is considered to be a classic of English children's literature. 

Here you can find a simplified version of the novel and some activity worksheets here .

Click here to read a book review. Here you can find a  detailed analysis of the novel.

FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

Thomas Hardy  was born on 2 June 1840 in the county of Dorset. His father was a stonemason and his mother educated him until age eight. His family was too poor to pay for university, so he became an architect's apprentice until he decided to focus on writing. His stories are generally set in the Dorset area. In 1874 he married Emma Gifford, and her death in 1912 had a profound effect on him. In 1914 he married his secretary, Florence Dugdale. His first few novels were unsuccessful, and even his later works were controversial and often censored. Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure drew strong disapproval  for their sexual frankness and social criticism that Hardy stopped writing fiction, focusing instead on his poetry. He is best known for Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. He died in 1928, at the age of eighty-seven.

Virginia Woolf  noted some of Thomas Hardy’s enduring power as a writer: “Thus it is no mere transcript of life at a certain time and place that Hardy has given us. It is a vision of the world and of man’s lot as they revealed themselves to a powerful imagination, a profound and poetic genius, a gentle and humane soul.”

AUGUST