Biography – Page 6 – Interesting Literature

A Very Short Biography of Robert Browning

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Robert Browning (1812-89) is, along with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the most famous and widely studied poet of the Victorian era. Yet for the first two decades that he was writing, he was virtually ignored by the public. In this post we offer a very short biography of Browning, a brief introduction to his life and work, touching upon the most curious and interesting aspects.

Robert Browning was born in London in 1812. Aged 14, he wrote a poem, ‘The Dance of Death’, in which Ague, Consumption, Fever, Madness, and Pestilence compete for the title of man’s worst foe; this early poem features many of the macabre hallmarks of his later poetry, dealing with death, murder, and ugliness (physical and moral) as it so often does.

Five Fascinating Facts about Christopher Marlowe

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

1. Christopher Marlowe was a pioneer of the Elizabethan theatre.

He influenced Shakespeare, and Shakespeare’s biographer Jonathan Bate has even suggested that Marlowe and Shakespeare became locked in a competition, where each influenced the other. Marlowe was just two months older than Shakespeare: he was born in Canterbury in February 1564, the son of a shoemaker. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (part one of a two-parter) is thought to be one of the first English plays written in blank verse – that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter.

A Very Short Biography of Elizabeth Daryush

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Who was Elizabeth Daryush? Although she was championed and praised by poets and critics including Roy Fuller and Donald Davie, her poetry is not widely read or studied now. Yet the biography of Elizabeth Daryush reveals some intriguing family connections and a curious poet, whose work is worth (re)discovering. In this post, then, we offer a very short overview of Daryush’s life and work.

A Very Short Biography of George Bernard Shaw

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was a prolific writer of plays but also of essays justifying his plays: the two (double-columned) volumes of his Plays and Prefaces both stretch to over 1,000 pages. In this post, we’re going to attempt to distill his busy life into a very short biography – and, we hope, an interesting one – covering some of the most fascinating aspects of the man known variously as Bernard Shaw, George Bernard Shaw, or even just plain ‘GBS’.

A Very Short Biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) was one of the most popular poets of the Victorian era, and although her achievement is now eclipsed by that of the man she married in 1846, she was the more popular poet of the two of them during her lifetime and only narrowly lost out to Tennyson for the position of Poet Laureate in 1850. Here we offer a very short biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, taking in her secret elopement, her Victorian verse epic, and other highlights from her interesting life and work.