The Brontë sisters are best-known as novelists: Emily gave us Wuthering Heights, Anne wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Charlotte offered Jane Eyre. But from a very young age, before they penned some of the greatest novels of the Victorian era, Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell – the names […]
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) is less famous now as a poet in her own right, and more familiar as the wife of Robert Browning, whom she courted through a series of extraordinary love letters in the 1840s. It was not always this way. Once upon a time, Robert Browning was […]
On one of Hardy’s best-known poems – analysed by Dr Oliver Tearle Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was a prolific poet, with his Complete Poems running to 1,000 pages. Yet he’s not generally known for being a satirical poet. ‘The Ruined Maid’, one of his earliest and best-known poems, is a rare […]