Books by Edmund Gosse

WORK IS IN FRENCH This book is a reproduction of a work published before 1920 and is part of a collection of books reprinted and edited by Hachette Livre, in the framework of a partnership with the National Library of France, providing the opportunity to access old and often rare books from the BnF's heritage funds.

CONTENTSChildhood and Early College LifeThe Grand TourStoke-Pogis. - Death of West. - First English PoemsLife at CambridgeThe "Elegy." - Six Poems. - Death of Gray's Aunt and MotherThe Pindaric OdesBritish Museum. - Norton NicholsLife at Cambridge. - English TravelsBonstetten. - DeathPosthumous

Charles Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909) was an often controversial English poet, playwright, novelist and literary critic. He and fellow writer Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) became close friends, and Gosse eventually undertook this brief biography of the poet, which was published in 1912.

First published in 1897 (though the version reissued here was published in 1898 in the series Short Histories of the Literatures of the World), this book documents English literature from Chaucer to Tennyson. Rather than focusing on the biographical and historical aspects, Gosse concentrates instead on literary technique and form.

Edmund Gosse wrote of his account of his life, "This book is the record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs." Father and Son remains one of English literature's seminal autobiographies. In it, Edmund Gosse recounts, with humor and pathos, his childhood as a member of a Victorian Protestant sect and his struggles to forge his own identity despite the loving control of his father. His work is a key document of the crisis of faith and doubt and a penetrating exploration of the impact of evolutionary science. An astute, well-observed, and moving portrait of the tensions of family life, Father and Son remains a classic of twentieth-century literature. This edition contains an illuminating introduction, and provides a series of fascinating appendices including extracts from Philip Gosse's Omphalos and Edmund Gosse's harrowing account of his wife's death from breast cancer.

Published in 1889, Gosse's study of English literature from 1660 to 1780 was commissioned by Macmillan as the third volume in a series of literary histories. It was a landmark in a relatively new field of academic study, popular and accessible, providing an enthusiastic and wide-ranging introduction to the period.

At birth Edmund Gosse was dedicated to 'the Service of the Lord'. His parents were Plymouth Brethren. After his mother's death Gosse was brought up in stifling isolation by his father, a marine biologist whose faith overcame his reason when confronted by Darwin's theory of evolution. Father and Son is also the record of Gosse's struggle to 'fashion his inner life for himself' - a record of whose full and subversive implications the author was unaware, as Peter Abbs notes in his Introduction. First published anonymously in 1907, Father and Son was immediately acclaimed for its courage in flouting the conventions of Victorian autobiography and is still a moving account of self-discovery.