# data[].attributes.body
William Shakespeare was born in Stratford Upon Avon 1564. His father, John Shakespeare, was a glove maker and wool merchant whereas his mother, Mary Arden, was the daughter of a land-owner. As both his family was wealthy, Shakespeare studied at King Edward VI Grammar School in Stratford. He has had four sisters and three brothers; although three died due to the black plague .

Later on in life, Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway (a local farmer’s daughter), 1582 then had three children although their youngest son died at 11 years old. Their children, in age order, were named Susanna, Hamnet and Judith.

After earning a name (“Upstart Crow”) for himself as an actor, Shakespeare wrote the poems; ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ and ‘ Venus and Adonis’ in 1593 and 1594, respectively. These poems  focused on themes of love and sex, guilt and shame, and unbridled emotions. These themes would reoccur in his later works.

Henry VI, Titus Andronicus and A Midsummer's night dream were some of the earliest plays Shakespeare had written. ‘Henry VI’s themes were that of Deceit and Power, ‘Titus Andronicus’ focused on revenge and ‘A Midsummer Night ‘on Opposites. Shakespeare’s early plays have almost nothing in common; they’re simply good plays.  During this time period he also wrote the classic tragedy, Romeo and Juliet.

In his final years, 34 plays and 154 sonnets later, he died at the age of 52 and buried in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford.

# data[].attributes.body
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Devonshire, England on October 21st in 1772. In 1781 his father died and he was sent to Christ’s Hospital, a London grammar school. There he passed his adolescence training in Hebrew, Latin, Greek and English composition. In 1791 he went up to Jesus College, Cambridge. At this time he was going through an adolescent crisis. He fell in love with a friend’s sister, Mary Evans.

Coleridge left school in December 1793, but his brothers convinced him to go back. The following summer he left again and met poet Robert Southey. The two of them planned a utopian “Pantisocracy” to be set on the banks of Susquehanna. All the participants had to be married, so Southey married Edith Fricker and Coleridge married her younger sister Sara. However, their plans fell through, leaving them trapped in marriage.

By this time Coleridge had begun to seriously write poetry. He became friends with William Wordsworth and his wife Dorothy. In September 1798 the three of them visited Germany, where he discovered Kant, Schiller, Schelling and A. W. Schlegel.

In 1799 Coleridge stayed with the Wordsworths and fell in love with Sara Hutchinson, who appears in his poems as “Asra”

It is unclear if his growing addiction to opium was a symptom or cause of his growing depression. He travelled to Malta and Sicily in 1804 and returned to England two years later. By this time Coleridge’s opium addiction started to take over and ruin his life. He got divorced in 1808 and argued with Wordsworth in 1810. He then put himself under the care of Dr. Daniel in 1814.

Coleridge died on July 25th, 1834.

# data[].attributes.body
In the Spring of 1688, Alexander Pope was born.

He was a Roman Catholic and for this reason he was barred from attending public school or university. Pope was largely self-educated. He taught himself French, Italian, Latin, and Greek, and read widely, discovering Homer at the age of six.

At twelve, Pope composed his earliest extant work, Ode to Solitude;the same year saw the onset of the debilitating bone deformity originally attributed to the severity of his studies: Pott’s disease, a form of tuberculosis affecting the spine that stunted his growth and rendered him hunchbacked, asthmatic, frail, and prone to violent headaches.

Essay on Criticism was published anonymously in 1711 and established the heroic couplet as Pope’s principal measure.

He attracted the attention of Jonathan Swift and John Gay, who would become Pope’s lifelong friends and collaborators. Together they formed the Scriblerus Club, a congregation of writers endeavouring to satirise ignorance and poor taste through the invented figure of Martinus Scriblerus, who would serve as a precursor to the dunces in Pope’s late masterpiece, the Dunciad.

In 1712 we see the first appearance of the The Rape of the Lock, Pope’s best-known work and the one that secured his fame. Its mundane subject—the true account of a squabble between two prominent Catholic families over the theft of a lock of hair—is transformed by Pope into a mock-heroic send-up of classical epic poetry.

Pope in 1713 began work on his six-volume translation of Homer’s Iliad. He arranged for the work to be available by subscription, with a single volume being released each year for six years, a model that garnered Pope enough money to be able to live off his work alone, one of the few English poets in history to have been able to do so.

In 1719 he went on to translate the Odyssey—which he brought out under the same subscription model as the Iliad—and to compile a heavily-criticised edition of Shakespeare.

Critic and scholar Lewis Theobald’s repudiation of Pope’s Shakespeare provided the catalyst for his Dunciad, a vicious, four-book satire in which Pope lampoons the witless critics and scholars of his day, presenting their “abuses of learning” as a mock-Aeneid, with the dunces in service to the goddess Dulness; Theobald served as its hero.

Pope published Essay on Man in 1734, and it was intended as an introductory book discussing the overall design of this work. The poem has often been charged with shallowness and philosophical inconsistency.

Pope’s output slowed after 1738 as his health, never good, began to fail. He revised and completed the Dunciad and began work on an epic in blank verse entitled Brutus, which he quickly abandoned; only a handful of lines survive.

Alexander Pope died at Twickenham, surrounded by friends, on May 25th, 1744.

Since his death, Pope has been in a constant state of reevaluation. His high artifice and, at times, the sheer cruelty of his satire were an object of derision for the Romantic poets of the nineteenth century, and it was not until the 1930s that his reputation was revived. Pope is now considered the dominant poetic voice of his century.

# data[].attributes.body
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, the Victorian novelist. considered to be among the best of Victorian writers, Eliot dealt with themes of social change in English life, its classes and its hypocrisies.

She was born on the 22nd of November 1819 in Warwickshire. Evans was the youngest daughter to her fathers second marriage and considered to be of no physical beauty, she pursued knowledge from an early age to please her father. Eliot learned French, Italian, and German by the time she was sixteen while she was at school and then continued to study at home after her mother died from cancer and she was required to keep the house by her father. in Coventry 1841, she met Charles Bray and Charles Hennal who taught her relation between science and the Bible, presenting views in violent disagreement to those of her father. Evans began to question the church which caused many arguments between her and her father as she refused to attend church. However she continued to attend to please him until his death in 1849. Yet she retained her views during this time, translating D.F Stauss's Das Laben Jesu Kritisch Bearbeiteret and published it anonimouslyas 'The Life of Jesus Critically Examined' (1846).

After spending a time in Devizes and Geneva between 1848 and 1850, where she had complicated and scandalous relationships with married men, not necessarily romantic but in any case she had encounters jealously from wife's and mistresses. Evans returned to Coventry in 1850 where she was offered the chance to review R.W Mackay's 'The Progress of Intellect' in the Westminster Review, of which she later became the editor.

In 1851 Evans met George Hentry Leves founder of the Leader in which he wrote reviews of litarary and theatrical works. They evantualy went to live, married in all but legal form, in Germany where they lived. until his death in 1878.

The encouraging presence of Leaves provided the atmousphere for Evans to write the bulk of her literary work within their marriage. In her first novels 'Adam Bade' and 'Mill on the Floss' she used child hood tales and experiences as inspiration providing both physiological and realist perspectives on life in Britain in the late 18th century.

Yet her novel ‘Middlemarch’ is considered to be her masterpiece.
Every class of society is represented in full and each plot is interwoven to
reveal contrast and parallel. Yet the collective effect of the book is to show the acts of those who “lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.”

# data[].attributes.body
John Donne

# data[].attributes.body
Emily Jane Bronte was born on July 30th 1818 in Thornton,Yorkshire.She had 5 other siblings two of which were also authors (Charlotte and Anne Bronte)

When she was a child she read a lot and began making stories up with her siblings about a place called Gondal.

Other than being a writer Emily Bronte was a teacher at a school called law hill in Halifax.

Wuthering heights was published in December 1847 and poems by currer ,Ellis and Acton bell was published in 1846.

Emily Bronte died in December on the 19th in 1848 at the age of 30 and was buried in haworth in Yorkshire.

Throughout her lifetime she only wrote one novel , Wuthering heights. which she published under the pseudonym of Ellis bell.

The only other book she published was Poems by Currer,Ellis and Acton Bell, which is where she published some poems with her sisters Charlotte author of Jane eyre and Anne author of Agnes grey in this book Emily contributed 21 of her own poems.the book is said to have only sold two copies but they all still continued to write after this.

# data[].attributes.body
Aphra was born in 1640 and was the first professional woman writer in English literature. In 1664, she married Johan Behn, a merchant of Dutch or German parentage, but the marriage is not thought to have lasted very long. In her youth, she undertook spying missions for Charles II in Antwerp. Imprisonment for debt led her to write for an income. In the late 1660’s, she began to write plays for the Duke’s Theatre. Behn wrote a series of successful plays. Her first, 'The Forc'd Marriage' was produced in 1671. 'The Rover' (1681), her most successful, was produced in two parts and included in its cast Nell Gwyn, mistress of Charles II. Behn's novel 'Oroonoko' (1688) was the story of an enslaved African prince and is now considered a foundation stone in the development of the English novel. As well as plays and prose Behn wrote poetry and translated works from French and Latin. In her time she was a celebrity, unusual for her independence as a professional writer and her concern for equality between the sexes. Behn died on 16 April 1689 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

# data[].attributes.body
•Jane Austen was an English novelist whose books, set among the English middle and upper classes, are notable for their wit, social observation and insights into the lives of early 19th century women. •The seventh child and second daughter of Cassandra and George Austen, Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 in the village of Steventon in Hampshire, growing up in a close-knit family. In the 1790s, during her adolescence, she started to craft her own novels. •Jane lived within a world where a woman had only one way of making a better life for herself; marrying well. Her first love, at age 20, was Tom Lefroy, a law student from Ireland. However, Lefroy succumbed to his families expectation of advantageous marriage; whereas Jane was born into poverty. •Over the span of her life, Jane would become especially close to her father and older sister, Cassandra. In 1801 the family moved to Bath. After her father's death in 1805, Jane, her sister Cassandra and their mother moved several times, eventually settling in Chawton, near Steventon. •In her 30's, Jane started to anonymously publish her works. In 1816, at the age of 41, Jane started to become ill with what some say might have been Addison's disease. After attempting to continue her work, she then died on July 18, 1817, in Winchester, Hampshire, England. •Northanger Abbey- A comical love story set in Bath about a young reader who must learn to distinguish fantasy from reality. Miss Austen sold this to a publisher in 1803, however, it was her brother Henry Austen that published the novel after her death in 1817. •Sense and Sensibility - The impetuous Marianne Dashwood hastily falls into a romance that turns sour, while her practical older sister Elinor copes with the family's financial problems, and hides her own frustrated romantic hopes. The first of Austen's novels to be published. She began to write it in around 1797, but wasn't published until 1811. •Pride and Prejudice- This is one of Austen's most loved novels, based around the misjudgments we make when making first acquaintances and how our views can change as individuals learn more about each other. It was first written in the late 1700's, rewritten in 1811-1812, and then finally published in early 1813. •Mansfield Park - Thisis Jane Austen's most complex novel, exploring many themes, from the education of children, to the differences between appearances and reality. It was written between February, 1811 and the summer of 1813, the third novel she had published and first appeared on May 4, 1814. •Emma- The noveldeals with a young woman's maturation into adulthood and the trouble she gets herself into along the way.Written in 1814-1815, during which, Austen received a suggestion from a member of the Prince Regents' household that she dedicate it to His Royal Highness. •Persuasion- A novel of second chances, expectations of society, and the constancy of love. Written in 1815-1816, while Jane Austen was suffering from her fatal illness. She was still working on some revisions at the time of her death in 1817. The novel was published by her brother, Henry Austen.

# data[].attributes.body
Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer, philosopher and advocate of women's rights. She was born in London on April 27, 1759. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1792), in which she argues that women only appear to be inferior to men because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order.

Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia on 10 September 1797 after giving birth to her daughter Mary Shelley who later became a writer herself. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life received more attention than her writing. After her death, her widower published a Memoir (1798) of her life, revealing her unorthodox lifestyle, which unintentionally destroyed her reputation for almost a century. However, with the emergence of the feminist movement at the turn of the 20th century, Wollstonecraft's advocacy of women's equality and critiques of conventional femininity became increasingly important. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often quote both her life and work as important influences.

# data[].attributes.body
Alfred Lord Tennyson was the Poet Laureate (a person who is honored with an award for outstanding creative or intellectual achievement) for much of the last half of the 19th century. He was born in Lincolnshire, England in 1809. As a child Tennyson loved to read and was writing poetry at an early age. At the age of 12, he wrote a poem that was 6,000 lines long. In 1827, Tennyson and his brother published a book of poems. In 1830, he received a gold medal at university for one of his poems and published his first solo collection of poems. In 1833, he published another set of poetry, which included a well known work, called ‘The Lady of Shalott’. In 1854, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote his famous poem, 'T he charge of the light brigade'. Tennyson’s poetry covered such a variety of subjects. For example, medieval legends, historical events, everyday life and nature. He has been described as being the saddest of English poets. He wrote a poem about Boudicca, called ‘Boadicea’. In 1850, Alfred Lord Tennyson was made Poet Laureate, until his death. The 42 years are the longest time anyone has held the position. He was still writing poetry in his 80s when he died in 1892, and is buried in Poets Corner, in Westminster Abbey, London.