D.H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930) D.H Lawrence was an English novelist, story writer, critic, poet and painter, one of the greatest figures in the 20th-century English literature. Snake and How Beastly the Boingeoisie is arc probably his most anthologised poems. David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, central England. He was educated at Nottingham High School, to which he had won a scholarship. He worked as...

Christina (Georgina) Rossetti ( 1830 -1894 ) Christina Rossetti was born in London. Her father was the poet Gabriele Rossetti (1783-1854), professor of Italian at King’s College from 1831. He resigned in 1845 because of blindness. Christina was educated at home by her mother, Frances Polidori, a former governess. She shared her parents’ interest in poetry and was portrayed in the paintings and drawings of the Pre-Raphaelites. Christina was the model...

Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870) Charles Dickens is considered to be one of the greatest English novelists of the Victorian period. Dickens’s works arc characterised by attacks on social evils, injustice, and hypocrisy Charles Dickens was born in Land port, Hampshire on February 7, 1812. His father was a clerk in the navy pay office, who was well paid but often ended up in .financial troubles. In 1814, Dickens moved to...

Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) Charles Darwin was a British naturalist, who revolutionised the science of biology by his demonstration of evolution by natural selection. Darwin’s on The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation Of Favoured Races In The Struggle of Life, was published on November 24, 1859, and sold out immediately. Darwin was born in Shrewsbury on February 12, 1809. In 1827, he started theology...

Benjamin Disraeli (1804 – 1881) Benjamin Disraeli was born on December 21, 1804 at Bedford Row, London. He was the eldest son born to Isaac Disraeli and his wife Maria Basevi. He was educated at Miss Roper’s school in Islington and then went to Higham Fall School in Walthamstow between 1817 and 1821. In 1824, he was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn but he withdrew in 1831. After that Disraeli travelled through-out...

Arundhati Roy Born in 1961 in Bengal, Arundhati Roy grew up in Kerala. She was trained as an architect at the Delhi School of Architecture, but became better known for her complex, scathing film scripts. She wrote and starred in In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones, and wrote the script for Pradip Kishen’s Electric Moon. Media attention came when she spoke out in support of Phoolan Devi, who she felt...

Anton Pavlovish Chekhov  (1860 – 1904)   Chekhov was a Russian dramatist and short-story writer, ranked as one of the foremost figures in Russian literature. Chekhov was born on January 29, 1860, in Taganrog, Ukraine, and educated in medicine at Moscow State University. While still at the university he published humorous magazine stories and sketches. He rarely practiced medicine because of his success as a writer and because he had tuberculosis,...

Anthony Gilbert  (1899 1973) Pseudonym for Lucy Beatrice Malleson, Gilbert also wrote as J. Kilmeny Keith and Anne Meredith, prolific British mystery writer, a woman writing under a man’s name, whose most famous creation is lawyer-detective Arthur G. Crook. For many years Gilbert’s identity was kept a secret. She wrote straight fiction -mostly with a Victorian flavour – under the pseudonym of Anne Meredith. Lucy Malleson was born in Upper Norwood,...