William Shakespeare
1564-1616
William Shakespeare is the England's most famous playwright and poet. He wrote some comedies, tragedies and history plays, among which Macbeth, Hamlet, The Tempest and As You Like it. His plays have been translated many languages across the world, and are still performed and studied today.
Charlotte and Emily Brontë
1816-1855 (Charlotte) and 1818-1848 (Emily)
Charlotte and Emily Brontë are two sisters who belonged to a family of writers and artists which also included their younger sister Anne and elder brother Branwell. They lived and wrote in a cramped parsonage set in Haworth, in Yorkshire. The bleak wind-swept moors that surrounded them were one of their major sources of inspiration. They published Jane Eyre ans Wuthering Heights under the pseudonyms of Currer and Ellis Bell.
George Eliot
1819-1880
George Eliot's real name was Mary Ann Evans. Her novels, among which The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, feature middle-class characters and address the social and economic changes of her time. Her heroine Dorothea Brooke has inspired Henry James's Isabel Archer in The Portrait of the Lady.
Thomas Hardy
1840-1928
Thomas Hardy is a novelist and poet who drew upon his native Dorset to write grippingly tragic stories of unrequited love, failure and bankrupt. A rather fatalistic writer, Hardy believed in the inevitability of fate and wrong choices leading to individual downfall. His most famous novel include Tess of the d'Urberville, The Return of the Native, Far from the Madding Crowd and Jude the Obscure.
Edith Wharton
1862-1937
Edith Wharton is an American author whose novels portray the rise and fall of New York high society, a milieu whose people she knew best. She wrote The Age of Innocence, The Custom of the Country, The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome. She also penned Gothic short stories, also set in New York.
Edward Abbey
1927-1989
Edward Abbey is an American novelist and essayist, born in Arizona, and renowned for his commitment to the preservation of the natural environment. He was sometimes tooted as an eco-terrorist for his allegiance to deep ecology. He wrote Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang.