George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, was born on 22 November 1819 at South Farm on the Arbury estate near Nuneaton in Warwickshire, England, and died in London on 22 December 1880. She became one of the defining writers of the Victorian age, though she reached that position by a route unusually difficult for a woman of her period. Novelist, translator, editor, critic, essayist, and poet, Eliot brought philos…
“Appeals founded on generalisations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity.”
Neighbourhood:
Love Poets, Pre-Raphaelite Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
Sir Samuel Ferguson was born in Belfast on 10 March 1810, at a moment when Ireland’s political union with Great Britain was still recent and its cultural future was fiercely contested. He died in Howth, County Dublin, on 9 August 1886, having become one of the most distinctive Irish literary figures of the nineteenth century: poet, barrister, judge, antiquary, translator, public servant, and advocate for the serious…
Neighbourhood:
Irish Poets, Nature Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Longing, Sensuality