Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 at Steventon, Hampshire, into a family whose modest circumstances, intellectual liveliness, and close emotional bonds supplied the material conditions for an extraordinary literary education. She was the seventh of eight children born to the Reverend George Austen and Cassandra Leigh Austen. Her father was rector of the parishes of Steventon and Deane; her mother came from the…
“You are now collecting your people delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life. Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.”
Neighbourhood:
Light Verse Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Sorrow, Longing
Dorothy Parker, born Dorothy Rothschild on 22 August 1893 and dead on 7 June 1967, became one of the most recognizable voices of twentieth-century American letters: a poet of compressed heartbreak, a theater and book critic of dangerous precision, a short-story writer of unusual psychological acuity, a screenwriter, and a public political dissenter. For much of her life, she was treated as the emblem of a particular…
“It was the greatest act of friendship I'd known.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Edwardian Poets, Light Verse Poets, Modernist Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Irony, Sorrow, Despair