The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (15 page)

Sor Juana achieved considerable renown in Mexico and in Spain. With renown came disapproval from church officials. Sor Juana broke with her Jesuit confessor, Antonio Núñez de Miranda, in the early 1680s because he had publicly maligned her. The nun's privileged situation began definitively to collapse after the departure for Spain of her protectors, the marquis and marquise de la Laguna. In November 1690, Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, bishop of Puebla, published without Sor Juana's permission her critique of a 40-year-old sermon by the Portuguese Jesuit preacher António Vieira. Fernández de Santa Cruz titled the critique
Carta atenagórica
(“Letter Worthy of Athena”). Using the female pseudonym of Sister Filotea, he also admonished Sor Juana to concentrate on religious rather than secular studies. Sor Juana responded to the bishop of Puebla in March 1691 with her magnificent self-defense and defense of all women's right to knowledge, the
Respuesta a sor Filotea de la Cruz
(“Reply to Sister Filotea of the Cross”). In the autobiographical section of the document, Sor Juana traces the many obstacles that her powerful “inclination to letters” had forced her to surmount throughout her life.

Yet by 1694 Sor Juana had succumbed in some measure to external or internal pressures. She curtailed her literary pursuits. Her library and collections were sold for alms. She returned to her previous confessor, renewed her religious vows, and signed various penitential documents. Sor Juana died while nursing her sister nuns during an epidemic.

(b. 1660, London, Eng.—d. April 24, 1731, London)

D
aniel Defoe was an English novelist, pamphleteer, and journalist. He remains best known as the author of
Robinson Crusoe
(1719–22) and
Moll Flanders
(1722).

Although intended for the Presbyterian ministry, Defoe decided against this, and by 1683 had set up as a merchant. He dealt in many commodities, traveled widely at home and abroad, and became an acute and intelligent economic theorist.

In 1692, however, after prospering for a while, Defoe went bankrupt. The main reason for his bankruptcy was the loss that he sustained in insuring ships during the war with France—he was one of 19 “merchants insurers” ruined in 1692. He suffered further severe losses in 1703, when his prosperous brick-and-tile works near Tilbury failed during his imprisonment for political offenses, and he did not actively engage in trade after this time.

With Defoe's interest in trade went an interest in politics, both foreign and domestic. The first of many political pamphlets by him appeared in 1683. He was a supporter of William of Orange—“
William
, the Glorious, Great, and Good, and Kind,” as Defoe was to call him—and Defoe supported him loyally, becoming his leading pamphleteer. In 1701, in reply to attacks on the “foreign” king, Defoe published his vigorous and witty poem
The True-Born Englishman
, an enormously popular work. The most famous and skillful of all his pamphlets, “The Shortest-Way With The Dissenters” (1702), was published anonymously but resulted in his being fined and sentenced to stand three times in the pillory, a prosecution that was likely primarily political, driven by an attempt to force him into betraying certain political allies. Although apprehensive of his punishment, Defoe had spirit enough, while awaiting his ordeal, to write the audacious “Hymn To The Pillory” (1703). This helped to turn the occasion into something of a triumph, with the pillory garlanded, the mob drinking his health, and the poem on sale in the streets.

Perhaps Defoe's most remarkable achievement at this time was his periodical, the
Review
. He wrote this serious,
forceful, and long-lived paper practically single-handedly from 1704 to 1713. At first a weekly, it became a thrice-weekly publication in 1705, and Defoe continued to produce it even when, for short periods in 1713, his political enemies managed to have him imprisoned again on various pretexts. It was, effectively, the main government organ. But, in addition to politics as such, Defoe discussed current affairs in general, religion, trade, manners, morals, and so on. His work undoubtedly had a considerable influence on the development of later essay periodicals (such as Richard Steele and Joseph Addison's
The Tatler
and
The Spectator
) and of the newspaper press.

With George I's accession (1714), Defoe continued to write for the government of the day and to carry out intelligence work. At about this time (perhaps prompted by a severe illness), he wrote the most popular of his many didactic works,
The Family Instructor
(1715). His writings to this point in his career would not necessarily have procured literary immortality for Defoe; this he achieved when in 1719 he turned to an extended work of prose fiction and (drawing partly on the memoirs of voyagers and castaways such as Alexander Selkirk) produced
Robinson Crusoe
. A German critic has called it a “world-book,” a label justified not only by the enormous number of translations, imitations, and adaptations that have appeared but by the almost mythic power with which Defoe creates a hero and a situation with which every reader can in some sense identify.

Here (as in his works of the remarkable year 1722, which saw the publication of
Moll Flanders
,
A Journal of the Plague Year
, and
Colonel Jack
) Defoe displays his finest gift as a novelist—his insight into human nature. The men and women he writes about are all, it is true, placed in unusual circumstances; they are all, in one sense or another, solitaries; they all struggle, in their different ways, through a
life that is a constant scene of jungle warfare; they all become, to some extent, obsessive. They are also ordinary human beings, however, and Defoe, writing always in the first person, enters into their minds and analyzes their motives. His novels are given verisimilitude by their matter-of-fact style and their vivid concreteness of detail; the latter may seem unselective, but it effectively helps to evoke a particular, circumscribed world. Defoe's range is narrow, but within that range he is a novelist of considerable power, and his plain, direct style, as in almost all of his writing, holds the reader's interest.

In 1724 he published his last major work of fiction,
Roxana
, though in the closing years of his life, despite failing health, he remained active and enterprising as a writer. In 1724–26 were published the three volumes of Defoe's animated and informative
Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain
, based in large part on his visits to Scotland, especially at the time of the Act of Union in 1707.

(b. Nov. 30, 1667, Dublin, Ire.—d. Oct. 19, 1745, Dublin)

T
he Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift is among the foremost prose satirists in the English language. Besides the celebrated novel
Gulliver's Travels
(1726), he wrote such shorter works as
A Tale of a Tub
(1704) and
A Modest Proposal
(1729).

In 1682 Swift entered Trinity College, Dublin, where he was granted his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1686 and continued in residence as a candidate for his Master of Arts degree until 1689. But the Roman Catholic disorders that had begun to spread through Dublin after the Glorious Revolution (1688–89) in Protestant England caused Swift, a Protestant, to seek security in England. In 1692 he received the degree of M.A. at the University of Oxford.
During a return visit to Ireland, he took orders in the Anglican church, being ordained priest in January 1695.

Between 1691 and 1694 Swift wrote a number of poems, notably six odes. But his true genius did not find expression until he turned from verse to prose satire and composed, between 1696 and 1699,
A Tale of a Tub
. Published anonymously in 1704, this work is outstanding for its exuberance of satiric wit and energy and is marked by an incomparable command of stylistic effects, largely in the nature of parody.

After 1699, Swift returned to Dublin as chaplain and secretary to the earl of Berkeley, who was then going to Ireland as a lord justice. During the ensuing years he was in England on some four occasions—in 1701, 1702, 1703, and 1707 to 1709—and won wide recognition in London for his intelligence and his wit as a writer. Early in 1700 he was preferred to several posts in the Irish church. His public writings of this period show that he kept in close touch with affairs in both Ireland and England. Swift's works brought him to the attention of a circle of Whig writers led by Joseph Addison, but Swift was uneasy about many policies of the Whig administration. He was a Whig by birth, education, and political principle, but he was also passionately loyal to the Anglican church, and he came to view with apprehension the Whigs' growing determination to yield ground to the Nonconformists.

A momentous period began for Swift when, in 1710, he once again found himself in London. A Tory ministry headed by Robert Harley (later earl of Oxford) and Henry St. John (later Viscount Bolingbroke) was replacing that of the Whigs. Swift's reactions to such a rapidly changing world are vividly recorded in his
Journal to Stella
, a series of letters written between his arrival in England in 1710 and 1713. The astute Harley made overtures to Swift and won him over to the Tories. Swift quickly became the Tories'
chief pamphleteer and political writer. He was rewarded for his services in April 1713 with his appointment as dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. With the accession of George I, the Tories were a ruined party, and Swift's career in England was at an end. He withdrew to Ireland, where he was to pass most of the remainder of his life.

After a period of seclusion, Swift gradually regained his energy. He turned again to verse, which he continued to write throughout the 1720s and early '30s, producing the impressive poem
Verses on the Death of Doctor Swift
, among others. By 1720 he was also showing a renewed interest in public affairs. In his Irish pamphlets of this period he came to grips with many of the problems, social and economic, then confronting Ireland. Of his Irish writings,
A Modest Proposal
remains perhaps the best known. It is a grimly ironic letter of advice in which a public-spirited citizen suggests that Ireland's overpopulation and dire economic conditions could be alleviated if the babies of poor Irish parents were sold as edible delicacies to be eaten by the rich.

Swift's greatest satire,
Gulliver's Travels
, was published in 1726. It is uncertain when he began this work, but it appears from his correspondence that he was writing in earnest by 1721 and had finished the whole by August 1725. Its success was immediate. This work, which is told in Gulliver's “own words,” is the most brilliant as well as the most bitter and controversial of his satires. In each of its four books the hero, Lemuel Gulliver, embarks on a voyage, but shipwreck or some other hazard usually casts him up on a strange land.
Gulliver's Travels
's matter-of-fact style and its air of sober reality confer on it an ironic depth that defeats oversimple explanations. Is it essentially comic, or is it a misanthropic depreciation of humankind? Pulling in different directions, this irony creates the tensions that are characteristic of Swift's best work, and reflects his
vision of humanity's ambiguous position between bestiality and reasonableness.

Swift remained active throughout most of the 1730s—Dublin's foremost citizen and Ireland's great patriot dean. In the autumn of 1739 a great celebration was held in his honour. He had, however, begun to fail physically and later suffered a paralytic stroke, with subsequent aphasia. After his death in 1745, he was buried in St. Patrick's Cathedral.

(b. Nov. 21, 1694, Paris, France—d. May 30, 1778, Paris)

V
oltaire (the pseudonym of François-Marie Arouet) is one of the greatest of all French writers, known especially as a courageous crusader against tyranny, bigotry, and cruelty. He studied law but abandoned it to become a writer.

After the death of Louis XIV, in 1715, under the morally relaxed Regency, Voltaire became the wit of Parisian society, and his epigrams were widely quoted. In 1718, after the success of
Oedipe
, the first of his tragedies, he was acclaimed as the successor of the great classical dramatist Jean Racine and thenceforward adopted the name of Voltaire. (The origin of this pen name remains doubtful.) He continued to write for the theatre all his life.

Voltaire was twice imprisoned in the Bastille for his remarks and in 1726 was exiled to England, where his philosophical interests deepened; he also learned English, and to the end of his life he was able to speak and write it fluently. He returned to France in 1728 or 1729. His epic poem
La Henriade
(1728) was well received, but his lampoons of the Regency and his liberal religious opinions caused offense. His
Lettres philosophiques
(1734) spoke out against established religious and political systems: they contrast
the Empiricist psychology of the English philosopher John Locke with the conjectural lucubrations of the French philosopher René Descartes. A philosopher worthy of the name disdains empty, a priori speculations, Voltaire argues; he instead observes the facts and reasons from them.