The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (19 page)

The decade following the publication of
Lyrical Ballads
were troubled years for Coleridge. He split with Wordsworth, and opium retained its powerful hold on him; the writings that survive from this period are redolent of unhappiness, with self-dramatization veering toward self-pity. In spite of this, however, there also appear signs of a slow revival. A course of lectures on Shakespeare he delivered during the winter of 1811–12 attracted a large audience. Coleridge's play
Osorio
, written many years before, was also produced at Drury Lane with the title
Remorse
in January 1813.

After Coleridge read the 17th-century archbishop Robert Leighton's commentary on the First Letter of Peter, Christianity, hitherto one point of reference for Coleridge, became his “official” creed. By aligning himself with the Anglican church of the 17th century at its best, he hoped to find a firm point of reference that would both keep him in communication with orthodox Christians of his time (thus giving him the social approval he always needed, even if only from a small group of friends) and enable him to pursue his former intellectual explorations
in the hope of reaching a Christian synthesis that might help to revitalize the English church both intellectually and emotionally.

One effect was a sense of liberation and an ability to produce large works again. He drew together a collection of his poems (published in 1817 as
Sibylline Leaves
) and wrote
Biographia Literaria
(1817), a rambling and discursive but highly influential work in which he outlined the evolution of his thought and developed an extended critique of Wordsworth's poems. For the general reader
Biographia Literaria
is a misleading volume, since it moves bewilderingly between autobiography, abstruse philosophical discussion, and literary criticism. But over the whole work hovers Coleridge's veneration for the power of imagination.

His final decades were more settled years. His election as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1824 brought him an annuity and a sense of recognition. In 1830 he joined the controversy that had arisen around the issue of Catholic Emancipation by writing his last prose work,
On the Constitution of the Church and State
. The third edition of Coleridge's
Poetical Works
appeared in time for him to see it before his final illness and death in 1834.

Coleridge's achievement has been given more widely varying assessments than that of any other English literary artist, though there is broad agreement that his enormous potential was never fully realized in his works.

(b. Dec. 16, 1775, Steventon, Hampshire, Eng.—d. July 18, 1817, Winchester, Hampshire)

J
ane Austen is the English writer who first gave the novel its distinctly modern character through her treatment
of ordinary people in everyday life. Austen also created the comedy of manners of middle-class life in the England of her time in her novels.

Austen was born in the Hampshire village of Steventon, where her father, the Reverend George Austen, was rector. She was the seventh child in a family of eight. Her closest companion throughout her life was her elder sister, Cassandra, who also remained unmarried. Their father was a scholar who encouraged the love of learning in his children. His wife, Cassandra, was a woman of ready wit, famed for her impromptu verses and stories. The great family amusement was acting.

Jane Austen's lively and affectionate family circle provided a stimulating context for her writing. Moreover, her experience was carried far beyond Steventon rectory by an extensive network of relationships by blood and friendship. It was this world—of the minor landed gentry and the country clergy, in the village, the neighbourhood, and the country town, with occasional visits to Bath and to London—that she was to use in the settings, characters, and subject matter of her novels.

Her earliest-known writings date from about 1787, and between then and 1793 she wrote a large body of material that has survived in three manuscript notebooks. These contain plays, verses, short novels, and other prose and show Austen engaged in the parody of existing literary forms, notably sentimental fiction. Her passage to a more serious view of life from the exuberant high spirits and extravagances of her earliest writings is evident in
Lady Susan
, a short novel-in-letters written about 1793–94 (and not published until 1871).

In 1802 it seems likely that Austen agreed to marry Harris Bigg-Wither, the 21-year-old heir of a Hampshire family, but the next morning changed her mind. There
are also a number of mutually contradictory stories connecting her with someone with whom she fell in love but who died very soon after. Since Austen's novels are so deeply concerned with love and marriage, there is some point in attempting to establish the facts of these relationships. Unfortunately, the evidence is unsatisfactory and incomplete.

The earliest of her novels,
Sense and Sensibility
, was begun about 1795. Between October 1796 and August 1797 Austen completed the first version of
Pride and Prejudice
. In 1797 her father wrote to offer it to a London publisher for publication, but the offer was declined.
Northanger Abbey
, the last of the early novels, was written about 1798 or 1799, probably under the title “Susan.” In 1803 the manuscript of “Susan” was sold to the publisher Richard Crosby for £10. He took it for immediate publication, but, although it was advertised, unaccountably it never appeared during her lifetime.

After years of unsettled lodgings, as a result of the family's move to Bath, Austen's brother Edward was able in 1809 to provide his mother and sisters with a large cottage in the village of Chawton, within his Hampshire estate, not far from Steventon. The prospect of settling at Chawton had already given Austen a renewed sense of purpose, and she began to prepare
Sense and Sensibility
and
Pride and Prejudice
for publication. Two years later Thomas Egerton agreed to publish
Sense and Sensibility
, which came out, anonymously, in November 1811. Both of the leading reviews, the
Critical Review
and the
Quarterly Review
, welcomed its blend of instruction and amusement. Meanwhile, in 1811 Austen had begun the most serious of her novels,
Mansfield Park
, which was finished in 1813 and published in 1814.
Pride and Prejudice
seems to have been the fashionable novel of its season. Between January 1814 and March 1815 she wrote
Emma
, which appeared in
December 1815; of her novels it is the most consistently comic in tone.
Persuasion
(written August 1815–August 1816) was published posthumously, with
Northanger Abbey
, in December 1817.

The years after 1811 seem to have been the most rewarding of her life. She had the satisfaction of seeing her work in print and well reviewed and of knowing that the novels were widely read. They were so much enjoyed by the Prince Regent (later George IV) that he had a set in each of his residences; and
Emma
, at a discreet royal command, was “respectfully dedicated” to him.

For the last 18 months of her life, she was busy writing. In January 1817 she began
Sanditon
, a robust and self-mocking satire on health resorts and invalidism. This novel remained unfinished owing to Austen's declining health. In April she made her will, and in May she was taken to Winchester to be under the care of an expert surgeon. She died on July 18, and six days later she was buried in Winchester Cathedral. Her authorship was announced to the world at large by her brother Henry, who supervised the publication of
Northanger Abbey
and
Persuasion
. There was no recognition at the time that regency England had lost its keenest observer and sharpest analyst.

(b. Jan. 22, 1788, London, Eng.—d. April 19, 1824, Missolonghi, Greece)

L
ord Byron was a British Romantic poet and satirist whose poetry and personality captured the imagination of Europe.

In 1805 Byron entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he piled up debts at an alarming rate and indulged in the conventional vices of undergraduates there. His
first published volume of poetry,
Hours of Idleness
, appeared in 1807. A sarcastic critique of the book in
The Edinburgh Review
provoked his retaliation in 1809 with a couplet satire,
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
, in which he attacked the contemporary literary scene. This work gained him his first recognition.

In 1809 Byron took his seat in the House of Lords, and then embarked on a grand tour of Europe. In Greece Byron began
Childe Harolde's Pilgrimage
, which he continued in Athens. In March 1810 he sailed for Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey), visited the site of Troy, and swam the Hellespont (present-day Dardanelles) in imitation of Leander. In March 1812, the first two cantos of
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
were published by John Murray, and Byron “woke to find himself famous.” The poem describes the travels and reflections of a young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands. Besides furnishing a travelogue of Byron's own wanderings through the Mediterranean, the first two cantos express the melancholy and disillusionment felt by a generation weary of the wars of the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras.

During the summer of 1813, Byron apparently entered into intimate relations with his half sister Augusta, now married to Colonel George Leigh. He then carried on a flirtation with Lady Frances Webster as a diversion from this dangerous liaison. The agitations of these two love affairs and the sense of mingled guilt and exultation they aroused in Byron are reflected in a series of gloomy and remorseful verse tales he wrote at this time, including
The Corsair
(1814), which sold 10,000 copies on the day of publication.

Seeking to escape his love affairs in marriage, Byron proposed in September 1814 to Anne Isabella (Annabella)
Milbanke. The marriage took place in January 1815, and Lady Byron gave birth to a daughter, Augusta Ada, in December 1815. Annabella soon after left Byron to live with her parents, amid swirling rumours centring on his relations with Augusta Leigh and his bisexuality. Wounded by the general moral indignation directed at him, Byron went abroad in April 1816, never to return to England.

Byron sailed up the Rhine River into Switzerland and settled at Geneva, near Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin, who had eloped, and Godwin's stepdaughter by a second marriage, Claire Clairmont, with whom Byron had begun an affair in England. In Geneva he wrote the third canto of
Childe Harold
(1816), which, perhaps predictably, follows Harold from Belgium up the Rhine River into Switzerland. At the end of the summer the Shelley party left for England, where Claire gave birth to Byron's illegitimate daughter Allegra in January 1817. In May he arrived in Rome, gathering impressions that he recorded in a fourth canto of
Childe Harold
(1818). He also wrote
Beppo
, a poem in ottava rima that satirically contrasts Italian with English manners.

In the light, mock-heroic style of
Beppo
Byron found the form in which he would write his greatest poem,
Don Juan
, a satire in the form of a picaresque verse tale. The first two cantos of
Don Juan
were begun in 1818 and published in July 1819. Byron transformed the legendary libertine Don Juan into an unsophisticated, innocent young man who, though he delightedly succumbs to the beautiful women who pursue him, remains a rational norm against which to view the absurdities and irrationalities of the world.

Shelley and other visitors in 1818 found Byron grown fat, with hair long and turning gray, looking older than his years, and sunk in sexual promiscuity. But a chance
meeting with Countess Teresa Gamba Guiccioli, who was only 19 years old and married to a man nearly three times her age, reenergized Byron and changed the course of his life. He won the friendship of her father and brother, Counts Ruggero and Pietro Gamba, respectively, who initiated him into the secret society of the Carbonari and its revolutionary aims to free Italy from Austrian rule. Byron wrote cantos III, IV, and V of
Don Juan
at this time; it and a number of other works were published in 1821.

After collaborating with Shelley and Leigh Hunt on a periodical, Byron's attention wandered. Cantos VI to XVI of
Don Juan
were published in 1823–24 by Hunt's brother John, after Byron quarrelled with his publisher. From April 1823 Byron aided the Greeks in their struggle for independence from the Turks. He made efforts to unite the various Greek factions and took personal command of a brigade of Souliot soldiers, reputedly the bravest of the Greeks. But a serious illness in February 1824 weakened him, and in April he contracted the fever from which he died. Deeply mourned, he became a symbol of disinterested patriotism and a Greek national hero. His body was brought back to England and, refused burial in Westminster Abbey, was placed in the family vault near Newstead.