MEET SOME OF THE MOST PROMINENT AUTHORS OF OUR TIME...

1. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Perhaps the greatest English author that ever lived was William Shakespeare. He was an English poet, playwright, and actor. He was born on 26 April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon. His father was a successful local businessman and his mother was the daughter of a landowner. Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and nicknamed the Bard of Avon. He wrote about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.

Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights.

Shakespeare's plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.

2. JANE AUSTEN 

One wonders at the restraint in that, considering that Jane Austen is indisputably one of the greatest English writers - some say the greatest after Shakespeare - and certainly the greatest English novelist and one of the most famous English women who ever lived.

She was the daughter of George Austen, the vicar of the Anglican parish of Steventon in Hampshire. She had six brothers and one sister, Cassandra, to whom she was very close. The family did not have enough money to send her to school so she was educated at home, where she read a great deal, directed by her father and brothers Henry and James. She also experimented with writing little stories from early childhood and one can still read her juvenilia, which has been collected by various editors. 

A mark of her genius is that she was there near the beginning of the novel's emergence as a literary form, and all of her novels, including the earliest of them, written when she was very young, are perfectly formed. No English novelist has since bettered them and the novel hasn't developed much since her definitive examples of the form. That is amazing when one thinks about how the other art forms -painting, music, architecture - fall out of fashion with each generation, and give way to new forms. And also when one thinks about how many novels have been written since hers.

Jane Austen died on 18th July 1817 at the age of 41. We do not have an accurate diagnosis of the cause of her death but medical researchers think it may have been the rare disease, Addison's disease of the suprarenal glands.

3. WILLIAM BLAKE

William Blake was  born on the 28th of November 1757 and was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. The reason he was disregarded is because he was very much ahead of his time in his views and his poetic style, and also because he was regarded as being somewhat mad, due to behaviour that would be thought of as only slightly eccentric today- for example his naturistic habit of walking about his garden naked and sunbathing there. He illustrated his poems and the poems of others like Chaucer, Dante and Milton but his exhibitions of these illustrations were sneered at, and one reviewer wrote that they were 'nonsense, and egregious vanity,' and another called Blake 'an unfortunate lunatic.'

Blake began training as an illustrator and engraver and worked at that as his day job. And in the meantime he wrote his poems. The most important thing about Blake as a poet is his rejection of the highly sophisticated verse structures of the 18th century: he looked back to the more immediate, accessible poetry of Shakespeare, Jonson and the Jacobeans. He used monosyllabic words and packed more meaning and feeling into them that any of the poets of his time did, writing their expansive, sophisticated poems full of figures of speech. For example, two of Blake's most famous collections: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience contain some of the finest and most profound of English poems, all done in the most simple language. 

4. CHARLES DICKENS

Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the 20th century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are still widely read today.

Born on the 7th of February 1812 in Portsmouth, Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. Despite his lack of formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed readings extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms.

We see him as the author of such classics as Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House and many others. All of his novels are English classics. 

Dickens had an almost unbelievable level of energy. In addition to writing all those lengthy books in long-hand, he had time to pursue what would have been full-time careers for most people in acting, literary editing social campaigning and philanthropic administration. He was also the father of a large family, as well as being involved in a love affair that lasted many years.

He began as a journalist, writing little pieces about daily life and developed very quickly into a best-selling novelist, avidly read throughout the English speaking world. At the same time he was appearing in plays and touring, reading from his novels. And editing his literary journals, Household Words and All the Year Round, which featured the serialisation of his novels, with people queuing up to buy them, eager to find out how the previous episode would be concluded.

Charles Dickens died on the 9th of June 1870.

5. GEORGE ELIOT

Mary Ann Evans, born on the 22nd of November 1819, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862-63), Middlemarch (1871-72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of which are set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.

Although female authors were published under their own names during her lifetime, she wanted to escape the stereotype of women's writing being limited to lighthearted romances. She also wanted to have her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and widely known work as an editor and critic. Another factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny, thus avoiding the scandal that would have arisen because of her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes.

Eliot's Middlemarch has been described as the greatest novel in the English language. It is impossible to overestimate the significance of Eliot's novels in the English culture: they went right to the heart of the small-town politics that made up the fabric of English society. Her novels were essentially political: Middlemarch is set in a small town just as the Reform Bill of 1832 was about to be introduced. She goes right into the minutia of the town's people's several concerns, creating numerous immortal characters whose interactions reveal Eliot's deep insight into human psychology.

George passed away on the 22nd of December 1880. 

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