John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, as well as an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, philosopher, prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy.
Henry James was an American author who became a British citizen in the last year of his life. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of renowned philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
The Orient Express was a long-distance passenger train service created in 1883 by Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (CIWL).
Charles Eliot Norton was an American author, social critic, and professor of art. He was a progressive social reformer and a liberal activist whom many of his contemporaries considered the most cultivated man in the United States.
Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, literary and art critic, and fiction writer, regarded as one of the great stylists. His works on Renaissance subjects were popular but controversial in his times.
Bankimchandra Chatterjee or Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, CBE was an Indian novelist, poet and journalist. He was the composer of Vande Mataram, originally in Sanskrit, personifying India as a mother goddess and inspiring activists during the Indian Independence Movement. Chattopadhyay wrote thirteen novels and many serious, serio-comic, satirical, scientific and critical treatises in Bengali.
Charles Montagu Doughty was an English poet, writer, explorer, adventurer and traveller born in Theberton Hall near Saxmundham, Suffolk and educated at private schools in Laleham and Elstree, and at a school for the Royal Navy, Portsmouth. He was a student at King's College London, eventually graduating from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1864.
Bayard Taylor was an American poet, literary critic, translator, travel author, and diplomat.
James Thomson, who wrote under the pseudonym Bysshe Vanolis, was a Scottish Victorian era poet famous primarily for the long poem The City of Dreadful Night (1874), an expression of bleak pessimism in a dehumanized, uncaring urban environment. Thomson's pseudonym derives from the names of the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Novalis. He is often distinguished from the earlier Scottish poet James Thomson by the letters B.V. after his name.
James De Mille was a professor at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, and an early Canadian novelist who published numerous works of popular fiction from the late 1860s through the 1870s.
Charles Dudley Warner was an American essayist, novelist, and friend of Mark Twain, with whom he co-authored the novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.
A Little Tour in France is a book of travel writing by American writer Henry James. Originally published under the title En Province in 1883–1884 as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly, the book recounts a six-week tour James made of many provincial towns in France, including Tours, Bourges, Nantes, Toulouse, Arles and several others. The first book publication was in 1884. A second, extensively revised edition was published in 1900.
English Hours is a book of travel writing by Henry James published in 1905. The book collected various essays James had written on England over a period of more than thirty years, beginning in the 1870s. The essays had originally appeared in such periodicals as The Nation, The Century Magazine, Scribner's Magazine, The Galaxy and Lippincott's Magazine. James wrote a new introduction for the book and extensively revised many of the essays to create a more coherent whole.
French Poets and Novelists is a book of literary criticism by Henry James published in 1878. The book collected essays that James had written over the preceding several years. From an early age James was fluent in French and read widely in the country's literature. These essays show a deep familiarity with the techniques and themes of many French writers. The book also includes an interesting essay on Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, who James read in a German translation.
Essays in London and Elsewhere is a book of literary criticism by Henry James published in 1893. The book collected essays that James had written over the preceding several years on a wide range of writers including James Russell Lowell, Gustave Flaubert, Robert Browning and Henrik Ibsen. The book also included an interesting general essay on the role of the critic in literature and a piece of travel writing about London.
Constance Fenimore Woolson was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. She was a grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper, and is best known for fictions about the Great Lakes region, the American South, and American expatriates in Europe.
Paul A. Cantor is an American literary and media critic. He is currently the Clifton Waller Barrett Professor in the English Department at the University of Virginia.
Venice for Lovers is a collection of essays and travel impressions about the city of Venice in Italy, written by Louis Begley and wife Anka Muhlstein.
Richard Frederick Littledale (1833–1890) was an Anglo-Irish clergyman and writer.
Elémire Zolla was an Italian essayist, philosopher and historian of religion. He was a connoisseur of esoteric doctrines and a scholar of Eastern and Western mysticism.
