Notable Women Authors of the Day (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1893 edition. Excerpt: ...of literature was very great, and it was from her that I learned to enjoy Browning as well as the older masters of verse. After my father's death we removed to the suburbs of London, and my mother died fifteen months later. We were united heart and soul, and her death was the greatest sorrow of my life, especially as I had been much separated from her by school and college life, and had been promised that I should live at home and care for her when my elder sister married, but my mother died four months before the wedding, and that dream--hers as well as mine, I think--was never realized." Adeline Sergeant began to write at the very youthful age of eight. Her first published verses appeared when she was but thirteen, and a volume of verse when she was sixteen years of age. " It always seems to me," she continues, " that I owe a great deal to the influences of the free country life of my early childhood when we lived at Eastington, near Stonehouse, for two years. I believe that modern teachers would say that I wasted my time, for I went to no school then, but ' did lessons' with my mother in a desultory fashion." Rambling for hours in the fields and lanes by herself, sometimes with a book and sometimes without, the young author used conscientiously to set herself her own tasks; she wrote innumerable stories, had no playfellows, and no children's books, but she had the run of her father's library. Here she read Shakespeare until she knew him by heart; next to Shakespeare her favourite book was Addison's " Spectator"; after these came Byron, Mrs. Hemans, and many earlier poets, Prior, Gay, Dryden, etc. Here, from the age of eleven to fifteen, she also studied theological writers like Chalmers, Butler, and Jeremy Taylor; whilst a set of...