Charlotte (1816-1855), Emily (1818-1848), and Anne (1820-1849) Brontë were born in Thornton, England, the three out of six children of Maria and Patrick Brontë, who was an Anglican clergyman. Shortly after Anne was born, the family moved to Haworth. Only a few months later, their mother died, and their aunt came to take care of them. In 1824, Charlotte, Emily, and their two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, were sent to study at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge. The harsh conditions affected their health, and the following year, both Maria and Elizabeth died of tuberculosis. Charlotte and Emily returned home, where Charlotte, who now became the eldest, took the mother role to her younger siblings. They were homeschooled and earned most of their education from books from their father’s library. Being isolated from other children, the Brontës spent their time in writing and inventing an imaginary Kingdome called Glass Town. Charlotte, who wrote her first poem at 13, gathered her and her siblings’ compositions and published them in a homemade magazine called Branwell’s Blackwood’s Magazine. Over time, Charlotte and her older brother, Branwell (Patrick), created their own world called Angria. While Charlotte went to study at Roe Head school in Mirfield, Emily and Anne invented another world called Gondal. In 1833, at 17, Charlotte returned to Roe Head as a teacher. During this time, she wrote poems to express her loneliness. In 1835, Emily joined her at Roe Head as a student but returned home after a few months. Later, Anne took her place at the school. In 1839, Charlotte and Anne began to work as governesses. That was a traumatic experience for Anne, who later detailed the event in her novel Agnes Grey. In 1842, Charlotte and Emily traveled to Brussels to improve their French, but they had to return early than planned following their aunt’s death. Later, Charlotte returned to Brussels to teach for two more years. Two of her novels – The Professor and Villette – were inspired by her time there. During all this time, the Brontë Sisters continued writing, and in 1846 they self-published a joint collection of their poems under the pseudonyms Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily), and Acton (Anne) Bell. Later that year, they sent to publishers in London a package containing manuscripts by each sister – Charlotte’s The Professor, Emily’s Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s Agnes Grey. Although The Professor was not published, Charlotte sent another manuscript, Jane Eyre. All three sisters published their novels in 1847; while Jane Eyre received immediate success, Anne’s Agnes Grey was surpassed by her sister’s passionate drama. In 1848, at 28, Anne published her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. At the time, Charlotte worked on her second manuscript, but stopped following the death of her three lasting siblings. First, her older brother Branwell died of chronic bronchitis and marasmus; then Emily died of pulmonary tuberculosis, and the following year, Anne died from pulmonary tuberculosis. Eventually, Charlotte resumed her writings, and in 1849, published her second novel, Shirley, followed by her third, Villette (1853). She then married Arthur Nicholls, her father’s curate, and soon became pregnant. Her health declined, and she died with her unborn child only three weeks before her 39th birthday. Despite the early and tragic deaths of the three Brontë sisters, they published together six novels (Charlotte – 3, Anne – 2, Emily – 1) and hundreds of poems, leaving a significant mark on the Victorian literature world that continues to this day. Their books were adapted into films, TV series, music, dances, operas, and stage productions. Read more...

Helen Beatrix Potter was born in London, England, into a wealthy family. She was homeschooled, spent lots of her time outdoors, looked after her pets, such as rabbits, cats, and mice, and collected butterflies, which she studied and drew. From a young age, she was drawn to fairy tales and fantasy, incorporating her two loves by illustrating stories featuring her own pets. As Potter got older, especially during her family’s annual vacation in Scotland and the Lake District, she became interested in natural science, collecting fossils, exploring insects, and painting them. Over time, Potter focused on mycology – the study of fungi; she drew and wrote a paper on spore germination, which she presented to the Linnean Society in 1897. Later in life, she donated her mycological drawings to the Armitt Museum and Library in Ambleside, which mycologists still use to identify fungi. In her 20s, Potter, who wanted to become financially independent, began to sell holiday cards she designed, often featuring small animals like rabbits and mice. In 1890, a printing company bought some of her drawings of Benjamin Bunny to illustrate the rhyme book A Happy Pair. Afterward, she sold more illustrations for children’s books. Inspired by the successes, Potter decided to publish her own illustrated stories. She took an illustrated letter she sent to the son of her former governess and formed it into a book titled The Tale of Peter Rabbit. After she couldn’t find any buyers, she self-published it in 1901, but the following year, it was published commercially by Frederick Warne & Company. The story, which was about “four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter,” depicted the rural countryside by combining high-quality illustrations with simple prose. The book was printed as a small size book so that even small children could hold it. It was an immediate success, and within a year, Potter converted illustrated letters into two tale books, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin and The Tailor of Gloucester. During her lifetime, Potter wrote over 60 books, including 23 children’s tales, which sold millions of copies. The last tale book published in her lifetime was Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes in 1922. From the get-go, Potter anticipated her characters’ commercial potential. In 1903, she patented a Peter Rabbit doll and developed various merchandise, including figurines, board games, china tea sets, and baby blankets. It made Potter and her publisher a fortune, and she had the income that allowed her the autonomy that initiated this enterprise. In 1905, at 39, Potter bought the Hill Top Farm Near Sawrey in the Lake District. She learned Fell farming techniques, raised livestock, including chickens, cows, and pigs, and bred Herdwick sheep. A few years later, Potter bought Castle Farm across the road and resided there. Most books she wrote in this period reflect her interest and engagement with rural life, including The Tale of Ginger and Pickles and The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse. In 1913, Potter married her solicitor William Heelis and became more involved with village life, establishing Nursing Trust for local villages and serving in numerous committees regarding rural issues. Throughout her life, Potter was a devoted conservationist and supported the National Trust’s efforts to preserve land from being destroyed by the increasing development of the time. She conserved and restored farms, and as an authority on the traditional Lakeland crafts, she always ensured that the restored farmhouses had antique Lakeland furniture. She died at 77 of complications from pneumonia. Read more...

Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, England, the seventh child and second daughter out of eight. Her father was a rector and encouraged all his children to acquire an education. At 8, Austen and her older sister Cassandra were sent to a boarding school but returned home after four years since the tuition fee became too expensive for the family. Austen continued to study with her father and siblings and used her father’s extensive library. From a young age, Austen wrote and played in home productions with her siblings. Her father, who supported his daughters’ creativity and interest in writing, provided them with paper, writing, and drawing tools. By age 12, she wrote stories, verses, and poems and began exploring prose, parody, comedy, and novels. Today known as Juvenilia, this early work had accumulated in three manuscript notebooks titled Volume the First, Volume the Second, and Volume the Third. At 19, she wrote her first mature work, an epistolary novella called Lady Susan (which became Northanger Abbey). In the next few years, she continued to develop her writing style with the novels Elinor and Marianne (which became Sense and Sensibility) and First Impressions (which became Pride and Prejudice), which got rejected by a publisher in 1797. Four years later, she sold “Susan” for £10, but the publisher never printed it, and only a year before she died, Austen managed to purchase it back. In 1801, following her father’s retirement, the family moved to Bath. There, she began to work on the novel The Watsons, which she never completed. The relocation and her father’s death in 1805 affected Austen’s spirit and creativity, and she didn’t write for a decade. After a few years of moving from one place to another, Austen, her sister, and her mother moved to a cottage in Chawton, Hampshire, in 1809. The stability and tranquil environment inspired 34 years old Austen to renew her writing, and in the next six years, she was more productive than ever, revisiting her previous novels and writing new ones. In 1811, she anonymously published her first novel, Sense and Sensibility; the author was referred to as “a lady.” In 1813, Pride and Prejudice was published, followed by Mansfield Park in 1814 and Emma in 1815. That same year, she began to work on Persuasion, but by the time she finished, her health had declined from what is considered today as Addison’s Disease. Despite her illness, Austen continued to write, and she worked on a new novel titled Sanditon, which remained unfinished as she became too sick to write. She died at the age of 41. A few months after her death, her brother published Austen’s last two finished novels – Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. He added a Biographical Notice, revealing her name for the first time as the author of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma. Both reviewers and readers praised Austen’s novels for their combination of entertainment and morality. In her writing, she withdrew from the romantic melodrama that was common at the time and created a new style of domestic realism. She emphasized women’s dependence on marriage as the only way to secure economic security and social status. She used humor and wit to portray strong female characters, explore gender relations and women’s individualism, and interpret and criticize the gentry class and country life. All of Austen’s novels, including the three that were published posthumous and the two that she never completed, became classics worldwide and were adapted into hundreds of movies, TV shows, and plays and were the basis of dozens of sequels, prequels, and interpretations. Read more...

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in London, England, the second of seven children. The family’s financial situation was unstable, and her father was abusive toward her mother. At 19, she found her way out of her home and took a position as a lady’s companion to a widow living in Bath. After two years, she got called back home to assist her ill mother. As soon as her mother died, Wollstonecraft moved in with her friend, the educator, and illustrator, Fanny (Frances) Blood. The two had envisioned a female utopia in which they meant to support each other financially and emotionally. Wollstonecraft, her sisters, and Blood established a school in Newington Green to make a living. Later, she detailed her teaching experiences in the pamphlet Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, published in 1787. Not long after, Blood became sick, and Wollstonecraft nursed her until she died in 1785. Afterward, the school closed, and she moved to Ireland to serve as governess for the Kingsborough family. After three years, she returned to London and decided to earn a living as a writer, an uncommon profession for a woman at the time. She befriended Joseph Johnson, a publisher of radical texts, and worked for him first as a translator and later as a regular contributor to his paper, the Analytical Review. He also published her first works, including the novel Mary: A Fiction; and the children’s book Original Stories from Real Life, both published in 1788. In 1790, at 31, she published a political pamphlet titled Vindication of the Rights of Men in response to MP Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution. Two years later, she published her most famous work – A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In this groundbreaking essay, Wollstonecraft argued that women must receive education equally to men, asserting that women are more than mere wives, rather companions to their husbands, and their education is essential to the nation because they are the ones who educate the children. Although the essay aroused controversy, it didn’t lead to reforms or further interest. That same year, Wollstonecraft moved to Paris to witness firsthand the French Revolution. There, she met Captain Gilbert Imlay, an American timber merchant, and in 1794, she had her first child, Fanny. While caring for her newborn, she wrote and published the critique essay An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution. Shortly afterward, Imlay left her, and she followed him back to London. In their attempt to reunite, she joined him on a business trip to Scandinavia, documenting her accounts in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. In 1796, on their return to London, Wollstonecraft and Imlay separated for good. She rejoined Johnson and became part of his radical group of friends, one of them was the philosopher William Godwin. Within a few months, she became pregnant, and the couple got married so their child would be legitimate. Suffering from post-partum infection, Wollstonecraft died 11 days after giving birth to her second child, who became the prominent novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. By the time she died at 38, she had published 10 of her works, and seven more were published posthumously. Although her legacy has been almost forgotten for nearly a century, her name was brought back by writers of the modern feminist movement, such as Virginia Woolf and Emma Goldman, who embraced her life story and achievements. The interest in her work increased during the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of feminist criticism in academia. Today, Wollstonecraft is considered one of the founding feminist philosophers. Read more...

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, England, into a middle-class family. In her early years, she was homeschooled by her parents and taught herself to read at the age of five, against her mother’s wish. In 1901, at 10, she wrote her first poem, “The Cow Slip.” That same year, her father died, and not long after, her mother remarried, and the family moved to Cheadle, Cheshire. She began to receive formal education at Miss Guyer’s Girls’ School but had trouble adjusting to the strict environment. At 15, she was sent to a boarding school in Paris, where she mainly had piano lessons and vocal training. Following her return to England, she began writing short stories reflecting her interest in spiritualism and the paranormal. These include The Call of Wings, and The House of Beauty, later published as The House of Dreams. In addition, she began working on her first novel, Snow Upon the Desert, which she tried to publish under a pseudonym but got rejected by six different publishers. In 1912, at 22, she began a relationship with a military officer named Archie Christie. At the outbreak of World War I, he was sent to fight in France, and the couple had to wait for his home leave to get married. During the war, she volunteered as a nurse at the Voluntary Aid Detachment of the Red Cross. There, she met many Belgian soldiers, which inspired her to create the character of Hercule Poirot – a former Belgian police officer “with a magnificent mustache.” He appeared in Christie’s first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, as the distinguished detective and later in 25 more novels and numerous short stories. That first novel was written in 1916 but was published only in 1920 after Christie signed a six books contract with The Bodley Head publication. After the war, Christie and her husband moved to London, and in 1919 she gave birth to her daughter Rosalind. She continued to write thrillers and murder mystery stories, developing new detective characters, such as Tommy and Tuppence in The Secret Adversary and Miss Jane Marple in the short story collection The Thirteen Problems. In 1926, she published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which was an immediate best-seller, and years later was voted the best crime novel ever by the British Crime Writers’ Association. Despite her literary success, she dealt with personal issues. First, her mother died, and then her husband filed for divorce after falling in love with another woman. On December 3rd, 1926, following a fight with her husband, Christie left the house without saying where she was going. The next morning, her car was found abandoned, and the mysterious disappearance of the author became a news sensation. Thousand police officers and 15,000 volunteers searched for her. The author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, gave a medium one of Christie’s gloves to locate her, and a newspaper offered a £100 reward to the person who would find her. Eleven days later, Christie got recognized in a hotel in Yorkshire, where she registered under the last name of her husband’s lover. She suffered from amnesia and couldn’t recall who she was or how she got to Yorkshire. After the incident, she moved to London with her daughter, received psychiatric treatment, and divorced. In 1928, at 38, she took the Orient Express to Istanbul and then continued to Baghdad. While visiting the archaeological site at Ur, she befriended the archaeologist Leonard Woolley, who invited her back the following year. Then, she met the archaeologist Max Mallowan, 13 years her junior. After they married, she joined him on his archaeological expeditions in the Middle East, which inspired many of her stories, such as the 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express. She continued to publish more novels and short stories, and in 1943, after she disliked a stage adaption of one of her novels, she began to adapt her stories into plays. In the early 1970s, her health began to decline. She published her last novel in 1973 and made her last public appearance in 1974. She died two years later at the age of 85. During her life, she wrote 74 novels (66 of them are detective stories), 14 short-stories collections, 19 plays, and an autobiography. Dozens of her works got adapted into films, TV series, and stage plays. Her books have been translated into over 100 languages and sold over 300 million copies worldwide. In 1976, at the time of her death, she was the best-selling novelist in history.   Dive deeper into the inspiring story of Agatha Christie with our fun and engaging printable worksheet! Available now on Etsy and Teachers Pay Teachers.   Read more...

Mary Ann Evans was born in Nuneaton, England. From a young age, she was an avid reader, and because she was not considered beautiful, which reduced her potential to find a husband, her parents decided to nurture her education, a rare offer to girls at the time. At the age of five, she was sent to a boarding school in Attleborough and returned to Nuneaton at 13 to attend Mrs. Wallington’s school and later attended Miss Franklin’s school in Coventry. At 16, after her mother died, she returned home to run her father’s household. She continued to educate herself by corresponding with her teacher and visiting the library of the local landowner in Arbury Hall. At 21, she moved with her father to Coventry. There, she became friends with the Bray family, who were liberal philanthropists that campaigned for various social radical causes. Their home was a gathering place for freethinkers, and she became acquainted with agnostic theologies and writers. Questioning her faith, she translated David Strauss’ controversial theological work into English, published in 1846 as The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. She also published essays and reviews in Bray’s newspaper, the Coventry Herald and Observer. At the age of 30, right after her father’s funeral, she traveled with the Brays to Geneva, Switzerland, where she immersed herself in reading and writing. In the following year, she returned to England and settled in London with the intent of becoming a freelance writer while attending mathematics classes at Ladies College. She boarded at the house of John Chapman, the publisher of the left-wing journal The Westminster Review, and soon she began to work as his assistant editor. She contributed to the journal articles expressing her views on society and the gap between the classes. That year, she met the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes, and within a few years, they lived together. Though he was married, the couple considered themselves husband and wife, while his legal wife had children with another man. In 1857, at the age of 37, she published her first story in the book Scenes of Clerical Life, a collection of stories about the people of her childhood surroundings in Warwickshire. She used the male pen name George Eliot for the first time to ensure that her fiction writing would not be related to her previous work and to avoid the stereotype of contemporary women novelists who were not taken seriously. Two years later, she published her first novel, Adam Bede. Its instant success prompted the interest in the author’s identity, and eventually, Eliot revealed that she was the woman behind the name. Eliot’s unusual relationship did not harm her popularity, and she continued to write and publish six more novels and dozens of poems in the next two decades. In her writing, she presented political and social situations, particularly in Middlemarch, a novel about small-town life on the eve of the Reform Bill of 1832. Many of her characters were outsiders and misfits of rural society portrayed with a method she developed of psychological analysis. In 1876, at the age of 57, Eliot published her last novel, Daniel Deronda. Afterward, she and Lewes moved to Witley, Surrey, where Lewes died two years later. Following his death, she spent her time and efforts editing his final work, Life, and Mind and founded the George Henry Lewes Studentship in Physiology at Cambridge. In 1880, she married John Walter Cross, a Scottish commission agent 20 years her junior. They settled in Chelsea, and six months later, she died from a throat infection coupled with the kidney disease she had for several years. She was 61 years old. Read more...

Adeline Virginia Woolf was born in London, England, into a wealthy household. Her father was an important literary figure, and her mother was a socialite and artist who used to model for painters. Woolf and her sisters were home-schooled, and her brothers received formal education. She was an enthusiastic learner reader, and by the age of 7, she could read in both French and Latin. At 9, she started a family newsletter, reporting family events and documenting humorous anecdotes. Growing up, Woolf experienced a series of losses. When she was 13 years old, her mother had died. Two years later, her half-sister passed away, and in 1904, when she was 22, her father also died, and Woolf had a mental breakdown and was institutionalized, while her big sister Vanessa took charge of the family. During those formative years, dealing with her grief, Woolf had studied at the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London, where she was introduced to feminist views. Woolf and her siblings moved to the bohemian Bloomsbury area of London, where they hosted a weekly gathering of artists and intellectuals that later became known as the Bloomsbury group. In 1905, at the age of 23, Woolf began to write anonymous reviews for The Times Literary Supplement. In the following year, her older brother Thoby had died, and her mother-like sister Vanessa got engaged. To overcome the loss she felt for both her siblings, Woolf turned to her writing and began to work on her first autobiographical essay – Reminiscences. Being influenced by post-Impressionist artists, Woolf began to experiment with her writing, avoiding the norms of Victorian structure and creating a holistic form that embraced all aspects of life. In 1912, at 30, she married Leonard Woolf, a political theorist and author whom she met a few years earlier. At the time, she worked on her first novel Melymbrosia, though a manic-depressive outburst and a suicide attempt delayed its publication. The book was published in 1915 under the title The Voyage Out. It broke the contemporary realism conventions since the experiences were described within the surrealistic world of dreams, hallucinations, and free association. A narrative method later became known as stream of consciousness. Woolf wanted to prove that to break the traditional writing form, one needs to master it first. And she did, in her second novel, Night and Day, published in 1919. Her unique writing style continued to evolve, and in her 1922 novel Jacob’s Room, she describes the protagonist’s life, from childhood to death, without a plot or character description. In that same year, 40 years old Woolf befriended Vita Sackville-West, an author and landscape gardener, and over time their friendship grew into a romantic affair. Their affair did not last long, but the two stayed friends, and Sackville-West greatly influenced Woolf’s writings. In the next few years, she published numerous short stories, dramas, and essays, continuing to redefine modern writing while examining her ideas on social issues, such as feminism, homosexuality, mental illness, and the consequences of war. Ideas she expressed in her 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway, and in one of her most famous works, To the Lighthouse. Using the stream of consciousness technique, Woolf portrayed the lives of her characters, their thoughts, and feelings as a montage of memories, focusing on language and design rather than notions of reality. In the novel Orlando, published in 1928, Woolf goes even further by creating a paradox chronology, following a man who becomes a woman that lives for more than three centuries. In 1929, Woolf published her groundbreaking essay A Room of One’s Own, which became a milestone in feminist theories. Based on lectures she gave at women’s colleges, Woolf claimed that women’s absence from history and literature circles is not due to lack of talent or capability but because they don’t have the money and space to execute their ideas. She had spread her feminist ideology in her other works, such as in her speech Professions for Women, in which she stated that unequal opportunities for women are affecting all of society, and in her novel The Years, she followed the decline of the patriarchal systems and the rise of feminism via 50 years in a family’s history. In WW2, during the bombing of London in 1940, their house was destroyed, and they moved to their cottage in Sussex. At the time, Woolf worked on her next novel, Between the Acts, but the stress has impacted her mental state, and she suffered from depression and severe mood swings. On March 28th, 1941, Woolf filled her coat pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse behind her house. She drowned. She was 59 years old. Woolf published dozens of novels, short stories, essays, dramas, memoirs, and autobiographical writing. Thirty years after her death, her work has resonated again, influenced and helped define the feminist movement of the 1970s. She is considered one of the most important authors of all time. Her writings are still being studied in universities and inspiring notable authors such as Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. Read more...