Sir Edmund William Gosse CB[1] (21 September 1849 – 16 May 1928) was an English poet, author and critic; the son of Philip Henry Gosse and Emily Bowes.[2]
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Gosse worked as assistant librarian at the British Museum from 1867 alongside the songwriter Theo Marzials[3], and in 1875 became a translator at the Board of Trade, a post which he held until 1904. From 1904 to 1914 he was chief Librarian of the House of Lords Library. In the meantime, he published his first volume of poetry, On Viol and Flute (1873) and a work of criticism, Studies in the Literature of Northern Europe (1879). Gosse and Robert Louis Stevenson first met while teenagers, and after 1879, when Stevenson came to London on occasion, he would stay with Gosse and his family. He became acquainted with the pre-Raphaelites, and with Thomas Hardy, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Algernon Swinburne.
He became, in the 1880s, one of the most important art critics dealing with sculpture (writing mainly for the Saturday Review) with an interest spurred on by his intimate friendship with the sculptor Hamo Thornycroft. Gosse would eventually write the first history of the renaissance of late-Victorian sculpture in 1894 in a four-part series for the Art Journal, dubbing the movement the New Sculpture.
From 1884 to 1890 Gosse lectured in English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, despite his own lack of academic qualifications. Cambridge University gave him an honorary MA in 1886, and Trinity College formally admitted him as a member, 'by order of the Council', in 1889.[4] From 1904, he was librarian of the House of Lords, where he exercised considerable influence. He wrote for the Sunday Times, and was an expert on Thomas Gray, William Congreve, John Donne, Jeremy Taylor, and Coventry Patmore. He can also take credit for introducing Ibsen's work to the British public. Gosse and William Archer collaborated in translating Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder; those two translations were performed throughout the 20th century. Gosse and Archer, along with Shaw, were perhaps the literary critics most responsible for popularising Ibsen's plays among English-speaking audiences.
His most famous book is the autobiographical Father and Son, about his troubled relationship with his Plymouth Brethren father, Philip, which was dramatised for television by Dennis Potter. Historians caution, though, that notwithstanding its literary excellence, Gosse's narrative is often at odds with the verifiable facts of his own and his parents' lives. [5] In later life, he became a formative influence on Siegfried Sassoon, the nephew of his lifelong friend, Hamo Thornycroft. Sassoon's mother was a friend of Gosse's wife, Ellen. Gosse was also closely tied to figures such as Algernon Charles Swinburne, John Addington Symonds, and André Gide.
After Gosse's mother died of breast cancer, his father married in 1860 the deeply religious Quaker spinster Eliza Brightwen (1813-1900), whose brother Thomas tried to encourage Edmund to become a banker and whose brother George was the husband of Eliza Elder Brightwen (1830- 1906), a naturalist and author, whose first book was published in 1871. After Eliza Elder Brightwen's death, Edmund Gosse arranged for the publication of her two posthumous works Last Hours with Nature (1908) and Eliza Brightwen, the Life and Thoughts of a Naturalist (1909), both edited by W. H. Chesson, and the latter book with an introduction and epilogue by Gosse.
Edmund William Gosse (21 September 1849 – 16 May 1928) was an English poet, author and critic.
EDMUND GOSSE (1849-), English poet and critic, was born in London on the 2 rst of September 1849, son of the zoologist P. H. Gosse. In 1867 he became an assistant in the department of printed books in the British Museum, where he remained until he became in 1875 translator to the Board of Trade. In 1904 he was appointed librarian to the House of Lords. In 1884-1890 he was Clark Lecturer in English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge. Himself a writer of literary verse of much grace, and master of a prose style admirably expressive of a wide and appreciative culture, he was conspicuous for his valuable work in bringing foreign literature home to English readers. Northern Studies (1879), a collection of essays on the literature of Holland and Scandinavia, was the outcome of a prolonged visit to those countries, and was followed by later work in the same direction. He translated Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1891), and, with W. Archer, The Master-Builder (1893), and in 1907 he wrote a life of Ibsen for the "Literary Lives" series. He also edited the English translation of the works of Bjornson.
His services to Scandinavian letters were acknowledged in 1901, when he was made a knight of the Norwegian order of St Olaf of the first class. Mr Gosse's published volumes of verse include On Viol and Flute (1873), King Erik (1876), New Poems (1879), Firdausi in Exile (r885), In Russet and Silver (1894), Collected Poems (1896). Hypolympia, or the Gods on the Island (Igor), an "ironic phantasy," the scene of which is laid in the 10th century, though the personages are Greek gods, is written in prose, with some blank verse. His Seventeenth Century Studies (1883), Life of William Congreve (1888), The Jacobean Poets (1894), Life and Letters of Dr John Donne, Dean of St Paul's (1899), Jeremy Taylor (1904, "English Men of Letters"), and Life of Sir Thomas Browne (1905) form a very considerable body of critical work on the English 17th-century writers. He also wrote a life of Thomas Gray, whose works he edited (4 vols., 1884); A History of Eighteenth Century Literature (1889); a History of Modern English Literature (1897), and vols. iii. and iv. of an Illustrated Record of English Literature (1903-1904) undertaken in connexion with Dr Richard Garnett. Mr Gosse was always a sympathetic student of the younger school of French and Belgian writers, some of his papers on the subject being collected as French Profiles (1905). Critical Kit-Kats (1896) contains an admirable criticism of J. M. de Heredia, reminiscences of Lord de Tabley and others. He edited Heinemann's series of "Literature of the World" and the same publisher's "International Library." To the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica he contributed numerous articles, and his services as chief literary adviser in the preparation of the 10th and rrth editions incidentally testify to the high position held by him in the contemporary world of letters. In 1905 he was entertained in Paris by the leading littérateurs as a representative of English literary culture. In 1907 Mr Gosse published anonymously Father and Son, an intimate study of his own early family life. He married Ellen, daughter of Dr G. W. Epps, and had a son and two daughters.
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Categories: GOS-GRA | English poets
  | Works by Edmund Gosse - Internet Archive Search: creator:edmund gosse |
| | Sir Edmund Gosse - Encyclopedia - Britannica Online Encyclopedia |
| | Hedda Gabler - Hedda Gabler from Project Gutenberg |
| | The Master Builder - The Master Builder from Project Gutenberg |
| | Father and Son - Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments from Project Gutenberg |
| | texts by Edmund Gosse - Browse By Author: G - Project Gutenberg |
| | Father And Son - Father And Son by Edmund Gosse |
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