Autor/-in: Edmund Gosse

Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) was an English poet, critic, biographer, memoirist, translator, and one of the influential literary figures of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Born into a devout Plymouth Brethren family, he was the son of Philip Henry Gosse, the noted naturalist, and Emily Bowes Gosse, a writer of religious verse and tracts. His early life, marked by intense religious discipline and intellectual isolation, became the foundation for Father and Son, the work for which he is now most widely remembered. Gosse spent much of his career at the centre of English literary culture, serving as a critic, lecturer, librarian, and adviser while helping introduce Scandinavian literature to English readers and writing on figures such as John Donne, Thomas Gray, Henrik Ibsen, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. His own critical reputation has shifted over time, but Father and Son has endured as a classic of English autobiography: a subtle, controlled, and psychologically acute account of Victorian faith, family authority, intellectual independence, and the making of a literary life.