Blaise Pascal

EL was born into a landowning Irish family. Her mother's heritage was particularly ancient, originating in the west of Ireland. The family belonged to the Protestant Ascendancy, and hence the Church of Ireland. In...

In conversation she defended some of the seventeenth-century Puritans (notably Richard Baxter ) and referred to my old friends at the Port-Royal .

Her subjects included German and French, philosophy and literature, particularly such writers as Kant , Heine , Pascal , Racine , and Voltaire . Among English authors, she admired George Meredith (Modern Love))...

The contents are heterogenous, like those of the first volume (the same letter-books are drawn on again) but more so, with actual letters, poetry, essays, and translation, together with short fictions. The essays-in-letters include (in...

The title-page quotation from Paradise Lost features the archangel Raphael's pronouncement that it is better for human beings to know That which before us lies in daily life than things remote. According to critic...

Natalie Clifford Barney , though American, is best known as a Paris salonnière. She specialized in memoirs and pensées, though she also produced poetry, drama, novels, essays, and dialogues. Writing primarily in French but also...

Among the contents and specifically mentioned on the title-page is a translated essay entitled Thoughts on Death which comes from the Moral Essays of the Messieurs du Port Royal—that is, from the Jansenist movement...

AMFR published another biography, Portrait of Pascal, again under her married name.

Two years later she followed this book with a collection of short pieces on the same topic, The French Ideal: Pascal , Fénelon and other Essays, published as by Madame Duclaux .

Johnson found at this stage a good deal to criticize but also much to praise. The work possessed, he said, such force of comprehension, and such nicety of observation as Locke or Pascal might be...

In this text the titular heroine narrates her experiences at the French boarding school Les Avons. Here, Olivia forms friendships with several other schoolgirls, but is most fascinated by her headmistress, Mlle Julie, who runs...