Homer

For a young woman who had never attended university (as she of course could not at this time) to offer a translation from a classical language was both courageous and confident.

An Unfortunate Mother's Advice to her Absent Daughters quickly became a staple of composite volumes directed toward young women's conduct. At Edinburgh a volume of this kind, Instructions for a Young Lady, in every sphere...

An introductory poem summarises desirable female qualities: Formed by the Graces, loveliness itself, / Come, with those downcast eyes sedate and sweet, / Those modest looks that deeply touch the soul. Having discussed her...

PW was a black African, whose colour dictated all her life-experiences as a slave in the USA (a British colony during much of her life) from the moment when, at the age of seven or...

On holidays her father taught his children to shoot with arrows and to play on pipes which they had made themselves, to light fires, and boys and girls alike, how to row, to swim, to...

As a child in a middle-class Bengali family, KKD was exposed from an early age to several languages, particularly Bengali, English, Sanskrit, German, and French. She learned English at home from her mother , who...

She was without formal education. She told a cousin that her favourite reading had been the Bible ever since she was a girl. Historian Susan E. Whyman argues that it was through epistolary...

She was, she said, mainly self-educated from the books which were all around her. (She read Pope 's Homer at nine.) She studied Sanskrit, Persian, and Icelandic as an adult. She later believed firmly that...

She found school work (at Byron House school in Highgate and then at the highly academic North London Collegiate ) difficult. She always got an A for English essays, although she would write a short...

Virginia read Aeschylus , Homer , Sophocles , and Plato , among others, with Clara Pater. In 1902, however, the Cambridge-educated Janet Case , who was a feminist as well as a classicist, took over...

Here she extended her already very considerable reading in English literature and philosophy, and in the Greeks from Homer and Æschylus . She also studied modern languages and several branches of mathematics and science.

She was able to learn a little Greek and geometry from the local parson, though she read Homer in translation.

In the twentieth century Sappho continued full of potential for poets and prose-writers. Naomi Mitchison fictionalises her supposed school; Eavan Boland takes her as guide on an underworld journey (as Dante took Virgil); Jeanette Winterson

Her protagonist, NB says, is not herself, though the milieu comes from her own experience. The action takes place in a single day, the day Penelope has decided (thinking wryly of the exemplary wifely faithfulness...

AG is a conscious artist as a letter-writer, playing with the influence not only of Richardson but also, in later years, of Hugh Blair 's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. The earliest letters...