Document Type
Finding Aids
Publication Date
2018
Collection Date
1882-1927
Identifier
GOSSE.1
Description
Sir Edmund William Gosse (1849–1928) was an English biographer and critic. He was lecturer in English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge (1884–90) and librarian of the House of Lords (1904–14). Although he wrote with enthusiasm and wit, his scholarship was often inaccurate and thus much of his critical work has been superseded. He did, however, introduce English readers to Ibsen and other Scandinavian writers as well as to some modern French writers and painters. Among the many biographies he wrote were those of Gray (1882), Donne (1899), Sir Thomas Browne (1905), Ibsen (1907), Swinburne (1917), and Congreve (rev. ed. 1924). Father and Son (1907), his best work, describes his relationship with his father, Philip Henry Gosse (1810–88), an English naturalist and author of zoological works, whose biography Edmund had written (1890). Included among Edmund's several volumes of verse are On Viol and Flute (1873) and New Poems (1879). He was knighted in 1925. The collection contains correspondence from the 1880s to the 1920s to American and British literary figures such as Thomas Sargent Perry, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edmund Stedman, and Violet Paget, and two published articles on Thomas Hardy, one from 1896 and the other from 1927.
Recommended Citation
Collection of Sir Edmund William Gosse Materials, Colby College Special Collections, Waterville, Maine.