"Autobiographical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind; an Autobiographical Poem. By William Wordsworth. London. Moxon. New York, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... Durgin alone in a corner of the bar-room. With two or three potations Durgin became autobiographical. Was he acquainted with Mr. Shackford outside the yard? Rather. Dick Shackford? His (Durgin's) mother had kept Dick from starving when he was a baby,—and no thanks for it. Went to school with him, and knew all ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... but must try to hide the fact whenever the real Spain fell below the ideal, however I might reason with my infatuation or try to scoff it away. It had once been so inextinguishable a part of me that the record of my journey must be more or less autobiographical; and though I should decently endeavor to keep my past out of it, perhaps I should not try very hard and should ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... SHERWOOD (chiefly Autobiographical), with Extracts from Mr. Sherwood's Journal during his Imprisonment in France and Residence in India. Edited by her Daughter, SOPHIA KELLY, Authoress of the "De Cliffords," "Robert ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various
... Allston's health became seriously affected, and he resolved to visit Bristol. Coleridge, who was affectionately attached to Allston, followed him thither. "The house was so full," writes Leslie, in his autobiographical recollections, "that the poet was obliged to share a double-bedded room with me. We were kept up late in consequence of the critical condition of Allston, and when we retired Coleridge, seeing a copy of Knickerbocker's ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... chapter of the dearth of human bones in alluvium containing flint implements in abundance, I pointed out that it is not part of the plan of Nature to write everywhere, and at all times, her autobiographical memoirs. On the contrary, her annals are local and exceptional from the first, and portions of them are afterwards ground into mud, sand, and pebbles, to furnish materials for new strata. Even of those ancient monuments now forming ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... will be published in one of our magazines, are hereafter to be added, in their complete form, to the Appendix of this volume.] which he wrote for this Romance would of themselves make a small volume, and one of autobiographical as well as literary interest. There is no other instance, that I happen to have met with, in which a writer's thought reflects itself upon paper so immediately and sensitively as in these studies. To read them is to look into ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... meanwhile to return to the routine work of an operatic repetiteur, lost patience. Satisfied that Ricordi would never do anything more for him, and become desperate, he shut himself in his room to attempt "one more work"—as he said in an autobiographical sketch which appeared in "La Reforme," a journal published in Alexandria. In five months he had written the book and music of "Pagliacci," which was accepted for publication and production by Sonzogno, Ricordi's business rival, after a single reading of the poem. Maurel, ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... a monotony about their apprehension and helplessness when they're turned adrift that's altogether too much like my own. No, Mr. Munt, I can't agree with you that it's interesting to see people come in. It's altogether too autobiographical. What else have you ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... face to face with the interminable controversies upon the autobiographical significance of Shakespeare's Sonnets. As volumes upon the subject have been written, it is not possible even adequately to review the various theories here. The controversialists may be broadly divided into those who read complicated autobiographical ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... "make whole flawed hearts, and bowed necks straight." In 1791 he wrote an anonymous letter to Fox, in which he advanced the sentiments to which he later gave expression in his "Political Justice," his principal work. In his autobiographical notes he explains:— ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... of the coast of ancient Armorica. M. Rio was then a young man, and probably in Paris for the first time, at the beginning of the literary career of which he has furnished so interesting a sketch in the autobiographical volumes which form the conclusion of his "Histoire de l'Art Chretien." Five and twenty years later, while passing my second winter in Rome, I heard of M. Rio's arrival there, and of the unbounded satisfaction he expressed at ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Reno is a river between Bologna and Ferrara. But there are many difficulties in the way of this theory, and, on the whole, it seems most reasonable to conclude that the sonnets were composed in England, and that their autobiographical character is at least doubtful. That nominally inscribed to Diodati, however, would well suit Leonora Baroni. Diodati had been buried in Blackfriars on August 27, 1638, but Milton certainly did not learn the fact until after his ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... represent public opinion as far as he could. He had changed his style since the Mrs. Hemans' days. He was essentially imitative in his poetic faculty; and of late he had followed the lead of a popular writer of sonnets.' He turned his poems over: they were almost equivalent to an autobiographical passage in his life. Arranging them in their ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... is made in the following pages to submit to historical treatment the vast and varied mass of printed matter which Cardan left as his contribution to letters and science, except in the case of those works which are, in purpose or incidentally, autobiographical, or of those which furnish in themselves effective contributions towards the framing of an estimate of the genius and character of the writer. Neither has it seemed worth while to offer to the public another biography constructed on the lines of the one brought out by Professor Henry Morley ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... while the secretary was at his labour of sorting the heap of autobiographical scraps in a worn dispatch-box, pen and pencil jottings tossed to swell the mess when they had relieved an angry reminiscence. He noticed, heedlessly at the moment, feminine handwriting on some few clear sheets ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... youth, portraits of those who have gone before us in the battle,—taken together, they build up a face that "I have loved long since and lost awhile," the face of what was once myself. This has come by accident; I had no design at first to be autobiographical; I was but led away by the charm of beloved memories and by regret for the irrevocable dead; and when my own young face (which is a face of the dead also) began to appear in the well as by a kind of magic, I was the first to be surprised at ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... springs from "a delicate and cultivated taste." But we are puzzled by the presence outside the pale of some who cannot rightly be called "pachydermatous." I am turning over the pages of Sarah Bernhardt's autobiographical revelations. "I adore the sea and the plain," she writes, "but I neither care for mountains nor for forests. Mountains seem to crush me, and forests to stifle me." Strange that the high priestess of expression, the interpreter of every phase of human passion and ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... story of her childhood and tried to interpret her own personality in her autobiographical story, 'The One I Knew Best of All.' She has pictured a little English girl in a comfortable Manchester home, leading a humdrum, well-regulated existence, with brothers and sisters, nurse and governess. But an alert imagination added ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... father's: money, and enjoyed himself. The dissipation was not flagrant. He was never a sensualist, nor a Sybarite. Even then he had a frugal mind, and knew well the value of money. "I remember," he says in The Oxford Counter Reformation, an autobiographical essay—"I remember calculating that I could have lived at a boarding-house on contract, with every luxury which I had in college, at a reduction of fifty per cent."* He was not given to coarse indulgence, and idleness was probably his worst sin at ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... also here take the liberty of neglecting a very great—as far as bulk goes, by far the greatest—part of Moore's own performance. He has inserted so many interesting autobiographical particulars in the prefaces to his complete works, that visits to the great mausoleum of the Russell memoirs are rarely necessary, and still more rarely profitable. His work for the booksellers was done at a time when the best class of such work was much better done than the best class of it is now; ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... the world being in some way better; it is only good that those who never knew him in the flesh should at least know him in a book. It is not enough that, as Chesterton points out, he 'was of all novelists the most autobiographical,' which is not to say that he wrote unending personal confessions with a very large I, but rather that his books were drawn from the experiences of his life, a field that is productive ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... old, dying of hydrocephalus, after manifesting an intellectual power which the forlorn brother recalled with admiration and wonder for life. The impression was undoubtedly genuine; but it is impossible to read the "Autobiographical Sketch" in which the death and funeral of the child are described without perceiving that the writer referred back to the period he was describing with emotions and reflex sensations which arose in him and fell from the pen at the moment. His father, meantime, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... irritation is reached when, having troubled to write down autobiographical details, having wrestled with your modesty and overthrown it, having posted your letter and prepaid it, the —— editor rejects your contribution without thanks. This hard fate overtook me—moi ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... 1, 1804, at Covent Garden, as "Selim" disguised as "Achmet," in Browne's 'Barbarossa'. In the winter season of 1804-5, when he appeared at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, such crowds collected to see him, that the military were called out to preserve order. Leslie ('Autobiographical Recollections', vol. i. p. 218) speaks of him as a boy "of handsome features and graceful manners, with a charming voice." Fox, who saw him in 'Hamlet', said, "This is finer than Garrick" ('Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers', p. 88). Northcote ('Conversations', p. 23) ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... happy moments than any prince upon earth. His natural spirits gave him rapture with his cook-maid and cheerfulness in a garret." Here is a kit-kat showing the man indeed: all his fiction may be read in the light of it. The main interest in "Amelia" is found in its autobiographical flavor, for the story, in describing the fortunes—or rather misfortunes—of Captain Booth and his wife, drew, it is pretty certain, upon Fielding's own traits and to some extent upon the incidents of his earlier life. The ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... upon the dissatisfied farmer vote is shown in the autobiographical sketches which Senators and Representatives wrote for the Congressional Directory of the Fifty-second Congress. Some who had never before held office stated the fact with apparent pride. One, who appeared from the Texas district which John ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... ugly, vilely-printed German volumes, felt suddenly a kind of magnetic influence creeping over him. The room seemed instinct with a harsh commanding presence. The history of a mind and soul was written upon the face of it; every shelf, as it were, was an autobiographical fragment, an 'Apologia pro Vita Mea.' He drew away from the books at last with the uneasy feeling of one who surprises a confidence, and looked for Robert. Robert was at the end of the room, a couple of volumes under his arm, another, which he was reading, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... which first made him known in every part of the United States. A Tramp Abroad (1880), and Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (1897), are records of other foreign travels. While they are largely autobiographical, and show in an unusually entertaining way how he became one of the most cosmopolitan of our authors, these works are less important than those which throb with the heart beats of that American life of which he was a part ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... equally good at the autobiographical style," he said. "Shall we try that next, by ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... an extraordinary rigmarole. He shook his head, saying that I was unintelligible; but the questions he put to me, 'Why had I no hat on in the open street?—Where did my mother live?—What was I doing out alone in London?' were so many incitements to autobiographical composition to an infant mind, and I tumbled out my history afresh each time that he spoke. He led me into a square, stooping his head to listen all the while; but when I perceived that we had quitted ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... all the essays on flies, or Diptera, from the Souvenirs entomologiques, to which I have added, in order to make the dimensions uniform with those of the other volumes of the series, the purely autobiographical essays comprised in the Souvenirs. These essays, though they have no bearing upon the life of the fly, are among the most interesting that Henri Fabre has written and will, I am persuaded, make a special appeal to the reader. The chapter entitled The Caddis Worm has been included ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... to himself as Cheyenne departed for the corral. This wayfarer, breezing in from the spaces, suggested possibilities as a character for a story No doubt the song was more or less autobiographical. "A top-hand once, but the trail for mine," seemed to explain the singer's somewhat erratic dinner schedule. Bartley thought that he would like to see more of this strange itinerant, who sang both coming into and ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... while," said the Easy Chair, with autobiographical relish, "they wrote me together, but it was not long before Mr. Mitchell left off, and Curtis kept on alone, and, as you say, he incomparably characterized me. He had his millennial hopes as well as you. In his youth he trusted in ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... of this book is famous for his hunting exploits in Africa and in Asia. His narrative has an autobiographical basis and contains some of the most marvelous stories of adventure ever published. Col. Gordon's accounts of his various expeditions are records of bravery and endurance seldom paralleled; and the tales of bloodshed are alleviated by pleasant anecdote—the ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... fact, to see again your life, as it were, acted for you in some camera obscura, with the chief actor changed. But diaries, unless they be mere records of bare facts, must of necessity, as in their nature they are autobiographical, be false guides; so that, perhaps, I in my carelessness was not quite so unwise as I have often thought myself. Although I made no notes of anything, caring most chiefly for the condition of my horse, yet when I think on them, pampa ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... people who annoy an author more than any others—the person who calmly supposes that everything he writes is biographical, or even autobiographical, and the person who declares, "I've got a dandy plot for ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... demonstrated the action of the scene to Saint-Prosper, and the soldier became collaborator, "abandoning, as it were," wrote the manager in his autobiographical date-book and diary, "the sword for the pen, and the glow of the Champ de Mars for the glimmer of a kerosene lamp." And yet not with the inclination of Burgoyne, or other military gentlemen who have courted the buskin and ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... of Bishop Newton, his Works were published, with an autobiographical Memoir, in two volumes quarto. The prelate, speaking, in this Memoir, of Johnson's Lives of the Poets, having observed, that "candour was much hurt and offended at the malevolence that predominated in every part," the Doctor, in a conversation with Dr. Adams, master of Pembroke College, Oxford, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... question. Many years ago we used to be told that inverts are such lying and deceitful degenerates that it was impossible to place reliance on anything they said. It was also usual to say that when they wrote autobiographical accounts of themselves they merely sought to mold them in the fashion of those published by Krafft-Ebing. More recently the psychoanalysts have made a more radical attack on all histories not obtained by their own methods as being quite unreliable, even when put forth in good faith, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... course feel that the poem is too autobiographical and that real experience are alien things that should never influence one, but it was wrung out of me, a cry of pain, the cry of Marsyas, not the song of Apollo. Still, there are some good things in it. I feel as if ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... mastering shorthand he has written feelingly in that novel which contains so much autobiographical material—David Copperfield. "I bought an approved scheme of the noble art and mystery of stenography ... and plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me, in a few weeks, to the confines of distraction. The changes that were rung upon dots, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... August 1881 in Sils Maria; and it was the idea of the Eternal Recurrence of all things which finally induced my brother to set forth his new views in poetic language. In regard to his first conception of this idea, his autobiographical sketch, "Ecce Homo", written in the autumn of 1888, contains the ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... but only a painfully pathetic record of Mozart's misery, his despair, and his terror. It is indeed a stupendous piece of art, and much of it surpassingly beautiful; but the absorbing interest of it will always be that it is a "human document," an autobiographical fragment, the most touching autobiography ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... his sixtieth birthday, Ibsen wrote out for Henrik Jaeger certain autobiographical recollections of his childhood. It is from these that the striking phrase about the scream of the saws is taken, and that is perhaps the most telling of these infant memories, many of which are slight and naive. It is interesting, however, to find that his earliest impressions of life at ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... Angelo fled from Rome during the week after Easter, 1506. He relates the circumstances in a letter of October 1542, No. c. d. xxxv. "Le Lettere p. 489," which corroborates Condivi's story word for word, and is another proof of the autobiographical ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... To this autobiographical sketch it remains to be added, that Mr Riddell is possessed of nearly all the qualities of a great master of the Scottish lyre. He has viewed the national character where it is to be seen in its most unsophisticated ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... playwright and the impecunious debtor. A German savant observes that Schiller was not, like Goethe, a virtuoso in love. And so it certainly looks, albeit the difference might perhaps appear a little less conspicuous if he had lived to a ripe old age and dressed up his recollections of youth in an autobiographical romance. He did not lack the data of experience, but without the charm of the retrospective poetic treatment his early love-affairs are not profoundly interesting. In the midst of his troubles it came over him that marriage might be the right ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... some unoccupied person to whom he could retail all the latest bits of Anarchist scandal, or from whom he could ferret out some little private secrets, he was contented enough, or, leaning out of the office window he would deliver a short autobiographical sketch to the interested denizens of the surrounding courts. A small bill, posted outside the office door, announced that Short was prepared to undertake extraneous jobs of printing on his own account; and this was responsible for many of the queer customers ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... Punch's influence at that time, as well as his desire to temper the ardour of its attacks if not to secure its silence, for he there explains how the hero, who to some degree at least is to be considered an autobiographical study, "flattered himself that 'Scaramouche'" would regard him in a more friendly spirit. Punch, with pardonable pride, devoted a cartoon to this pointed reference, but merely remarking, "H'm—he did flatter himself," abated not one jot of his ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... Many critics complained of the book called "Heretics" because it merely criticised current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy. This book is an attempt to answer the challenge. It is unavoidably affirmative and therefore unavoidably autobiographical. The writer has been driven back upon somewhat the same difficulty as that which beset Newman in writing his Apologia; he has been forced to be egotistical only in order to be sincere. While everything else may be different the motive in both cases is the same. It is ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... An autobiographical fragment, composed by Lord Shelburne in his closing years, and found among the Shelburne papers at Lansdowne House, presents with a vividness of detail and verisimilitude that leaves nothing to be desired the outlines of the first twenty years of his life. The Second ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... often", etc. This and the lines which immediately follow are autobiographical. Cf. George Primrose's story in 'The Vicar of Wakefield', 1766, ii. 24-5 (ch. i):—'I passed among the harmless peasants of Flanders, and among such of the French as were poor enough to be very merry; for I ever found them sprightly in proportion to their wants. Whenever I approached ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... not strictly and completely accurate in saying that the first volume of "Lavengro" is "strictly autobiographical and authentic as the whole was at first intended to be." He could give no proof that Borrow's memory went back to his third year or that he first handled a viper at that time. He could only show that Borrow's accounts do not conflict with other accounts ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... Ida Pfeiffer: Inclusive of a Visit to Madagascar. With an Autobiographical Introduction. Translated by H.W. Dulcken. New York. Harper & ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... recollect the morning," he says in the autobiographical sketch which he prepared for his sons, "and may it please God that I never forget it, when for the first time I entered Mr. Bakewell's dwelling. It happened that he was absent from home, and I was shown into a parlour where only one young lady was snugly seated at her ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... nothing more simple, homely, and attractive in literature than Franklin's autobiographical account of the first period of his life, of which we have transcribed a portion, nor nothing more indicative of the great changes which time has produced in the conditions of this country, and which it produced ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... really fight Big Ben Brain or Bryan in Hyde Park, or is it all a fantasy of the artist's imagining? We shall never know. Borrow called his Lavengro 'An Autobiography' at one stage of its inception, although he wished to repudiate the autobiographical nature of his story at another. Dr. Knapp in his anxiety to prove that Borrow wrote his own memoirs in Lavengro and Romany Rye tells us that he had no creative faculty—an absurd proposition. But I think we may accept the contest between ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... Moreover, unless she went out greedily in search of fresh variety, how could she bring it into his present prison? If she spent too much time with him, inevitably they would exhaust their fund of gossip. Then they would be driven into becoming autobiographical, and that would be the finish of ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... to leave England for a year or more, which he spent in travel on the Continent and in Egypt, Nubia, and Palestine. His visit to the birthplace of his race made an impression on him that lasted through his life and literature. It is embodied in his 'Letters to His Sister' (London, 1843), and the autobiographical novel 'Contarini Fleming' (1833), in which he turned his adventures into fervid English, at a guinea a volume. But although the spirit of poesy, in the form of a Childe Harold, stalks rampant through the romance, there is both feeling and fidelity to nature ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... sent in a letter, which possesses much autobiographical interest, to the Committee of Public Instruction, in which ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... was b. at Malta, and ed. at schools at Shrewsbury and in Paris. In 1882 he went to Australia, and was on the staff of The Sydney Bulletin. In 1884 he publ. his autobiographical novel, Leicester, and in 1888 Songs of the Army of the Night, which created a sensation in Sydney. His remaining important work is Tiberius (1894), a striking drama in which a new view of the character of the Emperor is presented. He d. by his own hand at Alexandria in a fit ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... Such were the autobiographical snatches—by no means so crude as they sound that reached her intelligence from time to time. Mr. Wing was too subtle to be crude; and he had married a Playfair, a family noted for good living. Honora did not know that he was fond of talking of that apple pie and the New England school ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... autobiographical passages in "David Copperfield" which bear on the difficulties of stenography. The book is in everybody's hands. But I cannot forego the pleasure of brightening my pages with Dickens' own description of his experiences as a reporter, a description contained in one of those ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... for business. Nor does this picture inadequately visualize Rockefeller's whole after-life, and explain the business qualities that made possible his unexampled success. It is, indeed, the scene to which Mr. Rockefeller himself most frequently reverts when, in his famous autobiographical discourses to his Cleveland Sunday School, he calls our attention to the rules that inevitably lead to industrial prosperity. "Thrift, thrift, Horatio," is the one idea upon which the great captain of the oil business has always insisted. Many have ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... old books of travel is, that they are, unconsciously, autobiographical. The honest pilgrim, in his desire to give a faithful description of new lands, is little aware that he is all the time describing himself as well. His prejudice, his likings, his disappointments and aspirations are all transparently revealed to us, and through him we ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... boyhood in his beloved island Bornholm, in the Baltic, in or near the town, Nexo, from which his final name is derived. There, too, he was a shoemaker's apprentice, like Pelle in the second part of the book, which resembles many great novels in being largely autobiographical. Later, he gained his livelihood as a bricklayer, until he somehow managed to get to one of the most renowned of our "people's high-schools," where he studied so effectually that he was enabled to become a teacher, first at a provincial school, and ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... me for a few reminiscences of the time when I took a more or less active part in the Revolutionary Movement in Russia—a sort of autobiographical sketch, to be published in English. As I never had the good fortune to render any really important service to my country, I have no right to draw public attention upon myself, and no wish to do so. But my experiences, of which I have told you a good deal by word ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... 'quarter share,' the fourth part of the receipts of his company. The Blackfriars Theatre had sixteen shareholders. It is proved that Shakspere at that time, when a valuation of the theatre was made, had a claim to four parts, each of L233 6s. 8d. (Chr. Armitage Brown, Shak. Autobiographical Poems, London, 1838, p. 101). In The Poetaster (act iii. sc. i), Tucca says to Crispinus the Poetaster:—'Thou shall have a quarter share.' In Epistle xii. (Forest), which Jonson addresses to Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland, and which, in our ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... him in all his strength and weakness, as we can know only an amiable and communicative egotist; moreover, besides losing no opportunity for self-expression, both in and out of season, Heine published a good deal of frankly autobiographical matter, and wrote memoirs, only fragments of which have come down to us, but of which more than has yet appeared will perhaps ultimately be made accessible. Heine's life, then, is to us for the most part an open ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... papers which appeared in Tait's Magazine are all duly vouched for in that periodical. I have not touched any of the autobiographical matter which appeared in Tait,—the Author having recast that as well as the Sketches from Childhood, published in The Instructor in the 'Autobiographic Sketches' with which he opened the Selections. The Casuistry of Duelling, indeed, appeared in Tait as part of the Autobiographic ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... tries to play; it pitilessly exposes him as a tin hero worshipping himself as Big Metal every time he tries to do the modest-unconsciousness act before the reader. This is not guessing; I am speaking from autobiographical personal experience; I was never able to refrain from mentioning, with a studied casualness that could deceive none but the most incautious reader, that an ancestor of mine was sent ambassador to Spain by Charles I., nor that in a remote branch of my family ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the Disruption; he also meditated the publication of a volume of essays. His poetical works, which appeared at various intervals, were re-published in 1850, in two duodecimo volumes, with an interesting autobiographical sketch. Of his poems those most deserving of notice, next to the "Sabbath," are "The House of Mourning, or the Peasant's Death," and "The Plough," both evincing grave and elevated sentiment, expressed in correct poetical language. The following songs are favourable specimens ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Darwin. With an Autobiographical Chapter. Edited by Francis Darwin. Portraits. 3 volumes 36s. Popular Edition. Condensed in ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... he moved backwards and forwards between his chest of drawers and dressing-table, he would cast frequent affectionate glances at his double, now in the glass of the armoire, now in that above the chimney. He was favouring me meantime with a running monologue of an autobiographical complexion. ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... forty-five; but his fame—his better life—is more vigorous than ever. Washington Irving, whose writings are similar in style to those of Goldsmith, has extended and perpetuated his reputation in America by writing his Biography; a charming work, many touches of which seem almost autobiographical, as displaying the resemblance between the ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... or did Johnson prefer to keep silent about them? Anecdote after anecdote shows Johnson to have been an extremely proud man, one who would feel keenly a public disgrace. Was he exposed to "the scorn of gazers" on one or both of these occasions? It is tempting, and admittedly dangerous, to read autobiographical significance in the note on Eleanor's words. But another question intrudes itself in this connection: Is there a link between the two arrests and Idler No. 22, "Imprisonment of Debtors," which Johnson substituted for the original essay when the periodical was republished ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... familiar with Edgar Allan Poe's admirable and entrancing narrative just mentioned, are aware that it is written in autobiographical form, the facts for the most part being furnished by Pym in the shape of journal or diary entries, which are edited by Mr. Poe. For such readers it will be but a waste of time to peruse the present chapter, brief though it is. And let me further say to any chance reader ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... Sept. 9, 1802, S. T. C." I should have guessed whence they came, but dared not flatter myself so highly as satisfactorily to believe it, before I obtained the avowal of the lady who had transmitted them. Excerpt from 'Autobiographical Sketch'.] ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... eighty-fifth year, preserving her beauty and freshness in a marvelous degree. The effect of Grassini's singing on people of refined taste was even greater than the impression made on regular musicians. Thomas De Quincey speaks of her in his "Autobiographical Sketches" as having a voice delightful beyond all that he had ever heard. Sir Charles Bell thought it was "only Grassini who conveyed the idea of the united power of music and action. She did not act only without being ridiculous, but with an effect equal to Mrs. Siddons. The 'O Dio' ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... For he, (though but few of his readers are aware of the fact,) like Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Gibbon, Franklin, and other eminent men, wrote an autobiography. It is certainly the briefest, and perhaps the wittiest and most truthful autobiographical sketch in the language. It was published in the "New Monthly Magazine" a few months after its author's death, with the following preface or introduction from the pen of some unknown ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... adventure, and action contributory to it, the defect is not so emphasised. The sense as of a projection of certain features of the writer into all and sundry of his important characters, thus imparts, if not an air of egotism, then most certainly a somewhat constrained, if not somewhat artificial, autobiographical air—in the very midst of action, questions of ethical or casuistical character arise, all contributing to submerging individual character and its dramatic interests under a wave of but half-disguised autobiography. Let Stevenson do his very ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... rest be "wrop in mystery," it would probably have been the best way. But the bulk of the book is beyond improvement: and there is a fluid grace about the autobiographical recit which is very rare indeed, at least in French, except in the unfortunate Gerard de Nerval, who was akin to Cazotte in many ways, and actually edited him. A very carping critic may object to the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... which he had reached that elevation. I hope, therefore, to be considered as having conquered my own disinclination to be the relater of events in which I was concerned, in order to overcome the scruples which he entertained against being the author of the autobiographical sketch, embracing so singular a portion of his life, which I have extracted from the rough notes ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... contributors. Amongst these were some very eminent men: Mr. John Barrow of the Admiralty; the Rev. Reginald Heber, Mr. Robert Grant (afterwards Sir Robert, the Indian judge), Mr. Stephens, etc. How Mr. Barrow was induced to become a contributor is thus explained in his Autobiography. [Footnote: "Autobiographical Memoir of Sir John Barrow," ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... Own Time in 1683, after the publication of his History of the Reformation. In its original form it partook largely of the nature of Memoirs. But on the appearance of Clarendon's History in 1702 he was prompted to recast his entire narrative on a method that confined the strictly autobiographical matter to a section by itself and as a whole assured greater dignity. The part dealing with the reign of Charles II was rewritten by August 1703. The work was brought down to 1713 and completed in that year. Two years later Burnet died, leaving instructions that it was not to be printed till six ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... intimate evening over their cigarettes both had their curiosity gratified. Captain Annersley was moved to relate some of his hair breadth escapes and thrilling moments to an alert and hero worshiping listener. And later still Ted too waxed autobiographical in response to some clever baiting of which he was entirely unaware though he did wonder afterward how he had happened to tell the thing he had kept most secret to an entire stranger. It was an immense ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... story, in the latter half of the book, are the identical things the author was preaching. The first chapters of the story are very largely colored by Mr. Wright's early life, but they are by no means autobiographical. ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... deciphered, constitute a body of laws which well deserve to have been made thus imperishable. For no temporal sovereign has ever legislated so fully and exclusively and with such evident conviction for the spiritual advancement and moral elevation of his people. Scarcely less important is the autobiographical value of these inscriptions, which enable one to follow stage by stage the evolution of the Apostle-Emperor's soul. Within a year of the conquest of the Kalinjas, for which he afterwards publicly recorded his remorse, Asoka became a lay disciple ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... shows that people are interested in life, and trying to shape it. But I don't want romance, and I don't want ugly and sensational realism either. That is only romance in another shape. I want real men and women—not from an autobiographical point of view, because that is generally romantic too—but from the point of view of the friends to whom they showed themselves frankly and naturally, and without that infernal reticence which is not either reverence or chivalry, but simply an inability to face the truth,—which ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... no more than sectional; the realities of his autobiography, taking him back again to Main-Travelled Roads and its cycle, were personal, lyrical, and consequently universal. All along, it now appeared, he had been at his best when he was most nearly autobiographical: those vivid early stories had come from the lives of his own family or of their neighbors; Rose of Dutcher's Coolly had set forth what was practically his own experience in its account of a heroine—not hero—who leaves her native farm to go first to a country ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... Notwithstanding their autobiographical form the above two stories are not the record of personal experience. Their quality, such as it is, depends on something larger if less precise: on the character, vision and sentiment of the first twenty independent years of my life. And the same may be ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... been written several years before the date of its publication. It is a great advance in certain respects over the first novel, but wants the peculiar interest which belonged to that as a partially autobiographical memoir. The story is no longer disjointed and impossible. It is carefully studied in regard to its main facts. It has less to remind us of "Vivian Grey" and "Pelham," and more that recalls "Woodstock" and "Kenilworth." The personages were many of them historical, though idealized; the occurrences ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... "Part Two; Autobiographical Style," he announced, with a wave of his hand. "I hopped along the Guests' Corridor, and turned into the South Corridor. I stopped at the little study. Door open; nobody there. I crossed the study to the second door, communicating with Mrs. ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... Grammont was by no means autobiographical. She gave no sketches of her idiosyncrasies, and she repeated no remembered comments and prophets of her contemporaries about herself. She either concealed or she had lost any great interest in her own personality. But she was interested in and curious about the people she had met in life, and her ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... the Memoir of Butler on which I am still engaged, I marked all the more autobiographical notes and had them copied; again I was struck by the interest, the variety, and the confusion of those I left untouched. It seemed to me that any one who undertook to become Butler's accountant and to post his entries upon himself would have to settle first how many and what accounts to open ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... imperfect work, and was jealously anxious to clear his reputation, as a writer, in the matter of this particular comedy, is no less apparent from the very unusual personal explanation he offered for it, soon after the brief run of the play was over. For no man was more shy of autobiographical revelations. His biographers are continually reduced to gleaning stray hints, here and there, concerning his private life. [5] And therefore we can measure by this emergence from a habitual personal reticence the soreness ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... known beyond what may be gleaned from a discriminating study of the "Book of Delight." That this romance is largely autobiographical in fact, as it is in form, there can be no reasonable doubt. The poet writes with so much indignant warmth of the dwellers in certain cities, of their manner of life, their morals, and their culture, that one can only infer that he is relating his personal experiences. ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... possessing a rare interest, not only for the missionary student, but equally so for the general reader. The amount of information it contains, descriptive, social, evangelistic, and even political, is astonishing; and the discursive and, in part, autobiographical form in which it is written, renders it so easy, that he who runs may read. The contrast is drawn graphically, and with a light and lively pen, between the state of things fifty years ago and that which now prevails: the exchange of slow and cumbrous means of conveyance for those ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... Humorists;" a series of scenes of Old English life, as displayed in one of those venerable halls, that rise, here and there, in a British landscape, as monuments of the hospitality of our ancestors, and better times. In the autobiographical chapter of this work, the writer thus pleasantly refers to his previous success, as "a matter of marvel, that a man, from the wilds of America, should express himself in tolerable English. I was looked upon as something ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 584 - Vol. 20, No. 584. (Supplement to Vol. 20) • Various
... we must go back to classic times. But literature, that is, literature which is an end in itself and not a means to something else, did not exist in America before Irving. Some foreshadowings (the autobiographical fragment of Franklin was not published till 1817) of its coming may be traced, but there can be no question that his writings were the first that bore the national literary stamp, that he first made the nation conscious of its gift and opportunity, ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... cannot but feel that it is, if not directly and circumstantially, at least in essence, autobiographical. One finds oneself speculating over the author, wondering what was her history, and how much of it was Miss Milner's. Unfortunately the greater part of what we should most like to know of Mrs. Inchbald's life has vanished beyond recovery. She wrote her Memoirs, and she burnt ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... a little remarkable, that—though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends—an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public. The first time was three or four years since, when I favored the reader—inexcusably, and for no earthly reason, that either the indulgent ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... aplomb was so majestic. I never knew a rogue to cut so fat; his villainy was ample, like his belly, and I could scarce find it in my heart to hold him responsible for either. He was good enough to drop into the autobiographical; telling me how the farm, in spite of the war and the high prices, had proved a disappointment; how there was 'a sight of cold, wet land as you come along the 'igh-road'; how the winds and rains and the seasons had been misdirected, it seemed 'o' purpose'; how Mrs. Fenn had died—'I lost ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I should want you to know that in many things my life has been very, very different from yours. The first thing I can remember—you'll think I'm more autobiographical than our driver at Ha-Ha Bay, even, but I must tell you all this—is about Kansas, where we had moved from Illinois, and of our having hardly enough to eat or wear, and of my mother grieving over our privations. At last, when my father was killed," ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... yet further expansion, for this autobiographical record which we are busy preparing, which is at once ledger and indictment, is to be read out one day. There is a great scene in the last book of Scripture, the whole solemn significance of which, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL.—I should be glad to know whether it would be advisable for me to write a book of "Reminiscences," as I see is now the fashion. My life has been chiefly passed in a moorland-village in Yorkshire, so that it has not been very eventful, and I have never written ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 24, 1892 • Various
... great liking; poems, political pamphlets, newspapers, all that came to her hand. Her longest and greatest poem, Aurora Leigh, was written during her Italian years. While the story of the poem is in no sense autobiographical, the heroine is in her beliefs and her ideals Mrs. Browning's self, and this was the poem by which she felt herself most willing to ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... terrestrial or celestial, is imagined only to be turned from with disgust. A temporary condition of this sort, connected with the religious evolution of a singularly lofty character, both intellectual and moral, is well described by the Catholic philosopher, Father Gratry, in his autobiographical recollections. In consequence of mental isolation and excessive study at the Polytechnic school, young Gratry fell into a state of nervous exhaustion with symptoms ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... title of Buzz-Buzz. Its author, JAMES E. AGATE, has now followed it with another, called, rather grimly, Responsibility (RICHARDS). You will be absolutely correct in guessing that this is not a treatise on revue, being indeed an autobiographical novel of (I feel bound to add) precisely the same calibre as, in the sister realm of drama, made the name of Manchester at one period a word of awe. Why do these young Mancunians recollect to such stupendous purpose? Here is Mr. AGATE, with an introduction ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... "This was the only time Abraham was ever defeated on a direct vote of the people," say his autobiographical notes. He had a consolation in his defeat, however, for in spite of the pronounced Democratic sentiments of his precinct, he received two hundred and seventy-seven votes out of three ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... in 1601 the living of Halsted in Suffolk, and married in 1603. In an autobiographical sketch of "Some Specialities in the Life of Joseph Hall," he thus tells us himself the manner of ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... In the process of removing the remainder of Mr. Darwin's books and papers from Down, the following autobiographical notes, written in 1838, came to light. They seem to us worth publishing—both as giving some new facts, and also as illustrating the interest which he clearly felt in his own development. Many words are omitted in the manuscript, and some names incorrectly spelled; the corrections ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... In compensation for the want of observation on the part of his own kith and kin, Milton himself, with a superb and ingenuous egotism, has revealed the secret of his thoughts and feelings in numerous autobiographical passages of his prose writings. From what he directly communicates, and from what he unconsciously betrays, we obtain an internal life of the mind, more ample than that external life of the bodily machine, which we ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... the poet's autobiographical sketches prefixed to his works, a competent biographer will, doubtless, be found among Sir Walter's personal acquaintance. Mr. Allan Cunningham's "Account" is, perhaps, the most characteristic that has yet appeared: it is full of truth, nature, kindly feeling, and tinged throughout with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... staircases climbing to heaven, up which toiled eternally the same solitary figure. "Then came sudden alarms, hurrying to and fro; trepidations of innumerable fugitives; darkness and light; tempest and human faces." Many of De Quincey's papers were autobiographical, but there is always something baffling in these reminiscences. In the interminable wanderings of his pen—for which, perhaps, opium was responsible—he appears to lose all trace of facts or of any continuous story. Every actual experience of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... poverty and consorting with the outcasts of society. Of all the writers of the Elizabethan period he is perhaps the one whose life and character we can best picture to ourselves; for in his last years, repentant and sorrow-stricken, he wrote with the utmost sincerity autobiographical tales and pamphlets, which are invaluable as a picture of the times; they are, in fact, nothing else than the "Scenes de la vie de ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... the deep, clear consciousness with which he cherished it. The most beloved of his lady friends was Isabel Fenwick, who was a frequent visitor at Rydal Mount during the last twenty years of his life. She wrote, to his dictation, the autobiographical notes used in the memoir of him. Her admiring and devoted friendship was evidently a strong inspiration and precious solace to him. It was for her sake that he built the Level Terrace, on which he paced to and fro for many an hour, in sight of the valley of the Rothay and the banks ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... best of the grave and gay tales with which he has aided the Magazines and Annuals during the last few years. The Series will extend to fourteen volumes, the first of which, now before us, preceded by a poetical dedication and autobiographical memoir. The poem is an exquisite performance; but the biography, with due allowance for the Shepherd's claim, is a most objectionable preface. It is so disfigured with self-conceit and vituperative recollections of old grievances, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 543, Saturday, April 21, 1832. • Various
... and other Autobiographical Tracts, not included in the recent Publication of the Camden Society edited by Mr. Halliwell, ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... me, since I was certain that every word was distinctly heard by Barboza; yet he made no sign, but went on swaying from side to side as if no mocking word had reached him, then launched out in one of his most atrocious decimas, autobiographical and philosophical. In the first stanza he mentions that he had slain eleven men, but using a poet's license he states the fact in a roundabout way, saying that he slew six men, and then five more, making ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... which he received in May, 1833. The appointment of a Whig by a Democratic administration seems to have been made without comment. "The office was too insignificant to make his politics an objection," say the autobiographical notes. The duties of the new office were not arduous, for letters were few, and their comings far between. At that date the mails were carried by four-horse post-coaches from city to city, and on horseback ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various |
