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Jane Austen was an English author who wrote about the lives of the British upper class in the 19th Century. Her novels famously poke fun at how people at the time expected women to behave. 

Today, she is one of the most popular authors in the English language.

A fact about Jane Austen

In her lifetime she completed six novels, including Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. Four of them were published before her death.

Quotes

“It isn’t what we say or think that defines us, but what we do.”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

“There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.”

William Cobbett (9 March 1763 – 18 June 1835) was a farmer born in Farnham, Surrey, and was part of a popular agrarian faction seeking to reform Parliament, raise wages, and ease poverty among farm labourers and smallholders. He travelled through Hampshire in 1822 and in his book, Rural Rides, he included a journey from East Meon through Hawkley and Headley.

A fact about William Cobbett

In 1821 William Cobbett started a tour of Britain on horseback. Each evening he recorded his observations on what he had seen and heard that day. This work was published as a series of articles in the Political Register and as a book, Rural Rides, in 1830.

Quotes

“You never know what you can do till you try.”

“Men fail much oftener from want of perseverance than from want of talent.”

“It is by attempting to reach the top at a single leap that so much misery is caused in the world.”

The novelist Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell is now best-known as the author of Cranford and North and South, and the biographer of her friend Charlotte Brontë. Her greatest books were written in reaction to the industrialisation of Manchester, where she lived for much of her life.

A fact about Elizabeth Gaskell

Charles Dickens was a big fan of Gaskell’s writing. He called her “my dear Scheherazade”, a reference to the clever Arabic queen who is the storyteller of the Arabian Nights.

Quotes

“As she realized what might have been, she grew to be thankful for what was.”

“Thinking has, many a time, made me sad, darling; but doing never did in all my life… My precept is, “Do something, my sister, do good if you can; but, at any rate, do something.”

The Reverend Gilbert White (1720-1793) spent most of his life in the small village of Selborne in Hampshire, UK. He was not a trained scientist but was very curious about the world around him – a true natural historian. It is that curiosity, and what he did about it, that resulted in him being a key inspiration to many naturalists who have followed in his footsteps.

A fact about Gilbert White

White was born in his grandfather’s vicarage at Selborne in Hampshire. He was educated by a private tutor in Basingstoke before going to Oriel College, Oxford University.

Quote

“Every intervention of man in the environment around him incurs some risk as to both favourable and unfavourable consequences. Every intervention is taken in the face of partial ignorance as to what its effects will be and involves uncertainty as to the ultimate outcome.”