What do you think?
Rate this book
Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape, 1849 - 1928
Hardcover with plastic covered unclipped dust jacket, in very good condition. From the collection of Ian Angus (British Librarian and a scholar on George Orwell), whose name and date are pencilled to FEP. Jacket is scuffed, and edges are creased. Board corners and spine ends are bumped and rubbed. Spine is slightly cocked, and page block is lightly blemished. Boards are clean, binding is sound and pages are clear. LW
- GenresBiography
567 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1984
1 person is currently reading
25 people want to read
About the author
Ann Thwaite
54 books27 followersAnn Thwaite is a British writer who is the author of five major biographies. AA Milne: His Life was the Whitbread Biography of the Year, 1990. Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape (Duff Cooper Prize, 1985) was described by John Carey as "magnificent - one of the finest literary biographies of our time". Glimpses of the Wonderful about the life of Edmund Gosse's father, Philip Henry Gosse, was picked out by D.J. Taylor in The Independent as one of the "Ten Best Biographies" ever. Her biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett was originally published as Waiting for the Party (1974) and reissued in 2020 with the title Beyond the Secret Garden, with a foreword by Jacqueline Wilson. Emily Tennyson, The Poet's Wife (1996) was reissued by Faber Finds for the Tennyson bicentenary in 2009.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 10, 2019
An intense and riveting account of the life of nineteenth-century biographer and literary critic Edmund Gosse, whose poetry and critical work is now largely forgotten but whose seminal work 'Father and Son' lives on as a great literary classic. Ann Thwaite's biography is a weighty tome and rightfully so, as Gosse was the literary Forrest Gump of his time, seemingly possessed of a rare talent for inspiring liking and affection and as a result close to practically every major writer of his era. Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Robert Browning, Robert Louis Stevenson - the list is endless. Not everybody liked Gosse: Evelyn Waugh couldn't stand him and Virginia Woolf labelled him a toady to the upper classes. This is borne out by Ann Thwaite's excellent research, which reveals every wart - particularly Gosse's carelessness with the facts in his historical work. However, given this crucial failing, she is oddly silent about the level of possible inaccuracy in the autobiographical 'Father and Son', bar pointing out the occasional wrong date, and indeed quotes from it without caveat. It is likely that the true facts are simply not available but more qualification would have been welcome. The reader is left with a greater understanding of this complex man, a true lover of literature but at the same time clearly ambitious and more than a touch sycophantic. Ann Thwaite is a magnificent biographer and historian, and I now look forward to reading the story of her own background in her recent 'Passageways: the story of a New Zealand family.'
July 4, 2015
I knew of Gosse through my enthusiasm for Hardy and Sassoon and thought I would find another view of them through this book. But it is so much more than a biography of just one man. A little erudite in places perhaps for the non scholar( that's me) but because I have read a lot of books of this period I found that easy to override. Congratulations to the author, I can't begin to imagine the amount of paperwork to be sifted through for research purposes.
February 2, 2024
This biography is a superb piece of work, a tour de force.
Ann Thwaite was right to call it ‘A Literary Landscape’. It’s far more than the story of one man, though it certainly is his story. From Gosse’s early years as the only son of Plymouth Brethen parents right up to his death as an agnostic mainstay of literary high society, it covers an incredible sweep, a detailed view of what was doing on in literature in England (and to some extent in the States) during one man’s life-time.
Gosse’s published work is extensive (biographies, edited volumes, poetry, essays, a memoir), but so are his letters, and the letters of his many correspondents. He was one of those people for whom the word ‘belletrist’ was invented, although it is a noun I always misunderstood. I thought it meant one who was a master of the art of writing letters, when in fact it is simply to do with writing and having a beautiful style. Which of course he did: Gosse did have an elegant way with words, and it’s clear from this biography, that was not just true on paper but in conversation as well. He was an entertainer and he put things beautifully. And he had many good and long-standing friends, and a loving, loyal family.
He also had flaws. When I was at school and studying Shakespeare’s tragedies more than half a century ago, we learned that each one of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes had a ‘fatal flaw’. (A. C. Bradley, the Oxford Professor of Poetry in his day, built his fame around this theory.) Edmund Gosse probably had more than one flaw, but the fatal one for him was (from this autobiography, at least) inaccuracy. He liked to tell a good story but he moved fast, gathered facts quickly and didn’t always check. He was not an academic at heart though he liked to move among them, and had acquired an academic title. But his fatal flaw got him in a pickle in 1886.
He had just accomplished a stunningly successful lecture series in the United States, and been paid a great deal of money for it. He had been feted and flattered, and had had a whale of a time. He came home and converted the lecture series into a book. He had a good memory and he always worked fast. The book was called From Shakespeare to Pope: an enquiry into the causes and phenomena of the rise of classical poetry in England. What a title! It was duly published by the University Press at Cambridge, where Gosse held the post of Clark Lecturer.
Nobody cared about poetry more than Edmund Gosse. He was widely read. He wrote the stuff. He was close friends with Swinburne and Hardy and Browning. There was just the minor snag that he wasn’t a great checker of detail. No peer reviewer was carefully dogging his footsteps either. He loved a good story (a dangerous predilection in academia, albeit an asset in his friendships with novelists like R L Stevenson and Henry James). But one of his more academic friends, one John Churton Collins, was disenchanted with him. And Collins was a stickler for detail. Beware, O beware! There’s always a Churton Collins not far away. He could be reading this review right now. So From Shakespeare to Pope came out, with Gosse anticipating some warm appreciation that didn’t come.
Instead, John Churton Collins read the work and then meticulously itemised a catalogue of the author’s inaccuracies. He offered his findings in a journal article fifty-one pages long. And people read it, or the dangerous parts of it at least. “There is no doubt that Collins was a fanatic and a pedant”, says biographer Ann Thwaite. “But, so far as Gosse’s book was concerned, Collins happened to be right.” Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
I can’t begin to imagine how much material Ann Thwaite must have ploughed through in order to draw her threads together and make a dynamic story of this, as well as the whole of the rest of Gosse’s life and his interactions with all the other literary and political figures. But she has certainly done that and as I read on, my sense of her as an authoritative writer was steadily reinforced. This is a writer who judges her subject tenderly but critically. When she quotes his poems, her remarks about them are appropriate and well judged. When she talks about his flaws, she balances them against his virtues, and there is enough of a mixture for the man to remain unusually interesting.
The biography was first published in 1983, when perhaps the issue of Gosse’s sexuality was a little more delicate than it might be now. So although Ann Thwaite mentions his potential ‘homosexuality’ several times (no fewer than 13 page references in the index), his relationship with his wife was tender and affectionate on both sides; and the strong feelings towards particularly one male friend seem to have remained just that: feelings. Today, we might regard him as curiously normal, in that he was capable of falling in love with both male and female people and he knew it. Perhaps the most important thing about him was that he did love, and where he loved, was loyal. To his wife, his male friends, his children. Or such is the impression I gained from reading this book.
I purchased Ann Thwaite’s book because I recently read Gosse’s ‘classic’ memoir, Father and Son, liked it very much, and wondered why Gosse’s Wikipedia page includes a lengthy quotation suggesting that a “study based on [Gosse’s] published remarks and writings about his father concluded that, in varying degrees, they are "riddled with error, distortion, contradictions, unwarranted claims, misrepresentation, abuse of the written record, and unfamiliarity with the subject." This 2021 article, by D. Wertheimer, is included in Nineteenth-Century Prose issue 48, which is only available if I pay to subscribe, so alas I can’t comment on its authority. But although I have no doubt that Gosse was inaccurate on a range of details, not least dates and locations, “riddled”is the the adjective of a Churton Collins. Moreover, “unfamiliarity with the subject” is, at the very least, an odd charge when a man is writing about his own father. Wrong about his father he may have been. Unfamiliar? Surely not.
In any case, the pleasure I gained from reading this volume has convinced me both that Ann Thwaite is a first-class biographer and that Edmund Gosse was an interesting man, someone well worth knowing about. There was a mountain of reading in this book: small print and a lot of pages, but the author kept me interested throughout. I felt I knew Edmund Gosse by the end, and also his wife Nellie, and I was moved when he died in the final chapter. His interactions with other literary figures of his time were absolutely fascinating. Stevenson, Hardy, James, Tennyson, Browning: their names are still burnished. Gosse is largely forgotten. But in his time, he was a key player, and this book explains precisely how, and why. I was enriched by reading it.
Ann Thwaite was right to call it ‘A Literary Landscape’. It’s far more than the story of one man, though it certainly is his story. From Gosse’s early years as the only son of Plymouth Brethen parents right up to his death as an agnostic mainstay of literary high society, it covers an incredible sweep, a detailed view of what was doing on in literature in England (and to some extent in the States) during one man’s life-time.
Gosse’s published work is extensive (biographies, edited volumes, poetry, essays, a memoir), but so are his letters, and the letters of his many correspondents. He was one of those people for whom the word ‘belletrist’ was invented, although it is a noun I always misunderstood. I thought it meant one who was a master of the art of writing letters, when in fact it is simply to do with writing and having a beautiful style. Which of course he did: Gosse did have an elegant way with words, and it’s clear from this biography, that was not just true on paper but in conversation as well. He was an entertainer and he put things beautifully. And he had many good and long-standing friends, and a loving, loyal family.
He also had flaws. When I was at school and studying Shakespeare’s tragedies more than half a century ago, we learned that each one of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes had a ‘fatal flaw’. (A. C. Bradley, the Oxford Professor of Poetry in his day, built his fame around this theory.) Edmund Gosse probably had more than one flaw, but the fatal one for him was (from this autobiography, at least) inaccuracy. He liked to tell a good story but he moved fast, gathered facts quickly and didn’t always check. He was not an academic at heart though he liked to move among them, and had acquired an academic title. But his fatal flaw got him in a pickle in 1886.
He had just accomplished a stunningly successful lecture series in the United States, and been paid a great deal of money for it. He had been feted and flattered, and had had a whale of a time. He came home and converted the lecture series into a book. He had a good memory and he always worked fast. The book was called From Shakespeare to Pope: an enquiry into the causes and phenomena of the rise of classical poetry in England. What a title! It was duly published by the University Press at Cambridge, where Gosse held the post of Clark Lecturer.
Nobody cared about poetry more than Edmund Gosse. He was widely read. He wrote the stuff. He was close friends with Swinburne and Hardy and Browning. There was just the minor snag that he wasn’t a great checker of detail. No peer reviewer was carefully dogging his footsteps either. He loved a good story (a dangerous predilection in academia, albeit an asset in his friendships with novelists like R L Stevenson and Henry James). But one of his more academic friends, one John Churton Collins, was disenchanted with him. And Collins was a stickler for detail. Beware, O beware! There’s always a Churton Collins not far away. He could be reading this review right now. So From Shakespeare to Pope came out, with Gosse anticipating some warm appreciation that didn’t come.
Instead, John Churton Collins read the work and then meticulously itemised a catalogue of the author’s inaccuracies. He offered his findings in a journal article fifty-one pages long. And people read it, or the dangerous parts of it at least. “There is no doubt that Collins was a fanatic and a pedant”, says biographer Ann Thwaite. “But, so far as Gosse’s book was concerned, Collins happened to be right.” Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
I can’t begin to imagine how much material Ann Thwaite must have ploughed through in order to draw her threads together and make a dynamic story of this, as well as the whole of the rest of Gosse’s life and his interactions with all the other literary and political figures. But she has certainly done that and as I read on, my sense of her as an authoritative writer was steadily reinforced. This is a writer who judges her subject tenderly but critically. When she quotes his poems, her remarks about them are appropriate and well judged. When she talks about his flaws, she balances them against his virtues, and there is enough of a mixture for the man to remain unusually interesting.
The biography was first published in 1983, when perhaps the issue of Gosse’s sexuality was a little more delicate than it might be now. So although Ann Thwaite mentions his potential ‘homosexuality’ several times (no fewer than 13 page references in the index), his relationship with his wife was tender and affectionate on both sides; and the strong feelings towards particularly one male friend seem to have remained just that: feelings. Today, we might regard him as curiously normal, in that he was capable of falling in love with both male and female people and he knew it. Perhaps the most important thing about him was that he did love, and where he loved, was loyal. To his wife, his male friends, his children. Or such is the impression I gained from reading this book.
I purchased Ann Thwaite’s book because I recently read Gosse’s ‘classic’ memoir, Father and Son, liked it very much, and wondered why Gosse’s Wikipedia page includes a lengthy quotation suggesting that a “study based on [Gosse’s] published remarks and writings about his father concluded that, in varying degrees, they are "riddled with error, distortion, contradictions, unwarranted claims, misrepresentation, abuse of the written record, and unfamiliarity with the subject." This 2021 article, by D. Wertheimer, is included in Nineteenth-Century Prose issue 48, which is only available if I pay to subscribe, so alas I can’t comment on its authority. But although I have no doubt that Gosse was inaccurate on a range of details, not least dates and locations, “riddled”is the the adjective of a Churton Collins. Moreover, “unfamiliarity with the subject” is, at the very least, an odd charge when a man is writing about his own father. Wrong about his father he may have been. Unfamiliar? Surely not.
In any case, the pleasure I gained from reading this volume has convinced me both that Ann Thwaite is a first-class biographer and that Edmund Gosse was an interesting man, someone well worth knowing about. There was a mountain of reading in this book: small print and a lot of pages, but the author kept me interested throughout. I felt I knew Edmund Gosse by the end, and also his wife Nellie, and I was moved when he died in the final chapter. His interactions with other literary figures of his time were absolutely fascinating. Stevenson, Hardy, James, Tennyson, Browning: their names are still burnished. Gosse is largely forgotten. But in his time, he was a key player, and this book explains precisely how, and why. I was enriched by reading it.
May 24, 2025
A monumental work - and such a pleasure to read. I only wish the publisher had agreed to it being longer. One of the most enjoyable biographies I have read in years. Gosse was such an interesting man and his life and career intersected with so many other interesting people. I have been fascinated by him ever since I read his autobiographical 'Father and Son". Well done to Ann Thwaite for doing him justice. Given the amount of material she had to work with, it couldn't have been easy
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews