Home Life of Great Authors

Family rooms, childhood habits and friendships supply the material for Hattie Tyng Griswold's sketches of writers. Home Life of Great Authors opens with Goethe's upbringing, describing his stern father, lively mother, early reading and enthusiasm for art and the theatre. Griswold builds her portraits from domestic incidents, including the awkward clothes Goethe takes to university and his embarrassment when he discovers how they look to others.

The collection includes chapters on Wordsworth, Emerson, George Eliot, Dickens, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Browning. A later sketch turns to Tennyson's family at the Somersby rectory and his friendship with Arthur Hallam. Written for busy readers interested in authors' private lives, these brief accounts offer an introduction to literary biography through family relationships, personal interests and familiar surroundings. They also show how a nineteenth-century writer presented celebrated literary figures through anecdotes about their homes and habits.