Doris Lessing

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky ; 11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881 sometimes translated as Dostoevsky, was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century... Russian society. A Slavophile, nationalist and monarchist, he criticised the bourgeois, pre-materialist West and nihilism in many of his works. Although Dostoyevsky wrote books in the mid-1850s which were influenced by realist and romanticist writers, most notably by Dickens, Gogol and Balzac, his best remembered work was done in his last years, including such masterpieces as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoyevsky overall wrote 11 complete novels, 3 novellas, 17 short novels and 3 essays. He is often acknowledged by critics as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature. Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born and raised within the grounds of the Mariinsky hospital.
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Marie-Henri Beyle , better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism in his two novels Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme .... Born in Grenoble, Isère, he had an unhappy childhood in what he found to be stifling provincial France, disliking his "unimaginative" father and mourning his mother, who had died when he was young. His closest friend was his younger sister, Pauline, with whom he maintained a steady correspondence throughout the first decade of the 19th century. The military and theatrical worlds of the First French Empire were a revelation to Beyle. He was named an auditor with the Conseil d'État on 3 August 1810, and thereafter took part in the French administration and in the Napoleonic wars in Italy. He travelled extensively in Germany and was part of Napoleon's army in the 1812 invasion of Russia. After the 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleau, he left for Italy, where he settled in Milan.
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Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels... Mrs Dalloway , To the Lighthouse and Orlando , and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own , with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London in 1882 to Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Stephen . Virginia's father, Sir Leslie Stephen , was a notable historian, author, critic and mountaineer. He was the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, a work that would influence Woolf's later experimental biographies. Virginia's mother Julia Stephen was a renowned beauty, born in India to Dr. John and Maria Pattle Jackson. She was also the niece of Julia Margaret Cameron née Pattle, the famous photographer.
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David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts... issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, and instinct. Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile which he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as, "The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel.
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