V. Associate the authors with their books:

Walter Scott Emily Bronte Charles Dickens William Shakespeare Charlotte Bronte Jane Austen Oscar Wilde Herbert Wells Agatha Christie  George Byron Somerset Maugham  Bernard Shaw

wrote

The Invisible Man Ten Negroes Ivanhoe Pride and Prejudice Romeo and Juliet Oliver Twist Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Pygmalion Wuthering Heights Jane Eyre The Theatre The Picture of Dorian Grey

VI. Read the text to find out if you are right.

GEORGE BYRON (1788- 1824)

English poet George Byron was one of the most important writers of the Romantic Movement. Educated at Cambridge, he gained recognition with English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), a satire responding to a critical review of his first published volume, Hours of Idleness (1807).

At 21 he began two years of travel in Portugal, Spain, and Greece. The publication in 1812 of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a poem narrating travels in Europe, brought Byron fame. The hero of the poem, Childe Harold, was the first example of what came to be known as the Byronic hero, the young man of stormy emotions who avoids people and wanders through life weighed down by a sense of guilt for mysterious sins of his past. The Byronic hero is, to some extent, modeled on the life and personality of Byron himself.

Settling near Geneva, he wrote the verse tale The Prisoner of Chillon (1816), a hymn to liberty, and Manfred (1817), a poetic drama whose hero reflected Byron’s own guilt and frustration. His greatest poem, Don Juan (1819–24), is an unfinished epic picaresque (плутовской) satire in ottava rima. Among his numerous other works are verse tales and poetic dramas. He died of fever in Greece while aiding the struggle for independence, making him a Greek national hero.

CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870)

D ickens was probably the most popular novelist in the English language in the nineteenth century. When he was only 12, Charles had to leave school and work in a factory. His novels often tell the stories of young children who work hard to escape a life of poverty. Many of the stories were set in London and his novel-show how the city changed during his lifetime.

Most of his books first appeared as serials in magazines. Each week or month, Dickens had to write another chapter of his story. He had to write fast and sometimes changed the stories if the public did not like his last chapter or particularly liked certain characters.

Among his best works are The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities.

CHARLOTTE, EMILY and ANNE BRONTE

T he Bronte sisters were exceptional writers of poetry as well as fiction. Between 1847 and 1848, all three sisters published novels. They all wrote under different names because “good” women were not allowed to write: Emily Bronte became Ellis Bell; Charlotte Bronte, Currer Bell; Anne Bronte, Acton Bell.

Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Bronte is one of the most famous of their novels. The story tells of the destructive and passionate love between two children, Catherine and Heathcliff, who grow up on a farm called Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff leaves the farm when Catherine, for reasons of class, refuses to marry him.

Charlotte Brontë is best known for her novel Jane Eyre (1847), which tells the story of an orphaned girl who falls in love with a married man. The main protagonists of the book, Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester, are portrayed with a complexity uncommon in fiction of the time.

All three sisters died very young. The house where they .lived is now a museum and you can walk from it over the Yorkshire moors to the farm where Wuthering Heights is set.

J ANE AUSTEN (1775-1817)

Jane Austen spent her short life in Hampshire, near the south coast of England. In her six full-length novels – Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Persuasion (1817), and Northanger Abbey (published 1817 but written before the others) – she created the comedy of manners of middle-class English life in her time.

Her novels describe the everyday life of people in the upper-middle class circles she knew best. Money and social position were very important and the only role of a woman of that class was to find a rich husband.

Her characters spend most of the time in the countryside, doing little or no work. Occasionally they go to London; sometimes they go to Bath, a fashionable town. Her novels may sound boring, but they are a record of what life was like for the upper-middle class in the early nineteenth century and are among the finest and most entertaining novels written at the time.

William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

William Somerset Maugham, a well-known English novelist, short-story writer, playwright and essayist, was the son of a British diplomat. He was educated at King’s School in Canterbury, went to Heidelberg University in Germany and studied to be a doctor at St. Thomas Hospital in London.

He abandoned a short career in medicine when his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), had some success.

During the First World War, Maugham’s best-known novel, Of Human Bondage (1915) was published. This was followed by another successful book, The Moon and Sixpence (1919), a story of the conflict between the artist and conventional society, based on the life of the French painter Paul Gauguin. Among his other famous novels are The Painted Veil (1925), Cakes and Ale (1930), The Theatre (1937), The Razor’s Edge (1944).

Maugham also developed a reputation as a fine short-story writer. His best known short stories are Rain, The Luncheon, The Ant and the Grasshopper, Home, A Friend in Need, The Happy Man.

Somerset Maugham’s style of writing is clear and precise. He does not impose his views upon the reader. He puts a question and leaves it to the reader to answer it.

Agatha Christie (1890-1976)

E nglish novelist and playwright Agatha Christie is one of the best-known 20th-century writers of mystery stories. She published more than 75 books during her career, which started in 1920 with The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Her mysteries are noted for clever and surprising twists of plot and for the creation of two unconventional fictional detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Poirot is the hero of many of her works, including the classic The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and Curtain (1975), in which the detective dies.

Her first marriage, to Archibald Christie, ended in divorce in 1928. In 1930, while traveling in the Middle East, Christie met the noted English archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan. They were married that year, and from that time on Christie accompanied her husband on annual trips to Iraq and Syria. She used the expeditions as material for Murder in Mesopotamia (1930), Death on the Nile (1937), and Appointment with Death (1938).

Christie’s plays include The Mousetrap, produced continuously in London since 1952, and Witness for the Prosecution (1953; film 1957), for which she received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for 1954-1955. Her stories have been made into a number of television series and films, most centering on her characters Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. In 1971 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.