Edmund Gosse: a literary landscape, 1849-1928

The life of Edmund Gosse was one of continuous contradiction. As he recalled in "Father and Son", he was a precocious only child brought up by his extraordinary father, whose thinking and conduct were dominated equally by the Bible and the "Actinologica Britannica", a study of marine life. Later, with inexplicable poise, he was simultaneously the intimate of Swinbourne and a sunday school superintendant, and public opinion divided in calling him the most discerning critic in England and a 'literary charlatan' with a 'genius for inaccuracy'. Gosse's rise to pre-eminence was rapid, and at his death he was acknowledged as the friend of Tennyson and Hans Christian Anderson, the confidant of Browning, R.L. Stevenson, Thomas Hardy and Henry James, and the champion of Ibsen, Gide and Yeats. In her biography, Ann Thwaite has painstakingly separated the facts from prejudice and rumour to reveal a picture of Edmund Gosse which can at last be called true to life. She refuses to ignore his many contradictions, but shows how they reflect the complexity of his singular genius.