# Great Writers series

The Great Writers series was a collection of literary biographies published in London from 1887, by Walter Scott & Co. The founding editor was Eric Sutherland Robertson, followed by Frank T. Marzials.
The stated intention, articulated by Robertson, was that the series should constitute fact-based textbooks of English literature. He advocated analytical and scholarly methods of literary study. The works generally contained a bibliography, compiled by John Parker Anderson of the British Museum.
A comparable French series also began publication in 1887, edited by Jean Jules Jusserand, under the title Les Grands Écrivains Français. Its inspiration was John Morley's English Men of Letters, published from 1880. Oscar Wilde called the Great Writers series "unfortunate", but suggested that Anderson's bibliographies were of value, and should be collected up. His dislike of the restrictions on authors extended also to the English Men of Letters. Other series in imitation of English Men of Letters were English Worthies (Longman) and Literary Lives (Hodder).
| Year | Subject | Author | Comment |
| 1887 | Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | Eric Sutherland Robertson | |
| 1887 | Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Hall Caine | "a sound and, within its scope, comprehensive volume" |
| 1887 | Charles Dickens | Frank T. Marzials | |
| 1887 | Dante Gabriel Rossetti | Joseph Knight | |
| 1887 | Samuel Johnson | Francis Richard Charles Grant | |
| 1887 | Charles Darwin | George Thomas Bettany | |
| 1887 | Charlotte Brontë | Augustine Birrell | |
| 1887 | Thomas Carlyle | Richard Garnett | |
| 1887 | Tobias George Smollett | David Hannay | |
| 1887 | Adam Smith | Richard Haldane | |
| 1887 | John Keats | William Michael Rossetti | |
| 1887 | Percy Bysshe Shelley | William Sharp | |
| 1888 | Oliver Goldsmith | Austin Dobson | |
| 1888 | Walter Scott | Charles Duke Yonge | |
| 1888 | Robert Burns | John Stuart Blackie | |
| 1888 | Victor Hugo | Frank T. Marzials | |
| 1888 | Ralph Waldo Emerson | Richard Garnett | |
| 1888 | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | James Sime | |
| 1888 | William Congreve | Edmund Gosse | |
| 1888 | John Bunyan | Edmund Venables | |
| 1888 | George Crabbe | Thomas Edward Kebbel | "Cheap, short and unsympathetic" |
| 1888 | Heinrich Heine | William Sharp | |
| 1889 | John Stuart Mill | W. L. Courtney | "although not negligible, is of very minor importance" |
| 1889 | Friedrich Schiller | Henry Woodd Nevinson | |
| 1889 | Frederick Marryat | David Hannay | |
| 1889 | Honoré de Balzac | Frederick Wedmore | |
| 1889 | Gotthold Ephraim Lessing | T. W. Rolleston | |
| 1890 | John Milton | Richard Garnett | |
| 1890 | George Eliot | Oscar Browning | Largely criticism |
| 1890 | Jane Austen (1890) | Goldwyn Smith | "signifies the recognition of Austen as a standard classic author" |
| 1890 | Robert Browning | William Sharp | |
| 1890 | Lord Byron | Roden Noel | |
| 1890 | Nathaniel Hawthorne | Moncure Conway | |
| 1890 | Arthur Schopenhauer | William Wallace | |
| 1890 | Richard Brinsley Sheridan | Lloyd C. Sanders | |
| 1890 | Henry Thoreau | Henry Shakespear Stephens Salt | revised edition 1896 |
| 1891 | William Makepeace Thackeray | Herman Charles Merivale and Frank Marzials | |
| 1891 | Miguel de Cervantes | Henry Edward Watts | |
| 1892 | Voltaire | Francis Espinasse | |
| 1893 | James Leigh Hunt | Cosmo Monkhouse | "most careful, but not entirely sympathetic" |
| 1893 | John Greenleaf Whittier | William James Linton | |
| 1895 | Ernest Renan | Francis Espinasse | |
Two further lives from the same publisher, of John Ruskin (1910) by Ashmore Wingate, and of Maurice Maeterlinck (1913) by Jethro Bithell, do not conform to the pattern of the series.