When Dante died at Ravenna, the custodians of the body at Ravenna put the bones in a false wall of the monastery. Nevertheless, in 1829, a tomb was built for him in Florence in the basilica of Santa Croce. That tomb has been empty ever since, with Dante's body remaining in Ravenna, far from the land he loved so dearly. The front of his tomb in Florence reads "Onorate l'altissimo poeta" – which roughly translates as "Honour the most exalted poet".
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English modernist writer, essayist and feminist.
She was born into a well-known family. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a Victorian scholar. Her mother, born in India, was a favourite model of the Preraphaelite artists. Her sister, Vanessa Bell, was a painter. She had two brothers; one of them, Thoby, died in 1906.
Her mother died when she was thirteen and four years later her half-sister Stella died. In these times Virginia started to have her psychological, or mental problems. She had bipolar disorder in the time when few people knew this illness and most thought she was strange.
After the death of her mother, Leslie Stephen was not able to keep good relations in the family. Virginia and her sister Vanessa were sexually abused by their half-brothers George and Gerald. It affected Virginia for the rest of her life.
In their childhood, all the Stephens children wrote diaries, but only Virginia kept it for her whole life (and after her death, lots of them were published). It was important for her when she was sexually abused, because there was no one with whom she could talk about it. In the diary, she could write everything.
After her father's death, Virginia and her brothers and sister moved to Bloomsbury, London and there they became members of the famous group of artists called Bloomsbury Group. Here Virginia met writer Leonard Woolf (1880-1969), whom she was married to from 1912 until her death. Together, they moved to Richmond, where they opened a publishing office called Hogarth House Press, which later published all of Virginia's novels and essays.
She was bisexual. When she was a teenager, she fell in love with Violet Dickinson and she wrote her lots of love letters. Violet probably never loved her back. Later, Virginia had a sexual relationship with Vita Sackville-West, a writer and a poet. Their letters, which have been published, show how deeply they were in love.
Her most famous novels are "Mrs Dalloway" and "To the Lighthouse". She completed "Mrs Dalloway" in 1925. It is about a day in the life of an English woman called Clarissa Dalloway. Clarissa is throwing a party and she spends the entire day preparing. The story can appear stupid, but it is not so important in the book. What's more important are the feelings, the colours, or the mood of the story.
"To the Lighthouse" was published in 1927 for the first time. It is about a family of Ramsays and its friends. These people are altogether spending a summer in Ramsay's house on an island. The youngest of Ramsays children, James, wants to go to the lighthouse, but they can't go there because of bad weather. In the next part of the book, James is ten years older and his father is taking him to the lighthouse, although he doesn't want to go there anymore.
Virginia Woolf is also an author of these novels: "Jacob's Room" (1923), "Orlando" (1928) and "The Waves" (1931). She was a feminist and she wrote a few essays about women's position in the society, for example "The Room of One's Own" and "Three Guineas".
On 28 March 1941, Woolf drowned herself by filling her overcoat pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse near her home. Her body was not found until 18 April. Her husband buried her cremated remains beneath an elm tree in the garden of Monk's House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.
In 1998, American writer Michael Cunningham wrote a novel in which she appeared, called "The Hours" (a winner of the Pulitzer award), which is best known because of the "same named movie", in which the role of Virginia was played by actress Nicole Kidman. Kidman won an Oscar for her performance.
Rather better known is "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", in which her name is used as a catch-phrase by the lead couple. This was a play, and then a film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The film won five Academy Awards.
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Jane Austen
Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist. She wrote many books of romantic fiction about the gentry. Her works made her one of the most famous and beloved writers in English literature. She is one of the great masters of the English novel.
Austen's works criticized sentimental novels in the late 18th century, and are part of the change to nineteenth-century realism. She wrote about typical people in everyday life. This gave the English novel its first distinctly modern character. Austen's stories are often comic, but they also show how women depended on marriage for social standing and economic security. Her works are also about moral problems.
Jane Austen was born on 16 December 1775 at Steventon, near Basingstoke. Educated mostly by her father and older brothers, and also by her own reading, she lived with her family at Steventon. They moved to Bath when her father retired in 1801. After he died in 1805, she moved around with her mother. In 1809, they settled in Chawton, near Alton, Hampshire. In May 1817 she moved to Winchester to be near her doctor. She died there on 18 July 1817.
Jane Austen was very modest about her own genius. She once famously described her work as "the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory, on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labor". When she was a girl she wrote stories. Her works were printed only after much revision. Only four of her novels were printed while she was alive. They were "Sense and Sensibility" (1811), "Pride and Prejudice" (1813), "Mansfield Park" (1814) and "Emma" (1815). Two other novels, "Northanger Abbey" and "Persuasion", were printed in 1817 with a biographical notice by her brother, Henry Austen. "Persuasion" was written shortly before her death. She also wrote two earlier works, "Lady Susan", and an unfinished novel, "The Watsons". She had been working on a new novel, "Sanditon", but she died before she could finish it. She is now a well known great writer.
Biographical facts about Jane Austen are "famously scarce" (few). Only a few letters remain (it is estimated that only 160 out of Austen's 3,000 letters survive). Her sister Cassandra (to whom most of the letters were written) burned "the greater part" of the ones she kept. The letters she did not destroy she censored. Other letters were destroyed by the heirs of Admiral Francis Austen, Jane's brother. Most of the biographies written about her for 50 years after she died was by her relatives, who often described her as "good quiet Aunt Jane". Scholars have not been able to find much information after that.
Austen's parents, George Austen (1731–1805), and his wife, Cassandra (1739–1827), were both part of the gentry. Cassandra was a part of the important Leigh family. George Austen, however, was of a lower class of society. He had first met Cassandra at Oxford, while she was meeting her uncle Theophilus. George and Cassandra married on 26 April 1764 at Walcot Church in Bath.