Hours in a Library

This three-volume set brings together a diverse selection of essays by Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), author, philosopher and literary critic. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, he was the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. He wrote critiques of many authors and works, which were published in periodicals such as the Cornhill Magazine (of which he was editor from 1871), Fraser's Magazine and the Fortnightly Review. Stephen sets each writer's work in its historical context, comparing it to that of other significant authors of its era and evaluating its philosophical and moral qualities. His articles, which discuss writers as diverse as Sir Thomas Browne and Walter Savage Landor, or Samuel Richardson and Charlotte Bronte, remain of great interest to scholars of early modern, Romantic and Victorian literature.