George Brimley (29 December 1819, Cambridge - 29 May 1857) was an English essayist.
George Brimley was born at Cambridge on 29 December 1819, and from the age of eleven to that of sixteen was educated at a school in Totteridge, Hertfordshire. In October 1838 he was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, where in 1841 he was elected a scholar. [1] He was reading with good hopes for classical honours, and was a private pupil of Dr. Vaughan; but even at that early age he was suffering from the disease to which he eventually succumbed. Although the state of his health prevented him from competing for university honours or obtaining a college fellowship, he was known to possess ability; and soon after taking his degree he was appointed college librarian (4 June 1845). He held this office until a few weeks before his death, when he returned to his father's house. Physical weakness prevented the sustained effort necessary for the production of any important work; but for the last six years of his life he contributed to the press.
Most of his writings appeared in The Spectator or in Fraser's Magazine , the only one to which his name was attached being an essay on Tennyson's poems, contributed to the Cambridge Essays of 1855. He died 29 May 1857. A selection of his essays was made after his death and published with a prefatory memoir by W. G. Clark. This volume contains notices of a large number of the writers who were contemporary with Brimley himself, and is of considerable value as representing the contemporary judgment by a man of cultivation and acuteness on the writers of the middle of the nineteenth century, most of whom are now being judged by posterity. Sir Arthur Helps said of him, 'He was certainly, as it appeared to me, one of the finest critics of the present day.'
Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–63), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–72) and Daniel Deronda (1876). Like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside.
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Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known in English as George Santayana, was a Spanish-American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. Born in Spain, Santayana was raised and educated in the US from the age of eight and identified himself as an American, although he always retained a valid Spanish passport. At the age of 48, Santayana left his position at Harvard and returned to Europe permanently.
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This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain : "Brimley, George". Dictionary of National Biography . London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.