Robert Inglesfield – författare

''How delightful it would be to be a governess!'' When the young Agnes Grey takes up her first post as governess she is full of hope; she believes she only has to remember ''myself at their age'' to win her pupils'' love and trust. Instead she finds the young children she has to deal with completely unmanageable. They are, as she observes to her mother, ''unimpressible, incomprehensible creatures''. In writing her first novel, Anne Brontë drew on her own experiences, and one can trace in the work many of the trials of the Victorian governess, often stranded far from home, and treated with little respect by her employers, yet expected to control and educate her young charges. Agnes Grey looks at childhood from nursery to adolescence, and it also charts the frustrations of romantic love, as Agnes starts to nurse warmer feelings towards the local curate, Mr Weston. The novel combines astute dissection of middle-class social behaviour and class attitudes with a wonderful study of Victorian responses to young children which has parallels with debates about education that continue to this day. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford''s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The English first edition of Dramatis PersonA was published in May 1864, with the American first edition appearing hard on its heels in the following September. This was the second of the two great collections of Robert Browning's middle years--the first, Men and Women, having appeared nine years previously. The new collection, with its inspired general title (which Browning seems to have hit upon only weeks before the publication of the English first edition), was certainly an extraordinary imaginative and technical achievement: the poems are remarkable for their modernity of subject matter and close psychological interest, as well as their assertive individuality of conception. An outstanding feature is the inventive handling of tone, as for example in 'Apparent Failure'. Browning seems to have regarded the collection very much as a continuation and development of Men and Women, with its varied, contrasting dramatic lyrics and dramatic-argumentative poems. As in the earlier collection, the great majority of the poems are essentially 'dramatic' in conception.

This is the first full scholarly edition of Browning's greatest and perhaps best-known collection of short poems, Men and Women. A comprehensive introduction shows how new research by Ian Jack an Robert Inglesfield has unearthed material which throws fresh light on the composition and dates of such famous pieces as 'Fra Lippo Lippi', 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came', and 'One Word More: To E.B.B.'.This edition uses a critical text based on that of Browning's final collection, and has detailed introductions to the individual poems. It is the fifth volume in the highly praised Political Works of Robert Browning.

The English first edition of Dramatis Personæ was published in May 1864, with the American first edition appearing hard on its heels in the following September. This was the second of the two great collections of Robert Browning's middle years--the first, Men and Women, having appeared nine years previously. The new collection, with its inspired general title (which Browning seems to have hit upon only weeks before the publication of the English first edition), was certainly an extraordinary imaginative and technical achievement: the poems are remarkable for their modernity of subject matter and close psychological interest, as well as their assertive individuality of conception. An outstanding feature is the inventive handling of tone, as for example in 'Apparent Failure'. Browning seems to have regarded the collection very much as a continuation and development of Men and Women, with its varied, contrasting dramatic lyrics and dramatic-argumentative poems. As in the earlier collection, the great majority of the poems are essentially 'dramatic' in conception.