Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse

Description

The author of forty books, Philip Henry Gosse also perfected and popularised the aquarium, and travelled widely before settling in Devon as a self-trained entomologist, botanist, lepidopterist, ornithologist, and, above all, marine biologist. In a reassessment of the extraordinary life of the man described by Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard palaeontologist, as the 'David Attenborough of his day', Ann Thwaite also addresses the key question of why he has been perceived as a cruel and tyrannical father - a notion generally attributed to Father and Son, the classic memoir by his son Edmund. But Edmund himself was shocked and surprised by such reactions to his work. The father he remembered - the man deemed by the Royal Society to have done more than any before to popularise the study of natural history in England, - was at odds with this portrait he seemed to have delivered to the public domain.

Born in London, Ann Thwaite spent the war years in New Zealand, returning to complete her education at Queen Elizabeth's, Barnet, and St Hilda's College, Oxford. She has lived in Tokyo, Benghazi and Nashville, Tennessee. She has lectured in many countries, but most of her life has been spent as a writer, and she is now settled in Norfolk with her husband, the poet Anthony Thwaite. She is an Oxford D.Litt, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her previous biographies are Waiting for the Party, a life of Frances Hodgson Burnett; Edmund Gosse (winner of the Duff Cooper Award, 1985); A. A. Milne (Whitbread Biography of the Year in 1990); and Emily Tennyson: The Poet's Wife.Ann Thwaite celebrated her seventieth birthday in the week of the publication of Glimpses of the Wonderful, which she says is her final biography. She plans now to use her biographical skills on her own life, in a book tentatively titled 'My Side of the