THIS IS THE DIARY JUNCTION - DATA AND LINKS FOR OVER 500 HISTORICAL AND LITERARY DIARISTS
PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT ALSO TO LOOK AT KIP FENN, A MAJOR NOVEL ABOUT THE 21st CENTURY
- freely available on this site
Symonds, John Addington ___ 1840-1893
___ British ___ writer
BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Symonds was born in Bristol, and
educated at Harrow School and Balliol College, Oxford where he won the Newdigate
prize with a poem 'The Escorial'. In 1862 he was elected to an open fellowship
at Magdalen but his health broke down, and he travelled to Switzerland.
On returning to London in 1864, he married Janet Catherine North. During
the following five years she gave birth to three daughters. However, the
couple appear to have led fairly separate emotional lives, with Symonds
always pursuing young men as soul mates. In the second half of the 1860s,
Symonds had further mental problems, and travelled to the Continent again.
In 1867, he moved to Bristol, where he did some lecturing. It is only in
the 1970s, that he began to publish significant volumes, many on poetry,
such as 'An Introduction to the Study of Dante' and 'Studies of the Greek
Poets'. In 1875, Catherine gave birth to their fourth daughter. Symonds
major work, 'Renaissance in Italy', was published in several volumes, starting
in the early 1880s. About the same time, he moved to Davos, Switzerland,
more or less permanently. Biographies of Shelley, Jonson and Michelangelo
followed. He also wrote some memoirs, but handed them and a lifetime of
diaries, to his literary executor, Horatio Brown. Subsequently, Brown wrote
a biography of Symonds using many extracts from the diaries. However, all
the diaries were destroyed after Brown's death.
One
biography link
DIARY DATES, CONTENT DESCRIPTORS
1860-1888 ___ literary travel art
music self health love/sex creativity Italy Switzerland
WEB TEXT LINKS
memoir
extracts
ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT LINKS
SOME PUBLISHED TITLES
John Addington Symonds
May 2005
THIS IS THE DIARY JUNCTION - DATA AND LINKS FOR OVER 500 HISTORICAL AND LITERARY DIARISTS
Please
email if you have any corrections, additions or comments. |
IMPORTANT NOTES AND CAUTIONS:
1) The first line of basic information
may be incomplete in several ways: some historical figures have different
names (titles, pen-names); their birth and death dates may be unknown or
uncertain (g - guess, c - circa); similarly, their occupations may be unknown,
or they may have had other jobs; and, for early diarists, I've used 'British'
a bit too freely. 2) The biographical summary may not be accurate. It was
compiled quickly from various sources, mostly on the internet, and the facts
were not checked anywhere near as rigorously as they would have been if
they'd been intended for publication in a printed form. 3) The journal dates
and descriptors (which are in no particular order) must be treated with
caution: since I have not examined the diaries myself, the descriptors are
only guesses based on bibliographies, anthologies and internet biographies.
4) For the biography and etext links, I have ignored any sites with charges,
and I have avoided, wherever possible, those with pop-ups or too much advertising.
I have limited myself to providing three etext links where there is some
variety between them. 5) For the original manuscript links, I have limited
myself to providing a maximum of two (although, for a few diarists, their
original diaries are held in more than two places). 6) I have provided the
titles - chosen randomly - for up to three printed editions of the diaries. |