Edmund Gosse

Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) was an English poet, critic and biographer who worked through the late Victorian years. His lasting importance lies partly in his role as a go-between: he helped introduce Henrik Ibsen to British readers and wrote some of the earliest histories of Victorian sculpture. Today he is best remembered for his memoir.

He was raised in a strict household within the Plymouth Brethren, a small Protestant sect. His father, the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, was a leading figure among the Brethren, and his mother, Emily Bowes, was a published poet. After her death, his relationship with his father grew increasingly strained, and Gosse eventually broke sharply with that faith.

He began at the British Museum in 1867 as an assistant librarian. In 1875 he became a translator at the Board of Trade, a post he held until 1904 and which left him time to write. Trips to Denmark and Norway in the early 1870s introduced him to Scandinavian literature, and his reviews of Ibsen helped bring the playwright to English attention.

His output ranged across poetry, criticism and biographies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers, including Thomas Gray and William Congreve, written in a clear and scholarly prose. During the 1880s he became one of the most respected critics of sculpture and coined the term New Sculpture for the movement. From 1884 to 1890 he taught English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, though he held no academic degrees.

His autobiography, Father and Son (1907), recounts his difficult relationship with his father and is often considered one of the first psychological biographies.

His legacy rests partly on his promotion of Ibsen and his support for younger writers, among them W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and Siegfried Sassoon.