British Authors/playwrights + Works

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Harold Pinter, CH, CBE, Nobel Laureate (10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008), was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor, director, poet, author, and political activist considered by many "the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation."

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His best-known works include The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1959), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted to film, and his screenplay adaptations of others' works, such as The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He directed almost 50 stage, television, and film productions.[2] Despite frail health since being diagnosed with oesophageal cancer late in 2001,[1] he continued to act on stage and screen, performing the title role in a critically-acclaimed production of Samuel Beckett's one-act monologue Krapp's Last Tape for the 50th anniversary season of the Royal Court Theatre, in October 2006.

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The Birthday Party (1958) is the first full-length play by Harold Pinter and one of Pinter's best-known and most-frequently performed plays. After its hostile London reception almost ended Pinter's playwriting career, it went on to be considered "a classic".

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The Birthday Party is about Stanley Webber, an erstwhile piano player in his 30s, who lives in a rundown boarding house, run by Meg and Petey Boles, in an English seaside town, "probably on the south coast, not too far from London".[11][12] Two sinister strangers, Goldberg and McCann, who arrive purportedly on his birthday and who appear to have come looking for him, turn Stanley's apparently-innocuous birthday party organized by Meg into a nightmare.

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The Caretaker is a play by the Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter, first published in 1959. It was Pinter’s sixth stage/TV play and was the work that gave him his first significant commercial success. It was first performed at the Arts Theatre, London on 27 April 1960 and transferred to the Duchess Theatre a month later. It achieved, on its first run, a total of 444 performances.

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This play is a three-hander, set in West London in 1959, involving the interaction of a tramp (Davies), a mentally challenged younger man (Aston) and his younger brother (Mick).

Aston has helped Davies to escape from a cafe brawl and brought him back to his scruffy one-room flat nearby. The room is filthy and full of junk but as Davies' only alternative is sleeping rough on the streets during a rainstorm he finds it perfectly desirable. Davies overtly expresses his racist views when told that there is a family of Indians, or 'blacks' as he calls them, living next door. He also has obsessional fears of draughts, gas leaks, and ill-fitting shoes. His obsessions however can be seen as a consequence of his empty restless life, drifting without any home or friends from one doss-house to another, and without any need to socialise at all. He is a loner. He is nominally en route to Sidcup to collect his “papers” and establish his real identity, but it is clear that he will never arrive there.

Aston fiddles throughout the play with the task of putting up a shed – a task that he never quite achieves. Mick, his brother, is the owner of the flat and a glib fatalist who dreams of converting the room into a fashionable penthouse apartment- throughout the play, he plays psychological games with Davies, switching rapidly between open hostility and unnerving friendliness in what seems like an attempt to keep the tramp as confused and uncomfortable as possible. It emerges that Aston has suffered from mental illness and received electric shock treatment from which he has not recovered – he has headaches all the time.

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The Homecoming is a two-act award-winning play written in 1964 by Nobel laureate, Harold Pinter. First published in 1965, the original Broadway production won the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play and its 40th-anniversary Broadway production at the Cort Theatre was nominated for a 2008 Tony Award for "Best Revival of a Play".

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Set in North London, the play has six characters: five men who are related––Max, a retired butcher, and Sam, a chauffeur, who are brothers; and Max's three sons, Teddy, an expatriate American philosophy professor; Lenny, who appears to be a pimp; and Joey, a would-be boxer in training who works in demolition; and one woman, Ruth, Teddy's wife. The play concerns Teddy's and Ruth's "homecoming," which has distinctly-different symbolic and thematic implications.

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Betrayal is a play written by Harold Pinter in 1978.

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The play deals with an affair that entangles a married couple, Emma and Robert, and their close friend Jerry (who is also married). The play is innovative in its particular uses of reverse chronology: the first scene takes place after the affair has dissolved; the final scene ends with the moment the affair begins.

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Adeline Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English novelist and essayist, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

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During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

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Mrs Dalloway (published on 14 May 1925) is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England. Mrs Dalloway continues to be one of Woolf's best-known novels.

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Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning, getting ready to host a party that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth at Bourton and makes her wonder about her choice of husband -- she married the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of the enigmatic Peter Walsh. Peter himself complicates her thoughts by paying a visit, having returned from India that day.

Septimus Smith, a veteran of World War I, spends his day in the park with his wife Lucrezia. He suffers from constant and indecipherable hallucinations. He commits suicide by jumping out a window.

Clarissa's party in the evening is a slow success. It is attended by most of the characters she has met in the book, including people from her past. She hears about Septimus' suicide at the party, and gradually comes to admire the act -- which she considers an effort to preserve the purity of his own happiness.

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To the Lighthouse (5 May 1927) is a novel by Virginia Woolf. A landmark novel of high modernism, the text, centering on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920, skillfully manipulates temporality and psychological exploration.

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The novel is set in the Ramsays' summer home in the Hebrides, on the Isle of Skye. The section begins with Mrs Ramsay assuring James that they should be able to visit the lighthouse on the next day. This prediction is denied by Mr Ramsay, who voices his certainty that the weather will not be clear, an opinion that forces a certain tension between Mr and Mrs Ramsay, and also between Mr Ramsay and James. This particular incident is referred to on various occasions throughout the chapter, especially in the context of Mr and Mrs Ramsay's relationship.

While they set sail for the lighthouse, Lily attempts to complete her long-unfinished painting. She reconsiders Mrs Ramsay’s memory, grateful for her help in pushing Lily to continue with her art, yet at the same time struggling to free herself from the tacit control Mrs Ramsay had over other aspects of her life. Upon finishing the painting and seeing that it satisfies her, she realizes that the execution of her vision is more important to her than the idea of leaving some sort of legacy in her work – a lesson Mr Ramsay has yet to learn.

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Orlando: A Biography is an influential novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 11 October 1928. A semi-biographical novel based in part on the life of Woolf's intimate friend Vita Sackville-West,

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Orlando tells the story of a young man named Orlando, born in England during the reign of Elizabeth I, who decides not to grow old. He does not, and he passes through the ages as a young man ... until he wakes up one morning to find that he has metamorphosed into a woman -- the same person, with the same personality and intellect, but in a woman's body. The remaining centuries up to the time the book was written are seen through a woman's eyes.

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A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published during 24 October 1929,[1] it was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in 1928.

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The essay examines whether women were capable of producing work of the quality of William Shakespeare, amongst other topics. In one section, Woolf invented a fictional character Judith "Shakespeare's Sister", to illustrate that a woman with Shakespeare's gifts would have been denied the same opportunities to develop them because of the doors that were closed to women. Woolf also examines the careers of several female authors, including Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and George Eliot. The author subtly refers to several of the most prominent intellectuals of the time, and her hybrid name for the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge—Oxbridge—has become a well-known term in English satire, although she was not the first to use it.

The title comes from Woolf's conception that, 'a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction' (page 4). It also refers to any author's need for poetic license and the personal liberty to create art.

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The Waves, first published in 1931, is Virginia Woolf's most experimental novel.

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It consists of soliloquies spoken by the book's six characters: Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis. Also important is Percival, the seventh character, though readers never hear him speak through his own voice. The monologues that span the characters' lives are broken up by nine brief third-person interludes detailing a coastal scene at varying stages in a day from sunrise to sunset.

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Aphra Behn (July 10, 1640–April 16, 1689) was a prolific dramatist of the Restoration and was one of the first English professional female writers. Her writing participated in the amatory fiction genre of British literature.

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# The Forced Marriage (1670)
# The Amorous Prince (1671)
* Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684)
* Oroonoko (1688)
* The History of the Nun: or, the Fair Vow-Breaker (1688)

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Mary Ann (Marian) Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist. She was one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. Her novels, largely set in provincial England, are well known for their realism and psychological perspicacity.

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The philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes met Evans in 1851, and by 1854 they had decided to live together. Lewes was married to Agnes Jervis, but they had agreed to have an open marriage, and in addition to the three children they had together, Agnes had also had several children by other men. Since Lewes was named on the birth certificate as the father of one of these children despite knowing this to be false, and was therefore considered complicit in adultery, he was not able to divorce Agnes.

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Middlemarch is a novel by George Eliot
published in 1874

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Dorothea Brooke is an idealistic, well-to-do young woman, engaged in schemes to help the lot of the local poor. She is seemingly set for a comfortable, idle life as the wife of neighbouring landowner Sir James Chettam, but to the dismay of her sister Celia (who later marries Chettam) and of her loquacious uncle Mr Brooke, she marries instead Edward Casaubon, a middle-aged pedantic scholar who, she believes, is engaged on a great work, the Key to all Mythologies. She wishes to find fulfilment through sharing her husband’s intellectual life, but during an unhappy honeymoon in Rome she experiences his coldness towards her ambitions. Slowly she realizes that his great project is doomed to failure, and her feelings for him descend to pity. She forms a warm friendship with a young cousin of Casaubon’s, Will Ladislaw, but her husband’s antipathy towards him is clear, and Ladislaw is forbidden to visit. In poor health, Casaubon attempts to extract from Dorothea a promise that, should he die, she will "avoid doing what I should deprecate, and apply yourself to do what I desire"—meaning that she should shun Ladislaw. Before Dorothea can give her reply Casaubon dies. It then transpires that he has added a provision in his will that if she should marry Ladislaw, Dorothea will lose her inheritance from Casaubon.

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Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe is a dramatic novel by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans) which was first published in 1861.

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Silas Marner settles near the village of Raveloe, where he lives as a recluse who exists only for work and his precious hoard of money until that money is stolen by Dunstan Cass, a dissolute son of Squire Cass, the town's leading landowner. The loss of his gold drives Silas into a deep gloom, although a number of the villagers endeavour to help him.

Soon, however, an orphaned child comes to Raveloe. She was not known by the people there, but she is really the child of Godfrey Cass, the eldest son of the local squire. Her mother, Molly, is secretly married to Godfrey, but is also of low birth and addicted to opium. On a winter's night, Molly tries to make her way into town with the child to prove that she is Godfrey's wife and ruin him. On the way she takes opium, becomes disoriented and sits down to rest amid the snow, child in arm. Her child wanders from her mother's still body into Silas's house. Upon discovering the child, Silas searches for its mother and finds Molly - a woman unfamiliar to him - dead. Silas decides to keep the child and names her Eppie, after his deceased mother Hephzibah. Eppie changes his life completely.

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Christopher "Kit" Marlowe (baptised 26 February 1564 – 30 May 1593) was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. The foremost Elizabethan tragedian next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his own mysterious and untimely death.

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Marlowe's colleague Thomas Kyd was arrested. Kyd's lodgings were searched and a fragment of a heretical tract was found. Kyd asserted, possibly under torture, that it had belonged to Marlowe. Two years earlier they had both been working for an aristocratic patron, probably Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange,[16] and Kyd suggested that at this time, when they were sharing a workroom, the document had found its way among his papers. Marlowe's arrest was ordered on 18 May.
Then Marlowe was killed in a drunken fight,

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Tamburlaine the Great is the name of a play in two parts by Christopher Marlowe. It is loosely based on the life of the Central Asian emperor, Timur 'the lame'. Written in 1587 or 1588, the play is a milestone in Elizabethan public drama; it marks a turning away from the clumsy language and loose plotting of the earlier Tudor dramatists, and a new interest in fresh and vivid language, memorable action, and intellectual complexity.

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The play opens in Persepolis. The Persian emperor, Mycetes, dispatches troops to dispose of Tamburlaine, a Scythian shepherd and at that point a nomadic bandit. In the same scene, Mycetes' brother Cosroe plots to overthrow Mycetes and assume the throne.

The scene shifts to Scythia, where Tamburlaine is shown capturing, wooing, and winning Zenocrate, the daughter of the Egyptian king. Confronted by Mycetes' soldiers, he persuades first the soldiers and then Cosroe to join him in a fight against Mycetes. Although he promises Cosroe the Persian throne, Tamburlaine reneges on this promise and, after defeating Mycetes, takes personal control of the Persian Empire.

Suddenly a powerful figure, Tamburlaine decides to pursue further conquests. A campaign against Turkey yields him the Turkish king Bajazeth and his wife Zabina as captives; he keeps them in a cage and at one point uses Bajazeth as a footstool.

After conquering Africa and naming himself emperor of that continent, Tamburlaine sets his eyes on Damascus; this target places the Egyptian soldan, his father-in-law, directly in his path. Zenocrate pleads with her husband to spare her father. He complies, instead making the Sultan a tributary king. The play ends with the wedding of Zenocrate and Tamburlaine, and the crowning of the former as Empress of Persia.

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The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus is a play by Christopher Marlowe, based on the Faust story, in which a man sells his soul to the devil for power and knowledge. Doctor Faustus was first published in 1604, eleven years after Marlowe's death and at least twelve years after the first performance of the play.

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As a prologue, the Chorus tells us about the type of play Doctor Faustus is. It is not about war or courtly love, but rather about Faustus, who was born of lower class parents. This can be seen as a departure from the Medieval tradition; Faustus holds a lower status than kings and saints, but his story is still worth being told. It gives an introduction to his wisdom and abilities, most notably in divinity which he excels so tremendously that he is awarded a doctorate. During this opening, we also get our first clue to the source of Faustus' downfall. Faustus' tale is likened to that of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and fell to his death when the sun melted his waxen wings. This is indeed a hint to Faustus's end as well as bringing our attention to the idea of hubris (excessive pride) which is represented in the Icarus story.

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The Jew of Malta is a play by Christopher Marlowe, probably written in 1589 or 1590.

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The play contains a prologue in which the character Machiavel, a Senecan ghost based on Nicholas Machiavelli, introduces "the tragedy of a Jew." The Jewish merchant in question, Barabas, is introduced as a man owning more wealth than all of Malta. When Turkish ships arrive to demand tribute, however, Barabas's wealth is seized and he is left penniless. Incensed, he begins a campaign to engineer the downfall of the Maltese governor who robbed him. With the aid of his daughter, Abigail, he recovers some of his former assets and buys a Turkish slave, Ithamore, who appears to hate Christians as much as Barabas. Barabas then, in revenge for the robbery, uses his daughter's beauty to embitter the governor's son and his friend against each other, leading to a duel in which they both die. When Abigail learns of Barabas's role in the plot, she consigns herself to a nunnery, only to be poisoned (along with all of the nuns) by Barabas and Ithamore for becoming a Christian.

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The Spanish Tragedy is an Elizabethan tragedy written by Thomas Kyd between 1582–92.

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Before the play begins, the Viceroy of Portugal has rebelled against Spanish rule. A battle has taken place in which the Portuguese were defeated and their leader, the Viceroy's son Balthazar, captured; but the Spanish officer Andrea has been killed by none other than the captured Balthazar. His ghost and the spirit of Revenge (present onstage throughout the entirety of the play) serve as chorus and at the beginning of each act Andrea bemoans the series of injustices that take place before being reassured by Revenge that those deserving will get their comeuppance. There is a subplot concerning the enmity of two Portuguese noblemen, one of whom attempts to convince the Viceroy that his rival has murdered the missing Balthazar.

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Erewhon, or Over the Range is a novel by Samuel Butler

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# Higgs - The narrator who conveys to us the nature of Erewhonian society
# Chowbok (Kahabuka) - Higgs' guide into the mountains; he is a native who greatly fears the Erewhonians. He eventually abandons Higgs.
# Yram - The daughter of Higgs' jailor who takes care of him when he first enters Erewhon. Her name is Mary spelled backwards.
# Senoj Nosnibor - Higgs' host after he is released from prison; he hopes that Higgs will marry his elder daughter. His name is Robinson Jones backwards.

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Samuel Butler (4 December 1835 - 18 June 1902)

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an iconoclastic Victorian author who published a variety of works, including the Utopian satire Erewhon and the posthumous novel The Way of All Flesh, his two best-known works, but also extending to examinations of Christian orthodoxy, substantive studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history and criticism . Butler also made prose translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey which remain in use to this day.

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The Way of All Flesh (1903) is a semi-autobiographical novel by Samuel Butler which attacks Victorian-era hypocrisy

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The story is narrated by Mr. Overton who was born in 1802, son of a clergyman in Paleham, England, a town about 50 miles from London. He is 80 years old at the end of the novel and has known the children of George Pontifex all his life and attended Cambridge College with both John and Theobald Pontifex. Overton is a playwright and moderately wealthy. He is 2nd Godfather to Theobald's son Ernest and he takes a particular, caring and lifelong interest in Ernest's life.

The novel traces the history of four generations of the Pontifex family from 1727 to 1882. The patriarch, John Pontifex, a carpenter, was born 1727 and died at age 85 in 1812. In 1750 he married Ruth (1727-1811). After 15 years of childless marriage they finally had a son, George, born 1765 in Paleham.

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Erewhon, or Over the Range is a novel by Samuel Butler

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# Higgs - The narrator who conveys to us the nature of Erewhonian society
# Chowbok (Kahabuka) - Higgs' guide into the mountains; he is a native who greatly fears the Erewhonians. He eventually abandons Higgs.
# Yram - The daughter of Higgs' jailor who takes care of him when he first enters Erewhon. Her name is Mary spelled backwards.
# Senoj Nosnibor - Higgs' host after he is released from prison; he hopes that Higgs will marry his elder daughter. His name is Robinson Jones backwards.

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Samuel Butler (4 December 1835 - 18 June 1902)

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an iconoclastic Victorian author who published a variety of works, including the Utopian satire Erewhon and the posthumous novel The Way of All Flesh, his two best-known works, but also extending to examinations of Christian orthodoxy, substantive studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history and criticism . Butler also made prose translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey which remain in use to this day.

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The Way of All Flesh (1903) is a semi-autobiographical novel by Samuel Butler which attacks Victorian-era hypocrisy

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The story is narrated by Mr. Overton who was born in 1802, son of a clergyman in Paleham, England, a town about 50 miles from London. He is 80 years old at the end of the novel and has known the children of George Pontifex all his life and attended Cambridge College with both John and Theobald Pontifex. Overton is a playwright and moderately wealthy. He is 2nd Godfather to Theobald's son Ernest and he takes a particular, caring and lifelong interest in Ernest's life.

The novel traces the history of four generations of the Pontifex family from 1727 to 1882. The patriarch, John Pontifex, a carpenter, was born 1727 and died at age 85 in 1812. In 1750 he married Ruth (1727-1811). After 15 years of childless marriage they finally had a son, George, born 1765 in Paleham.