Rather than becoming a religious missionary as his parents had hoped, Gosse became a literary evangelist, preaching a love of poetry, fiction, and drama. Gosse’s parents belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, and much of Father and Son concerns Gosse’s growing resistance to their religious expectations of him. This autobiographical novel describes his family life up to the age of twenty-one, with his father, Philip Henry Gosse (b. 1810–d. 1888), a prolific and popular author of books on natural history and religion, and his mother, Emily Bowes-Gosse (b. 1806–d. 1857), a writer of evangelical narrative tracts. Although he worked in several genres-as poet, playwright, biographer, essayist, critic, literary historian, and bibliophile-the modernist contempt for all things Victorian meant that Gosse’s wider oeuvre fell into obscurity, and his posthumous reputation was sustained by only one book: Father and Son (1907). Edmund William Gosse (b. 1849–d. 1928) was the preeminent man of letters during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.
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