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Biographies — page 24
1,257 public-domain biographies books, summarised. Page 24 of 27.
Charles Lever, His Life in His Letters, Vol. I
Charles Lever
HOOK A prolific novelist’s life unfolds through his own candid correspondence, revealing the precarious, nomadic existence of a man who wrote to live while struggling to escape the shadow of his own professional reputation.
Great African Travellers: From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley
William Henry Giles Kingston
An expansive 19th-century survey of African travel, chronicling the perilous, river-borne journeys and encounters that mapped the continent's heart.
Josephine: Makers of History
John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
From a quiet childhood on a Caribbean island to the heights of European royalty, Josephine’s life was shaped by political upheaval and personal sacrifice. Her story captures the tragic vulnerability of a woman caught in the gears of dynamic history.
Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley
A fiercely independent man of science battles Victorian dogma, reshapes public education, and helps establish the modern worldview through sheer intellectual force and relentless public service.
Curiosities of Human Nature
Samuel G. (Samuel Griswold) Goodrich
An extraordinary collection of real lives shows that human potential escapes every attempt to standardise intelligence, morality, physical form, or social position.
The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth
Edward Osler
An orphan youth leaps into the open sea from a moving ship to save a drowning sailor, launching an improbable career that transforms him into one of Great Britain’s most audacious naval commanders.
Beethoven
Romain Rolland
When physical suffering and isolation strip away every human comfort, the inner life of the true artist becomes an invincible fortress built on moral courage.
Famous Men of Ancient Times
Samuel G. (Samuel Griswold) Goodrich
A restrained, clear-eyed examination of history’s most influential figures, stripping away myth to weigh statesmen, philosophers, and military leaders by a single, steady moral standard.
Reminiscences of Prince Talleyrand, Volume 1 (of 2)
Colmache, M., active 19th century
Calculated survival in high-stakes diplomacy depends entirely on watching where the wind blows before taking a single step.
The Life of Marie de Medicis, Queen of France, Consort of Henri IV, and Regent of the Kingdom under Louis XIII
Miss (Julia) Pardoe
Royal ambition, sudden assassination, and dangerous palace intrigue collide in a detailed chronicle of seventeenth-century France, capturing a queen’s turbulent rise and fall within a fractured, power-hungry court.
John G. Paton, missionary to the New Hebrides, volume 1 (of 3)
John Gibson Paton
A fiery Victorian faith meets the perils of the South Pacific in an astonishing true narrative of survival, loss, and unyielding religious conviction.
Mystics and Saints of Islam
Claud Field
A path to the divine unfolds not through rigid dogma, but through terror of judgment, ecstatic devotion, and the complete surrender of the self in the relentless pursuit of spiritual truth.
Music-Study in Germany, from the Home Correspondence of Amy Fay
Amy Fay
A young American woman arrives in imperial Germany with a modest piano technique and a quiet dream, only to find her hand broken down and rebuilt key by key by the greatest musical minds of the nineteenth century.
Samuel Pepys and the Royal Navy
J. R. (Joseph Robson) Tanner
An exacting administrative study strips away the legendary diarist's romantic gloss, revealing a pragmatic bureaucratic strategist who built the operational engine of seventeenth-century British naval power.
Thomas Carlyle
Hector Macpherson
A fiery Scottish thinker rejects the mechanical materialism of his age to become the stormiest moral voice of Victorian Britain.
Beacon Lights of History, Volume 11: American Founders
John Lord
Individual ambition and severe principle collide as a handful of men attempt to forge a durable republic out of thirteen discordant colonies.
The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood
George Frisbie Whicher
Before the rise of modern realism, early eighteenth-century fiction relied on sensational passions and dramatic court intrigues. This scholarly monograph traces how one prolific woman shaped the evolution of the popular English novel.
The life of St. Patrick and his place in history
J. B. (John Bagnell) Bury
Peeling back centuries of myth and medieval embellishment, a rigorous historical lens reveals the flesh-and-blood missionary who transformed a tribal island on the fringes of a collapsing empire.
Memoirs of Bertha von Suttner: The Records of an Eventful Life (Vol. 2 of 2)
Bertha von Suttner
A relentless campaigner crisscrosses a fin-de-siècle world of diplomatists and monarchs, recording the practical mechanics of a movement determined to replace war with international law.
Charles Robert Maturin: His Life and Works
Niilo Idman
A dark, forgotten corner of literary history opens up to reveal a brilliant, erratic Irish romantic whose wild terror-tales enchanted Lord Byron and shaped European gothic fiction.
Dorothea Beale of Cheltenham
Elizabeth Raikes
A visionary educator quietly transforms Victorian womanhood by building a powerhouse institution of rigorous academic learning from scratch.
Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood)
Marie Bashkirtseff
A prodigiously talented teenager records her unvarnished ambitions, fiery passions, and agonizing anxieties, capturing the exquisite, tumultuous inner landscape of a brilliant youth determined to conquer the world.
Memoirs of the life, exile, and conversations of the Emperor Napoleon. (Vol. II)
Las Cases, Emmanuel-Auguste-Dieudonné, comte de
Stripped of power and confined to a remote rock in the South Atlantic, a fallen conqueror turns his final battlefield into a contest for history itself, dictating his legacy through a devoted companion's daily journal.
A Writer's Recollections
Ward, Humphry, Mrs.
These reflections offer an intimate window into the intellectual and social landscape of late Victorian England, viewed through the eyes of a pioneering novelist. They capture a vanished world of profound cultural shifts, literary camaraderie, and earnest moral inquiry.
Confessions of a Young Man
George Moore
This record of a restless spirit chronicles the transformation of a sheltered Irish youth into a sophisticated, art-obsessed denizen of the Parisian avant-garde. It serves as a candid, unapologetic map of an aesthetic education.
Beacon Lights of History, Volume 07: Great Women
John Lord
This survey of history examines the lives of extraordinary women who shaped their eras, weaving together personal biography with the broader social and religious currents of their times.
Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Volume XII, Ohio Narratives
United States. Work Projects Administration
These collected interviews capture the fading echoes of an American era, preserving the raw, unfiltered memories of individuals who transitioned from the bondage of slavery to the complexities of freedom.
Queen Victoria
E. Gordon (Edgar Gordon) Browne
The Victorian age stands as a transformative bridge between an older, insular Britain and the modern global power that followed. This chronicle captures the evolution of a nation through the long, influential reign of its most iconic sovereign.
The Life of Yakoob Beg
Demetrius Charles Boulger
A soldier of fortune rises from obscurity to seize a Central Asian kingdom, only to find his survival threatened by the inexorable return of imperial power.
Narrative of My Captivity Among the Sioux Indians
Fanny Kelly
The summer of 1864 finds an emigrant party traveling toward Idaho, only to be ambushed by a band of Sioux. This memoir chronicles the five months of captivity that follow, detailing the harrowing struggle for survival.
Knut Hamsun
Hanna Astrup Larsen
This survey traces the life and literary progression of a pivotal Norwegian writer, examining how his nomadic early years and deep connection to nature shaped a body of work that challenged the conventions of his time.
Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African: To Which Are Prefixed, Memoirs of His Life
Ignatius Sancho
Born on a slave ship and destined for a life of service, a remarkable man transforms his difficult circumstances into a legacy of wit, music, and profound human connection in 18th-century London.
Stars of the Opera: A Description of Operas & a Series of Personal Interviews with Marcela Sembrich, Emma Eames, Emma Calvé, Lillian Nordica, Lilli Lehmann, Geraldine Farrar & Nellie Melba
Mabel Wagnalls
This collection of essays and interviews offers an intimate, behind-the-curtain glimpse into the lives of opera’s most celebrated prima donnas at the turn of the twentieth century.
The Báb: The Herald of the Day of Days
H. M. Balyuzi
A young merchant in mid-nineteenth-century Persia claims a divine mandate, igniting a spiritual revolution that transforms his nation and leads him to a public execution.
Tracks of a Rolling Stone
Henry J. (Henry John) Coke
The life of a Victorian traveler unfolds across the globe, from the deck of a warship in China to the rugged plains of the American West, capturing the restless spirit of a vanished age.
Quotes and Images from the Writings of Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln
The life and legacy of a singular American leader unfold through these selected fragments, capturing the evolution of his thought from early political ambition to the heavy, singular burden of a nation torn by civil war.
Autobiography of an Androgyne
Ralph Werther
This account offers a stark, unfiltered window into the life of an individual navigating the mid-point of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a sexual invert, documenting the profound dissonance between societal expectation and internal reality.
My Reminiscences of East Africa
Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck
This memoir recounts an extraordinary, years-long guerrilla campaign in East Africa, where a small, isolated colonial force successfully defied the superior numbers of the British Empire until the very end of the Great War.
Philipp Reis: Inventor of the Telephone: A Biographical Sketch
Silvanus P. (Silvanus Phillips) Thompson
This historical account restores the reputation of a neglected pioneer, arguing that Philipp Reis invented the telephone long before it became a commercial sensation. It serves as a technical defense of his original work.
Sir James Young Simpson and Chloroform (1811-1870): Masters of Medicine
H. Laing (Henry Laing) Gordon
A young Scottish student watches a surgeon operate and asks: "Can nothing be done to prevent this suffering?" This narrative chronicles how that simple, empathetic question drove a medical revolution.
A Journal of Impressions in Belgium
May Sinclair
The war’s most profound cruelties are often measured not in miles of territory lost, but in the distance between a person’s grandest intentions and their actual, fragmented experience. This account captures that precise, unsettling displacement.
A Week at Waterloo in 1815: Lady De Lancey's Narrative: Being an Account of How She Nursed Her Husband, Colonel Sir William Howe De Lancey, Quartermaster-General of the Army, Mortally Wounded in the Great Battle
De Lancey, Magdalene, Lady
This private, unadorned journal chronicles a young bride's harrowing journey to find and nurse her husband, a high-ranking British officer, after he is mortally wounded at the Battle of Waterloo.
Lord Lyons: A Record of British Diplomacy, Vol. 1 of 2
Newton, Thomas Wodehouse Legh, Baron
The quiet, meticulous work of a Victorian diplomat reveals the precarious balance of power that defined a century. Through his own words, one man’s steady hand navigates the volatile shifting of global alliances.
Chaucer
Ward, Adolphus William, Sir
A portrait of the foundational English poet, this study balances the sparse, documented facts of his life with a careful analysis of the cultural currents that shaped his enduring verse.
My Four Years in Germany
James W. (James Watson) Gerard
** An urgent dispatch from the heart of the German Empire, detailing the internal mechanisms of an autocracy that sacrificed a generation to the machinery of global war.
Marie Corelli: The Writer and the Woman
R. S. Warren (Robert Stanley Warren) Bell
An unapologetic defense of a lightning-rod literary figure, this biography frames a controversial novelist as a misunderstood crusader fighting for moral clarity against a cynical, entrenched establishment.
Diary of John Manningham: Of the Middle Temple, and of Bradbourne, Kent, Barrister‑at‑Law, 1602-1603
John Manningham
A sharp-eyed young lawyer captures the fleeting rhythm of London life during the final days of a fading queen and the dawn of a new king’s reign.
Grace Darling, Heroine of the Farne Islands
Marianne Farningham
The lighthouse keeper’s daughter who rowed into a gale to save the shipwrecked, Grace Darling remains a symbol of quiet, singular courage. This biography traces the brief, storied life of a woman whose simple acts of duty echo across the Northumbrian coast.