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Biographies — page 9
403 public-domain biographies books, summarised. Page 9 of 9.

The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals. Vol. 2
Byron, George Gordon Byron, Baron
A legendary poet navigates sudden celebrity, high-society feuds, and political outrage while revealing a sharp, restless mind in his private writings.

The Life of Cardinal Wolsey
George Cavendish
A towering minister of state falls from royal favor to absolute ruin, witnessed by a loyal servant who writes to rescue his master's memory from slander.

The Memoirs of Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo
A grand cultural eye witnesses France hurtle through revolutions, monarchies, and sieges, capturing the intimate wreckage and public grandeur of a century in turmoil.

The Trial of Oscar Wilde, from the Shorthand Reports
Charles Grolleau
A high-stakes libel suit collapses into a devastating criminal trial, exposing the hidden subcultures and bitter enmities of Victorian London.

Christopher Columbus and the New World of His Discovery
Filson Young
Driven by an absolute faith in land across the dark ocean, a humble mariner secures royal backing, survives perilous voyages into the unknown, and dies locked in a bitter struggle to claim his promised reward.

Six Years in the Prisons of England
Unknown
To enter the nineteenth-century British penal system was to step into a hidden, highly calculated machine designed to strip a man of his independence. This extraordinary, candid memoir reveals the inner workings of English prisons through the eyes of an educated insider who observed every detail of his six-year…

Hume: (English Men of Letters Series)
Thomas Henry Huxley
Stripping away philosophical pretension, this work grounds human knowledge, morals, and social order firmly in natural instinct, habit, and physical experience.

Life of Charles Dickens
Marzials, Frank T. (Frank Thomas), Sir
A child of the London slums and debtors' prisons rises to become the undisputed monarch of Victorian literature through boundless energy, keen observation, and an unmatched capacity for human empathy.

George Washington's Rules of Civility: Traced to their Sources and Restored by Moncure D. Conway
George Washington
A fourteen-year-old schoolboy copies out 110 handwritten maxims on decorum, creating a foundational blueprint for self-discipline, social harmony, and American leadership.

Baden-Powell of Mafeking
J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
An energetic, adaptable officer keeps his head, his humor, and his duty intact through bush tracking, colonial expeditions, and seven months under siege.

Life of Heber C. Kimball, an apostle
Orson F. (Orson Ferguson) Whitney
Driven by deep religious conviction and a rugged, intuitive nature, a blacksmith-turned-apostle braves violent mobs, foreign mission fields, and the treacherous Western frontier to help build a new religious society.

The Works of George Berkeley. Vol. 1 of 4: Philosophical Works, 1705-21
George Berkeley
Our immediate perception reveals not an independent material world, but a constant sequence of sensations sustained directly by a divine mind.

A Mind That Found Itself: An Autobiography
Clifford Whittingham Beers
Surviving mental collapse and years of institutional abuse, one man turns his private battlefield into a public crusade for psychiatric reform.

The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay
Fanny Burney
A young woman publishes a novel in secret, steps overnight into London's most brilliant literary circles, and eventually finds herself bound to five years of exhausting service at the Georgian court.

Home Life of Great Authors
Hattie Tyng Griswold
Behind closed doors, the iconic literary figures of the nineteenth century lived lives as fraught with financial strain, domestic friction, and emotional turmoil as any of their characters.

Great leaders: Historic portraits from the great historians
Unknown
A rich gallery of historical figures comes to life through short, vivid character studies crafted by master chroniclers. These selected prose portraits illuminate the human drives, flaws, and genius behind world-shaping events.

The Life of Charlotte Brontë
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Surviving a bleak isolation on the Yorkshire moors, a clergyman's daughter transforms domestic hardship and profound personal bereavement into some of the nineteenth century’s most vital, fiery literature.

The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2
Rupert Hughes
Genius on the stage rarely guarantees wisdom in the bedroom.

The True Benjamin Franklin
Sydney George Fisher
A penniless runaway eating rolls in the street grows into a philosopher who tames lightning and negotiates the birth of a nation.