Edmund Gosse began his long literary career hoping to make his mark as a poet; but, although a small collection of poems, On Viol and Flute (1873), won the approval of some distinguished critics, it was as the first English translator of the plays and poems of Henrik Ibsen, then as an essayist and reviewer, that he earned his reputation. In 1882 his first full-length biography, a life of Thomas Gray, was published in the English Men of Letters series; thereafter he took as his specialty the period from William Shakespeare to Alexander Pope, with lives and studies of writers as diverse as Walter Ralegh (1886) and William Congreve (1888). He also wrote extensively about his contemporaries, including a controversial biography of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1917). But it is for Father and Son (1907), his autobiographical record of "the struggle between two temperaments," that he is now best known: it is his finest narrative...