Edmund William Gosse was one of the key literary and intellectual figures of English life from the latter part of the nineteenth century until his death in 1928. It appears that Gosse knew everybody in the literary world and developed warm, intellectually supportive friendships with many writers who became rather better known than he: A. C. Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Thomas Hardy were among his close friends. When English literature was moving from the Victorian to the modern era, Gosse's influence, both personal and through his columns in the Sunday edition of the London Times, was immense. He was a poet and a creative writer in his own right, but his more important influence was as a literary critic. At a time when the practice of academic literary criticism was unsettled, critical writing necessarily took experimental forms, such as the brief critical biography known as the "kit-kat," that have...