Even though Henry Brooke worked in a wide variety of genres – poetry, drama, political pamphlets, periodicals – he is remembered primarily now for two popular novels of sensibility:

The Fool of Quality

(published in five volumes from 1765-1770) and

Juliet Grenville

(published in three volumes in 1774).

Brooke was born in approximately 1703, in County Cavan, Ireland, the son of Lettice Digby Brooke and William Brooke, a protestant clergyman. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, before continuing on to Middle College in London. While in London, Brooke became friends with Alexander Pope, and made his initial foray into the literary world with the poem Universal Beauty (1735), whose main legacy now is that it influenced Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791). Brooke’s next

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Citation: Wetmore, Alex. "Henry Brooke". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 March 2017 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=585, accessed 13 December 2024.]

585 Henry Brooke 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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