Jules Verne (1828–1905). Often overlooked by English critics, Verne was a prolific writer whose work combined a vivid imagination with a gift for popularizing science and travel. He remains among the classics of nineteenth-century French literature. Born in Nantes in 1828, Jules Verne was the eldest of five children. His father, Pierre Verne, a successful lawyer, was known to write occasional verse but encouraged his son to follow the family profession, which Verne duly did, studying law in Paris. His schooldays proved unexceptional and, apart from an unrequited love he cherished for his cousin, happy. After successfully completing his baccalauréat at the Lycée in Nantes in 1847, Verne went to Paris in order to study for the bar. For the next ten years he devoted himself to his real interest, writing, living an artist’s existence in a succession of gloomy lodgings. During this time he received moderate success with his plays and it is thought that about seven of his works reached the stage or print. Alexandre Dumas père and fils were instrumental in this. In 1856 Verne attended a wedding where he met his future wife, Honorine de Viane, a widow with two daughters. After his marriage in 1857 Verne became a stockbroker and for a time his interests vacillated between the bourse and the theatre. It was not until the success of some of his traveller’s tales which he wrote for the Musée des familles that his true talent for imaginative travel stories emerged. the success of Five Weeks in a Balloon (1862) led to a partnership between Verne and the publisher Hetzel that lasted for forty years and was intended, in Hetzel’s own words, ‘to sum up all the geographical, geological, physical and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science and to rewrite the history of the world’. Between the publication of Journey to the Centre of the Earth in 1864 and his death Verne wrote a staggering sixty-three novels, including from the Earth to the Moon (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Verne himself travelled widely in Europe, North Africa and America and was a keen yachtsman. He divided his time between Paris, Amiens and his yacht, but for reasons which remain a mystery he suddenly sold his yacht in 1886 and never travelled again. A month later he was shot twice by his mentally unstable nephew, leaving him permanently lame. Jules Verne died at Amiens in 1905. After his death several posthumous works appeared, but it has since been discovered that Verne’s son Michel wrote large chunks of them.