Cirrus@Austlit

'Yasmine Gooneratne was a poet, a writer of short stories and novels, and a literary critic, editor and reviewer. Born in Sri Lanka in 1935, while the country was still known as ‘Ceylon’, she was educated at Bishops College School for Girls and the University of Peradeniya, where she was a dedicated student of English literature. Yasmine was awarded a scholarship to the University of Cambridge in the 1950s, and she completed her doctorate there, as a Postgraduate student at Girton College. Her thesis was a groundbreaking one, and was one of the first published works of scholarship in the field of Commonwealth Literature. She is renowned as an Eighteenth Century scholar, and her books on the work of Jane Austen and Alexander Pope, published by Cambridge University Press, have been studied by university students all over the world.' (Introduction)