F.W. Brownlow was born in Northern Ireland, but educated in England at Wallasey Grammar School, the University of Liverpool, and the Shakespeare Institute (University of Birmingham). He has lived in North America since 1959, where he taught at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), the University of Western Ontario, Dartmouth College, and Mount Holyoke College, where he ended up as Gwen & Allen Smith Professor in English. He retired from teaching in 2012. His published writing includes many essays on the likes of John Skelton, Shakespeare, Van Eyck, John Donne, Byron, Browning, George Herbert, and Chesterton as well as books on Shakespeare, John Skelton, St. Robert Southwell, and Byron and Liszt. He has recently finished a book The Queen and the Torturer on Queen Elizabeth I and her torturer friend, Richard Topcliffe. His second life-long avocation has been music, and until recently he was a keen pianist, organist, and harpsichordist.
