Jules Verne

Jules Verne was a French geographer and writer, a classic of adventure literature and one of the founders of science fiction. He was a member of the French Geographical Society.

His father was the lawyer Pierre Verne (1798–1871), descended from a family of Provençal jurists. His mother was Sophie Allotte de la Fuÿe (1801–1887), a Briton of Scottish descent. Jules Verne was the first of five children. He was followed by a brother, Paul (1829), and three sisters: Anna (1836), Mathilde (1839), and Marie (1842).

Jules Verne’s wife was Honorine de Viane (née Morel). Honorine was a widow and had two children from her first marriage. On 20 May 1856, Jules Verne came to Amiens for a friend’s wedding, where he met Honorine for the first time. Eight months later, on 10 January 1857, they married and settled in Paris, where Verne had already been living for several years. Four years later, on 3 August 1861, Honorine gave birth to their son Michel, their only child. Jules Verne was not present at the birth, as he was traveling in Scandinavia.

The son of a lawyer, Verne studied law in Paris, but his love of literature led him to take a different path. In 1850, Verne’s play Broken Straws was successfully staged at Alexandre Dumas’s Historic Theatre. In 1852–1854, Verne worked as secretary to the director of the Lyric Theatre, then as a stockbroker, while continuing to write comedies, librettos, and stories.

In 1863, he published the first novel in the Extraordinary Voyages cycle in J. Hetzel’s magazine Magazine of Education and Recreation.

Jules Verne was not a “desk” writer; he traveled extensively around the world, including on his yachts Saint Michel I, Saint Michel II, and Saint Michel III. In 1859 he traveled to England and Scotland. In 1861 he visited