his wife and baby daughter to England in 1956 to study at the University of London, gaining the degree of Ph.D, with a thesis on Robert Browning, in 1959 (which was published in 1961 as Browning's Characters), while also writing a novel, two plays, poems, short stories and academic papers. Career Honan produced several "scrupulously researched and often revelatory biographies" of subjects ranging from the Elizabethan period to the 20th century, drawing on previously unseen sources to reveal new facts, addressing his books "as much to the general reader as to the specialist." In addition to extensive work on Browning, numerous essays and contributions to various anthologies and collections, he wrote biographies of Matthew Arnold, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. He also edited an anthology of Beat Generation writers. He was later interested in modernist writers and at the time of his death he had begun a biography of T. S. Eliot. He served on the editorial board of journals covering Browning and the Ohio University Press edition of Browning's complete works, as well as the journals Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, and Novel: A Forum on Fiction, among many others. According to his obituary in The Telegraph, "Honan passionately believed that a writer's life, family, friends and social background could all shed light on the work." Honan began his teaching career as an assistant professor of English at Connecticut College in 1959, where his wife taught in the French department. He moved to Brown University in 1961. He relocated permanently to England, where he became a Lecturer at the University of Birmingham in 1968, remaining there as a Senior Lecturer, then Reader in English, until 1983. He was appointed Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Leeds in January 1985 and retired in 1993 with the title Emeritus Professor. The biographer John Batchelor described Honan as "a dazzlingly dramatic lecturer". In 1998 Honan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL). He was given a Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1962. He died of liver cancer at the age of 86. Reputation Kirk H. Beetz wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that "Honan combines a multitude of previously unpublished facts about the personal lives and careers of his subjects with a narrative style that presents details in a coherent and fluid manner, thus pleasing general as well