Geoffrey Chaucer

The acclaim that Petrarch won in his lifetime shifted smoothly into a high reputation after his death. The first English author to refer to him was Chaucer . He was a vital inspiration to...

During her first marriage LAC was often alone. She had books read aloud to her while she sewed: history, theology, Montaigne 's Essays, Spenser 's Faerie Queene, Chaucer 's works, Sidney 's Arcadia...

Her needlework included doing Irish stitch, tent stitch, and purse-work, making bone lace and bodices, and knitting stockings, and she often gathered flowers in order to copy them in stitching. It is clear...

GB 's writings began with Filocolo, a retelling of the traditional Floris and Blanchefleur love-story written between 1338 and 1400. Other narratives were Ameto, a pastoral-allegorical novel, Teseida (which contains the story re-used...

Between then and 1898 it produced fifty-three books. WM 's The Story of the Glittering Plain (April 1891) was the first. The fortieth was the famous Chaucer (1896) containing eighty-seven wood-cuts by Edward Burne-Jones ...

The reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement found this method of compiling stories (the method of Boccaccio , Marguerite de Navarre , and Chaucer ) effective for stringing together a number of diverse tales told...

Believing strongly that no writer in English can be ignorant of English literature, JW told an interviewer that she reads or re-reads for about five hours a day, choosing sometiimes obscure authors from Chaucer to...

The central characters here are Jane Cleveland, a kindly and somewhat fey Oxford don, and Prudence Bates, Jane's former student and surrogate daughter. Jane's main preoccupation is matchmaking for Prudence: she likens herself not only...

Phillip Herring calls Ryderessentially an autobiographical family chronicle in experimental form. In this highly allusive novel, DB imitates and parodies a wide range of literary styles, from Chaucer to nineteenth-century sentimental novels.

Many of these tales are unequivocally charming for a modern reader, but not so Gaude Maria, a version of the story which Chaucer used for his Prioress's Tale, about a poor widow's pious...

More is represented as addressing Margaret alternatively as daughter Marget and mother Eve, implying that her attempts to persuade him to swear the oath that would save his life are analogous to Eve's...

The framework of a group of cultured people standing for different points of view and exchanging ideas owes something to Thomas Love Peacock 's Headlong Hall, 1816 (also set in Wales), but Williams is...

M. B.'s purpose in story-telling is not moral improvement but making little girls feel better (the youngest is seven): cheering them up since, newly sent to boarding school, they are crying for home; alleviating their...

Epigraphs to particular poems quote Chaucer , Swift , Elizabeth Barrett , Elizabeth Bishop , Geoffrey Bateson , and (most frequently) Elizabeth Hardwick . The title-poem (called by a reviewer Kafka esque) exemplifies...

His youthful letters to Sutton are clotted with obscenities in a schoolboy manner, boring and embarrassing to a later generation: My tooth still aches. Balls & anus! I feel shat upon. The pained exaggeration...