Alexander Pope

Like most of her peers, MMB maintained a lively correspondence. Some of it is reproduced in A House of Letters, edited by Ernest Betham (though he prints more letters to than from her). She...

The report of her death may have been optimistic in calling her an actress of some celebrity at Covent garden and Drury lane Theatre. She worked as an entertainer of several kinds, acting in regular...

Advising a would-be poet, EB wrote: Read a lot of poetry—all the time—and not 20th-century poetry. Read Campion , Herbert , Pope , Tennyson , Coleridge —anything at all almost that's any good, from the...

Her work reveals, without ostensibly displaying, a close acquaintance with the tradition of English poetry, to which she deliberately relates herself. For instance, a poem entitled May not the Love of Praise be an Incentive...

WLB 's sonnets, which formed the basis of his reputation as a poet, first appeared in 1789, five years after those of Charlotte Smith and shortly after her lavish, illustrated fifth edition. Bowles always denied...

EB offers original, discriminating praise for women's writing: Susanna Centlivre (her inspiration, she says), Eliza Haywood (though she regrets her exposure of women's faults), Aphra Behn , and Delarivier Manley , whom she calls the...

A first prologue addresses Pope , and invokes the ghosts of Shakespeare (The Wonder, as the Glory of the Land) and Dryden (Shakespear's Freind) as mentors to EB 's performance in...

In the first of this group of poems, Melissa declares her own inferiority to Fidelia (with a brief survey of other poets including Pope , Buckingham , Prior , Dryden and Finch ).

JB 's true attitude to her own poetic vocation is hard to fathom. In An Expostulatory Epistle to Sir Richard Steele upon the Death of Mr. Addison she calls herself the meanest of the tuneful...

This novel is best known for its picture of settler or habitant life in Lower Canada, which FB drew from her own years there. From a tourist point of view Lower Canada is idyllic...

FB began writing at the age of seven, when, inspired by her great and strange love of poetry, she attempted to re-write The Lord's Prayer in verse. She continued to write throughout her childhood...

EBB 's early immersion in fairy stories and popular tales was followed by a more ambitious course of reading that began around the age of seven with history, classical poetry, and some of Shakespeare 's...

Like Alexander Pope , Browning was an autodidact, educating himself in his father's vast library. In 1828 he began reading Greek at London University but dropped out in his second term.

In an unpublished poetic Fragment of an 'Essay on Woman', the teenaged Elizabeth Barrett countered Pope 's An Essay on Man, proclaiming that even in literature woman stands the equal of her Master Man.

Along with the sentimental and misunderstanding-prone lovers and the ridiculous esprit circle (which might so easily be taken to represent the Bluestockings), The Witlings features a women's working environment: a milliner's shop where seamstresses make...