Kathryn Hughes

Her writing evinces a strong belief in progress, which for her meant the gradual improvement of the world through difficult, often imperceptible human effort, sometimes characterised as meliorism. Her biographer Kathryn Hughes calls her the...

Biographer Kathryn Hughes , however, brings a serious charge against Sam Beeton: that before his marriage, during his rackety bachelor days, he had contracted syphilis. Hughes argues from a number of indications: the symptoms...

The critical tide did not turn (despite some acute criticism from Virginia Woolf , who called Middlemarchthe magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up...

Kathryn Hughes notes that SL 's support of the Governesses' Benevolent Institution (founded in 1843), and their efforts (via Queen's College , founded on 1 May 1848) to establish a system of qualification for governesses...

In her review Kathryn Hughes wrote: The great joy of this tender little novel is Deborah Moggach's sensory imagination, the way that her carefully-researched historical facts are subordinated to the effect they would have had...

A. N. Wilson , reviewing the novel in The Spectator, found it warm, humorous, and difficult to put down. A New York Times Book Review critic felt the author made the design more complicated...

The question of how to understand IB and her somewhat tenuous relationship to her famous book remains. Lytton Strachey hoped to write a biography of her in 1908, but found the materials wanting. By 1922...

Reviewing the collection, Kathryn Hughes found SB 's usual style characterised by a kind of polite chirpiness, with even faintly slangy expressions—jazzed up, my stars, corking—marked by scare quotes, and Beach's...