Laurence Sterne

Each volume has an introductory chapter, addressing the reader in the manner of, and with some images borrowed from, Henry Fielding or Laurence Sterne (the latter, indeed, is mentioned by name). MM hopes her reader...

Barbara Churchill, a clever, shy, ugly, awkward child, is sent by her harsh and unappreciative father to stay for a year in Suffolk with her aunt Ann Shandyshaft, who is as eccentric...

The heroine's father is a Hamburg merchant (which perhaps explains the book's Hamburg subscribers). She is born in Barbados (where her mother, on arrival, would have been perfectly happy, but for the black servants)...

Her ordinary working-class family here (quite the same as everyone else) consists of Henry and Lorna Tripp, their three children and their elders. She makes Angela, the character most like herself, a purposely...

In addition to its over-riding themes of colonialism and the marriage market, this novel, set in early British Calcutta (and incorporating a good deal of travel book material), is much concerned with literature and with...

WM heads her essay with a quotation from Laurence Sterne 's Tristram Shandy: Methinks, brother, replied my father, you might, at least, know so much as the right end of a woman from the...

Mrs Dubois makes a second marriage to a widower, Mr Ravenshaw. Something in their Minds attracted them to each other. They thought it was Friendship, and called it so; but their Friends termed it Love...

The volume includes poems of natural description, of meditation, and of political comment. FON expresses delight at the election victory on 9 August 1802 (in John Wilkes's old constituency of Middlesex) of Sir Francis Burdett

Here SHR makes a preface out of her unwillingness to write a preface: this concept is Sterne an, and so is the abrupt opening. I can't for my life see the necessity of it, said...

The chapter on Domestic Servants opens by noting archly the conviction that the race of good servants has died out, at least in England, although they do order these things better in France

The day was spent travelling from Glasgow to Inveraray. The writer throws in quotations and allusions (Edward Young , the Bible, Macpherson 's Ossian and Homer 's Odyssey, Sterne and Smollett

The Inquisitor is a character, again Sterne an, who wanders about doing good. He has a wife and two daughters. His wish to be invisible is made when he is asked for money by someone...

Henry Dellmore remains throughout his picaresque adventures innocent, if not chaste. After being (it seems) seduced by the rector's daughter he suffers agonies of guilt because he does not feel he can bring himself to...

Another juvenile poem, the Inscription Written on an Hermitage in one of the Islands of the West-Indies, composed at sixteen, is a celebration of female friendship. In the hermitage the author and her friend...

In the central plot a number of lives are ruined by the fact that a generation ago an upper-class rake, James Neville, has fathered various children by different women, most of them illegitimate, who have...