William Shakespeare

The title-page quotes Shakespeare on the divinity that shapes our ends. EST 's preface (dated at Chaldon on 25 June) challenges the current prejudice against novels. She argues that the novel deserves some...

This was a new influence added to those of the Victorian novelists (especially the women), Shakespeare , and Jane Austen , whom she admired extravagantly (Even her dull scraps are music to me)...

The chapter headings quote a range of canonical or contemporary writers, including Shakespeare , Milton , Pope , Thomson , Goldsmith , William Mason , John Langhorne , Burns , Erasmus Darwin , Edward Young

In her preface to the poem she outlines theories of poetry, taking much the same approach towards it that she had towards fiction: that verse, like prose, would benefit from attention to simple, everyday life...

Jane, a widow whose only child is dead, decides to marry again, and picks the young Marquess of Montrath, heir to an earldom, whom she has first seen as a fellow visitor to the spunging-house...

The Inheritance opens with what sounds like an allusion to Jane Austen : It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that there is no passion so deeply rooted in human nature as that of pride.

Here AH opens by quoting Shakespeare , and applies her usual vivacious style and sense of immediacy to the story of a man who is wrongfully imprisoned, and eventually released only to find his wife...

The title-page quotation from Paradise Lost features the archangel Raphael's pronouncement that it is better for human beings to know That which before us lies in daily life than things remote. According to critic...

The four characters, who meet periodically, chat, complain, and reminisce. They also rehearse as the witches in Shakespeare 's Macbeth. They dance, they backchat. To a happy retirement, Katie. . . . To gravetime...

That JO intended to publish is suggested by her dedication To the Worthy and Constant Catholickes of England—especially, she says, rich ones. She expresses conventional humility, asking her readers to pardon I pray...

The narrative voice (a Scottish one, apparently as a kind of joke) is complex and shifting, with irony fed by unstable reference to the central couple (now Muriel and Henry, now Mother and Father, and...

The theatre where the action unfolds is the Dolphin, from Marsh's novel of 1966. The personages include a range of life-larger actors including a mysterious young New Zealander of Maori blood and the looming, awful...

Critics have pointed to a range of influences and allusions in this novel. Kate Flint has suggested that the representation of the sorrowful-eyed aesthete Francis Chaloner was a satiric jab at Oscar Wilde , who...

She opened with remarkable clarity, confidence, and accuracy for an entirely self-taught critic: Before Jane Austen began to write, the novelists of her day had depended on involved plot, sensational incident, and the long arm...

At this point Gertrude hears a noise in her late husband's room; Ethelind sees a mysterious armed personage resembling him; Winifred sees a tall, white figure; Ormond offers to lie in wait for the ghost...