William Shakespeare

Here KN writes a lively style, with ingenious images and examples, paradoxes like giving a name a bad dog (by which she means taking a concept like Liberalism or Science and using it pejoratively),

Severo, brother of the heroine, Lellia, has a pathological distrust of women which is rather lamely explained by his having loved a faithless, wicked woman who then drowned herself. Despite his excesses, Lellia succeeds in...

The canonical name of Shakespeare was sufficient warrant to offer children stories which did not reliably reward virtue and punish vice, or make clear what action ought to be taken in response to events on...

An odd couple on holiday from England (Stanley Williams, his Jamaican immigrant parents' my-son-the-banker, and Jessie O'Donnell, a singer, a foundling raised by nuns in Leeds) drive haphazardly across Europe towards the Middle East...

Mary addressed herself particularly to female readers, because she knew that access to Shakespeare in the original was likely to be harder for girls than for boys. Sarah Burton argues that she had a hidden...

The book's contents consisted largely of already published journalism, carefully revised for the collection. Woolf had put detailed consideration into the idea of making a structure for the book, but she ended by rejecting...

The plot of this novel is a version of a romance archetype: poor but deserving girl confounds all expectations by marrying up. Elizabeth Bennet is the quintessence of the witty and resourceful heroine who had...

The play is a Senecan tragedy, written for the closet, not the public stage, though it is worth remembering that upper-class circles reading or performing such plays were connoisseurs of the highly dramatised masque...

In Stratford, MC became known as an eccentric. Her forceful character and her self-proclaimed guardianship of Shakespeare 's memory and birthplace offended many townspeople. She was a strong critic of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust ...

Just before her elder daughter's first birthday, SH moved with her family from Stratford to Oxford, where her husband was appointed editor of the Oxford edition of Shakespeare .

When she wrote this book, MKthought it was pure Shakespeare . Well, not Shakespeare exactly—more Dornford Yates .

In further Ladies Companion competitions the same year, FT went on to win joint second prize for her essay on Emily Brontë (which, again, the magazine printed) and another first prize for her essay on...

Austen's status in the English-speaking world is not so far equalled among, for instance, French speakers. Valérie Cossy noted in March 2006 that (largely on account of inaccurate and inadequate translations) [v]ery few people in...

MC took her own work extremely seriously, seeing herself as the Shakespeare of her age and genre. Her status as an unprecedented best-seller brought both celebration and derision, just as her anti-suffrage views, which...

Sappho was well-received, though perhaps not quite to the extent SL imagined. She wrote to a friend in 1877, The British press has placed me on a plane with Shakespeare —the highest position accorded to...