William Shakespeare

Our Lady of the Broken Heart, the garden play mentioned in the volume title, is set in a public Italian garden during the seventeenth century, or any time. In the dedication, AMFR recalls...

Pearl Richards (later JOH ) read widely as a child and adolescent, and her parents' liberal views (and considerable fortune) meant that she could pursue her tastes in both the lending libraries and the less...

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 theoretical essay with which FPC headed Josephine Butler 's landmark collection Woman's Work and Woman's Culture, 1869, launches out with wit: Of all the theories current concerning women, none is more curious than...

While the present-day plot produces a series of surreal confrontations, it is punctuated by a string of glimpses into the past. These begin when Swanscombe Man (the prehistoric human whose bones are the earliest evidence...

As well as her central allusion to Barbauld, AG claims authority for her work by quoting Milton on her title-page and later as well, and by echoing, in her deliberately derivative, that is traditional style...

Rachel, an heiress, gives her heart to a poor man whose family oppose the match for fear of being seen as mercenary. She is also something of a social rebel, a feminist (fond of gender-bending...

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...

AP quotes Pope on her title-page (about indifference to fame) and Shakespeare , Thomson , Savage , and others as chapter-headings. She sets her novel around the lakes of Killarney in Ireland. Antonia is...

CF assumes an attitude of outraged dignity: can his antiquarian eyes / My Anglo-Saxon C despise? Her tireless parody is here directed at antiquarian and linguistic learning. Ostensibly, she demands to be wholly disassocated...

The earlier Adelaide and Antonine, whose lovers take refuge from the French Revolution in England, is balanced by Agnes, or The Wanderer, whose protagonist (another Revolution victim) is ordered by her doomed husband...

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...

This is a work of fiction, not documentary. It relates the stories of four ex-prostitutes sympathetically, presenting a strong argument for social reform. According to scholar Katherine Binhammer , it is the most feminist among...

The book's first and longest piece, The History of an Enthusiast, is strongly influenced by Germaine de Staël 's novel Corinne; ou, L'Italie. Protagonist Julia Osborne is an orphan being brought up...

Reading myths, she finds, she has equal difficulty inhabiting characters of hyper-masculine men and of oppressed women: she wants instead to read about women who love themselves, who are alive, who are not debased, overshadowed...