William Shakespeare

The novel's title foregrounds GF 's perhaps fantastic extrapolation from history, justified in the Introduction with the assertion that Truth and fiction are closely blended in this tale. . . . Those who are sometimes...

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...

This novel has two sections, Dream-Life and The Awakening, with an Intermezzo between the two: love is not part of the dream, but of the awakening to reality. The title-page quotation from La Fontaine

Sister Invention is a new name for or new concept of that creative power that has sometimes been called the Muse, which recalls the way St Francis would address non-human beings as brothers. JK writes...

As each book in this series relates to one of Shakespeare 's plays, this one relates to Pericles, and the artist that it relates to is Tacita Dean, who is famous for her...

Most of the stories concern love, and some make creative use of the lives or works of other authors, like Tolstoy and Daphne Du Maurier . In The Closing DoorRT created a character who...

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...

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...

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 book does not reach complete closure in a traditional sense, but the narrator does sense that her father has come back to her consciousness for the last time. She finds solace in her voice:...

As often, Murdoch has a canonical text in mind for reworking: in this deeply unsettling novel it is Shakespeare 's Much Ado About Nothing. (One scene also recalls the book of Job.) But...

The family attends the funeral of Mirabeau ; they are still in France at the onset of the dreadful events of September 1793: the beginning of the Terror. The medallion is...

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...

Her dedicatee was a bookstore owner in Nashville, Tennessee, where he involved himself in the Civil Rights movement in 1960. (His son Richard is known as a writer). RT uses three epigraphs: from St John of the Cross