William Shakespeare

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...

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 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.

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...

This novel is set in Cornwall, as well as in a contemporary landscape of violent exclusion, lies, suffering. Its protagonist, Sophia, dwells on these things in her mind, while her activist sister, Iris, has...

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...

Although Shakespeare 's Richard III clearly plays a major role in shaping the myth of Richard's villainy against which Tey writes, she alludes to this play only in passing, when a character comments on Laurence Olivier

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...

As a child Mary Meredith (later MW ) wrote stories for her younger brothers and sisters. She first had her writing published after the family moved to Stanton-on-Hine Heath, in the parish magazine.

The title-page quotes Shakespeare . The story has no chapter divisions, though it is often broken by flashback or by letters. While melodramatic, it is unconventional in its avoidance of the standard courtship plot, happy...

JP divides the experiences of life into three stages: anticipation—reality—and reminiscence; and it is more difficult than it at first appears to be, to decide on the comparative extent and value of each. Hope is...

EH seeks to raise the canonical status of the novel in this work not only by serious politico-philosophical content, but also by chapter-heading quotations from the classics (from Horace , Shakespeare , and Milton to...

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...

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...