John Milton

The title-page has two epigraphs. The first begins with two lines from Milton 's Il Penseroso (perhaps alluding to its musical setting by Handel ), which go on to link the nightingale with Anna...

MW was replying to a number of authoritative male texts about the nature of women: by Burke (who in Reflections on the Revolution in France had glorified Marie-Antoinette and dismissed non-queenly femininity as animal), Rousseau

In Three Years After Marriage (a title which alludes to Three Hours After Marriage by Pope , Gay , and Arbuthnot ) a beautiful young wife, Matilda, is impervious to advice against quarrelling with her...

The title-page bore her name and a quotation from Milton . This book advertised her novel from nearly thirty years ago.

While she was still in her teens, although engaged in her second paid sexual relationship, her lover Frederic Lamb set out to get her reading Milton , Shakespeare , Byron , theRambler, Virgil

This volume also included work by Milton , Dryden , Addison , Pope , Carter , and Barbauld .

The claim of the preface that PW wrote for her own amusement, without thought of publication, and was now yielding to the persuasions of generous friends, may be taken with a grain of salt. She...

This is one of her best-known volumes of stories, in part perhaps because of its involvement with gender issues, with such topics as early sexual development, rigidly demarcated gender roles, misogyny, sexual violence, defiance of...

She refers to the campaign for the vote as a side-effect of a disturbance in the relation of the sexes, of the Paradisaical, or Milton ic, subordination of women. It is in fact the...

MW published what is probably her best-known work, her final completed novel, Precious Bane (titled from Milton 's name for gold—part of the natural resources of Hell—in Paradise Lost).

The first number, dated 1 December 1824, opens with The Editors to the Reader, in which Watts's three personae introduce themselves as sisters. They are very literary personifications, who possess, respectively, the actual spear...

The contemporary story features a self-educated working-class intellectual and freethinker whose characterisation draws on many strands of thought of the day. Drawn after the model of self-made men such as Daniel Macmillan , William Lovett

It proclaims: this is the story of two people // this is the story of two peoples // and one God / your God or mine? In tracing the story to before the Act...

Her range of reference is wide: Milton , Cromwell , Virginia Woolf , Joan Baez , fairy tales, the Bible, and settings (as her publisher puts it) from Jerusalem to Hollywood, cafes to graveyards.

Since the early 1990s, MW has turned her attention to music. Her libretti and radio plays include works based on poems by John Cornford , John Milton , and Ariosto : Spain, first performed...