John Milton

At fifteen she read Paradise Lost (with her brother's encouragement) and was delighted with its grandeur and sublimity, but was bold enough to criticise Milton for assert[ing] the superiority of his own sex in rather...

She was without formal education. She told a cousin that her favourite reading had been the Bible ever since she was a girl. Historian Susan E. Whyman argues that it was through epistolary...

KP 's maternal grandfather, Daniel Oxenbridge , was a physician with an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Her uncle John Oxenbridge was a friend of Milton and Marvell .

One of these night-school students later emigrated to work for a business firm in the USA. Of all AK 's students, rich or poor, she was the one who loved learning most...

Siddons was also an author: she published The Story of Our First Parents, Selected from Paradise Lost: For the Use of Young Persons, 1822 (to make Milton accessible for her children), and left unpublished...

Margaretta married, against her father's wishes, a French Jacobin doctor; the marriage turned out unhappy. Besides her posthumous edition of her mother's works, she published a blank-verse tragedy, Belisarius, and poems including one on...

Nor was this AS 's only opportunity to marry. In 1742 she was approached with an ardent love-letter (likening her to Milton 's Eve as she first strikes love into the heart of Adam) by...

Hester's father, James Ley , was a lawyer (in time a judge) who sat for many years as Member of Parliament for Westbury (under Queen Elizabeth, James I and Charles I). At the time of...

LHP 's elder sister Margaret (later, by marriage, Margaret Hobson ) had the distinction of being the recipient or dedicatee of Milton 's sonnet in praise of her father. Another sister, Dionysia, married the son...

The wedding was sumptuous and the bride's marriage portion was £6,000. It seems that after her wedding the bride, now My sister Brackley, was too young to be bedded, and so remained...

The most important friends of the young Anne MacVicar were Catalina Schuyler (whom she calls Madame, and with whom her first bond was a shared love of Milton ) and the little girl Catalina...

Under a perfunctory pretence of writing about the monarchs Henry VI and Edward IV , with dignifying chapter-headings from Shakespeare , Milton , Thomson , Prior , Gray , Pope , and the poems of...

MM believes that she is saying something new and not commonly known when she argues that male power over women has grown gradually by unjust laws. She sets out by quoting from and commenting on...

CH heads her volumes and chapters with quotations. Wordsworth is the most-used here; among other lines, he is cited for A little onward lend thy guiding hand / To these dark steps, a little farther...

Jocelyn has in a distant past studied English literature and is occasionally disconcerting. Do you believe in free will?, she asks, out of the blue. Stan replies, How do you mean? He replies...