James Macpherson

At three years old ES loved books and at four she could read extremely well. The move to Suffolk brought the Smiths a governess who was only sixteen but whose abilities exceeded her...

As well as a basic school education, the young TC (who had been thought slow as a small child) taught himself an astonishing range of abstruse subjects, mostly historical, by reading in circulating libraries and...

This novel is well supplied with quotations: Macpherson 's Ossian on the title-page and Robert Blair (The Grave) to open the first volume, with Shakespeare and Milton for the succeeding volumes. It opens...

The title-page quotes Dryden . The story opens in Scotland, twenty miles from Glasgow, with the humble clergyman Dr Woodville giving reluctant permission for his unsophisticated young daughter, Anna, to attend a charity ball...

The poem picked out by the Critical Review as the principal one, occupying fourteen pages, is entitled Lines found on the Stairs of the Tour de la Chapelle of the Bastile. These lines, powerful...

The novel opens: One tempestuous night in the October of 1793, a carriage stopped at the door of a solitary old house on the borders of the Lake of Killarney. Felix Charlemont...

This novel claims relationship with Macpherson 's Ossian through quotations appearing on its title-page and heading its chapters. An element of terror derives from Matthew Gregory Lewis 's notorious The Monk, 1796. It opens...

The contents included odes, sonnets (including one sequence from Petrarch and another based on Goethe 's Werther, in which she speaks as the male lover of a woman, with notes relating her poems to...

That is, she took Ossian as a model for a lament for her own chosen ancient hero. The din of war is drowned by one more great and more terrific sound; / A sound high...

AF writes in the style of mid-century poets Gray and especially Collins , whose names she specifically invokes and whose words she echoes, along with classics of the past like Petrarch . She records an...

Letters from the Mountains was not noticed in the Edinburgh Review, an omission which Grant attributed to gender prejudice. The Critical gave it a brutal review, which began by turning seriously against the...

The work has a frontispiece showing the castle of Dierenstein, built on a rocky crag. Dedicating it to the Austrian eagle, she thanks it for sheltering a dove [herself] flying from birds of prey...

CB took various steps to guard against association with the project of James Macpherson , whose Ossian ic poems which purported to be ancient Scottish works were more fabricated than adapted. She includes in her...

Her preface to the whole volume expresses regret, probably purely conventional, that her comparatively feeble hand cannot wield the pen of learning and antiquity. She professes to be [u]nacquainted with the rules of translation...

Choice of women writers is fairly generous, with excerpts from Hester Mulso Chapone , John Aikin and Anna Letitia Barbauld (Evenings at Home), Susanna Haswell Rowson , Elizabeth Carter , Hester Thrale ,...