Torquato Tasso

HW says she has more respect for the upper classes than some of our modern reformists. She recommends reading poetry and history, not novels: Novel reading tends to enervate the mind. We rise from...

SW worked hard for three months at translating Tasso 's Jerusalem and Verri 's Roman Nights; she had already done some translation from Tasso in about 1786.

SW 's choice of originals shows the catholicity of her tastes: on the one hand a Renaissance work (of which the standard English version was by John Hoole , 1763) and on the other Le...

After the pasted-in pages and a section devoted to Tasso , the volume moves to a poem modelled on the tabular lists of good and evil in his life that are kept by Defoe 's...

Freya had a German governess until the age of eight, and then an Italian governess who stayed until she was fourteen. More importantly, Freya was close to her grandmother Madeleine Stark , who read...

In a critical preface HS reveals her gender though not her name. She opens by invoking the author of Rienzi (either, Mary Russell Mitford or Edward Bulwer Lytton ). The two groups of lovers and...

One month before writing this poem Elizabeth Smith met Mary Hunt , with whom she was soon maintaining a scholarly correspondence. In the earliest letter which Bowdler prints (written on 7 July 1792), Smith touches...

The action of this novel takes place in many different parts of Italy. Its features include a mystery over the heroine's birth (her mother was an escaped nun and her father was burned by...

EPS has an eye for picturesque scenes, which she describes as set pieces as well as sketching as an artist. Examples are the group formed by a servant and a native each knee-deep in a...

Edmund Curll , still cashing in, published Select Translations from Tasso 's Jerusalem, by the late ESR .

The Vision (first of her poems both in the Tonson volume and in the posthumous Miscellaneous Works) and On the Creation both express the resolve to choose religious themes for the future. Two extended...

Her early work and the passages she copied into her mother's commonplace-book show the influence of Tennyson and Wordsworth ; she also acknowledged the impact of Gray and Crabbe , and wrote several poems inspired...

Samuel Johnson was eager to sit for her, and did so on three occasions: in March 1775, in June 1780, and in summer 1783. He may have been sitting for her on the day before...

Anna Seward , in letters which were to be published in AR 's lifetime, mixed her praise of her gothic oeuvre with some trenchant criticism.Nathan Drake called Radcliffe the Shakespeare of Romance Writers...

She began writing this work, which she subtitled A Dramatic Poem, in Five Acts, five years earlier; even after its printing it remained unproduced. The same title had been used for a tragedy...