William Congreve

Spedding believes that the original numbers came out more regularly than has sometimes been assumed by commentators. Collected in volume form after two editions in these original numbers, The Female Spectator had nine editions or...

ML was sometimes taken to the theatre as a child, which she loved. The first play she ever saw was Congreve 's tragedy The Mourning Bride, with a Harlequin pantomime to follow. She once...

His friendship with Sir Isaac Newton (a neighbour at the Tower) was shared by his daughter. There may also, possibly, have been personal acquaintance behind her praise of the poems of William Congreve and Alexander Pope

Lady Mary claimed that at every stage of her life she picked a few intimate friends and cared little for the opinions of anyone else. She always retained the highest opinion of her father's and...

MP 's wide circle of friends included her fellow female playwrights Delarivier Manley , Catharine Trotter , and Susanna Centlivre , as well as the poet Sarah Fyge and actresses Elizabeth Barry and Susannah Verbruggen

During her London years she was an ally of Damaris Masham , but quarrelled with Delarivier Manley . She found both a patron and a friend in Sarah, Lady Piers (who wrote poetry herself). She...

Another followed an upsetting review of Charles's Specimens in the Quarterly in February 1812, another on her completing her own On Needle-Work in December 1814-February 1815, and another, unusually, only six months later.

The negative influence of CT 's marriage on her career was very considerable. Years later, in a letter significantly addressed to the greatest writer of the age (that is Alexander Pope ), which it seems...

This poem's subject is the love-affair of Semele with Jove. Semele wished to see Jove in his true, not assumed form; when he complied and appeared as godhead she was burned to death in his...

It does include a fragment from verse play, Femininity and Freedom. It concludes with two poems about the peace process in Northern Ireland. The last, Irish Poetry, written for Michael Hartnett ...

Here she concludes by quoting, unascribed, eight lines of poetry by Congreve beginning When Lesbia first I saw, so heavenly Fair. Such a worldly quotation seems out of character. Most of the quotations in...

The first chapter is has an epigraph from Pope (A youth of frolic, an old age of cards) and Croker goes on to head her chapters with great literary names like Milton and...

MD makes skilful use of letters to project character, political issues, and gender interaction. Her use of significant dates (All Saints' Day, November the fifth) links her with the prophetic tradition of Lady Eleanor Douglas

The Double Disguise, set in an inn in England (the Pig and Castle, on the road from Ireland via Liverpool to London), features a travelling Irish family. The father (Richard Lovell Edgeworth 's...

The title page quotes Congreve . The story of Charles Benfield's early life and courtship precedes his death, which leaves his widowed Maria to bring up five children, feeling abject and paralysed (characteristics which become...