William Congreve

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...

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.

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...

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

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

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...

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...