William Congreve

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 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...

HC 's comedy A School for Greybeards; or, The Mourning Bride opened at Covent Garden . Its subtitle, confusingly, is the same as the title of William Congreve 's only tragedy, The Mourning Bride, 1697.

This novel made the best-seller list the month after publication; but at the end of the year it received the Bookseller's Glass Slipper award for books whose sales had not reflected their quality. Reviewers...

The villain here is the heroine's father, Sir Philip Moneylove. His daughter runs away from home to avoid a forced marriage, calls herself Miranda, and in a gender-reversed echo of Congreve 's The Way of...

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...

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 ...

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...

The play was a success with London audiences and critics. In The Observer, Kenneth Tynan claimed that the West End Theatre justified its existence with this production of the finest artificial comedy to have...