John Dryden

The reception of this volume, dictated by Gethin's position as her father's only child and heir, and as an exemplary pattern of female excellence, rather than by consideration of the literary quality of her work...

Dryden showed his copy of the poem to William Walsh and William Wycherley , and said all three writers agreed that Chudleigh's was the best of all the poems he had received in tribute to...

AK 's death was lamented in at least three poems. Her father printed in her PoemsDryden 's ode on her death, which links her painting and poetry, and subordinates both arts to her virtue...

Congreve was twenty-one when on 22 December 1691 he licensed his first book, a short novel called Incognita: or, Love and Duty Reconcil'd, which was published the following year. He moved quickly into...

As to poetry, Paradise Lost was quickly recognised as a classic. In 1674, while it was still a very recent text, Dryden praised it as undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime...

AF was a constant source of scenes, burlesques, and improvisations for performance by the Women's Liberation Street Theatre Group . She also wrote for a number of underground or radical papers: Ink, Islington Gutter...

An amateur performance at Court of Dryden 's The Indian Emperor used a prologue which AB included in her Covent Garden Drolery, but probably did not write.

ET (dubbed Corinna by Dryden and writing mostly in the early eighteenth century) was a poet of real stature and an interesting letter-writer. Her few authentic works have been upstaged by the many miscellaneous writings...

AK (also a painter) was a fine Restoration-period poet, who has the misfortune of being better known for Dryden 's praises of her than for her actual work.

It is difficult to summarise AB 's immense and complex importance for the history of women's writing. Virginia Woolf said she deserved from all women a tribute of flowers because she was the first to...

Her poetry as a whole is conspicuous for its versatility. Her major early influences (Katherine Philips and Abraham Cowley ) were succeeded by Dryden . (She always denied any influence from Pope .) But...

The elderly lady, Lady Arabella, represents a chilly view of the English aristocracy. She opens her story with a paean in praise of past times and in dispraise of the present: How interminably long the...

Lucretius , as a pagan philosopher and theologian (and, as LH and her contemporaries believed, insane much of the time and sexually promiscuous), was a daring choice for one of her religious opinions.

In some sense, therefore, she dictated the terms of the anthology. Its full title was The Virgin Muse: Being a Collection of Poems from our Most Celebrated English Poets, designed for the use of...

This was not the first dictionary of English, but its predecessors had remained more or less close to the model of a word-list, omitting common words or any attempt to distinguish one idiomatic usage from...