John Dryden

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.

The novel ranges over Barbary, Persia, and Brazil, but centres on the career of Sebastian , sixteenth-century king of Portugal, who in died in Africa in 1578, fighting against the Moors...

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...

An Argument explains the poem's source in Plutarch. AF 's hero, whose father was an associate of Alexander the Great , is dead after many vicissitudes. His ashes make a triumphal progress by sea from...

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...

MLC 's occasions include the public and private. She opens with an ode on the recent death of the queen's only surviving child , in which the speaker, unconventionally, rejects the consolation duly offered by...

The volume nicely mixes the personal and political. SF shows daring in expressions of love and of refusal to accept conventional restraints of all kinds. She reprints all four of her poems on Dryden 's...

M. G. Lewis is a more complicated case, treated with some nuance. SG admires The Monk but feels that after that Lewis's real talent was obscured by the baneful influence of German fiction: she agrees...

The American title echoes Dryden 's All for Love (Act 4, scene 1): Men are but children of a larger growth. The book is dedicated To Another Father and Mother in gratitude for a wide...

The title is a complex allusion to traditional gender roles, specifically to the sex appeal of male martial prowess. John Dryden 's line None but the brave deserve the fair (itself in context a propaganda...

MW has adapted two German plays for English productions: Heinrich von Kleist 's Penthesilea, about the Amazons (1977), and Ernst Toller 's The Blind Goddess (1981). She also adapted Githa Sowerby 's Rutherford and...

CD 's second novel, Wandering Fires (titled from John Dryden ), appeared the same year as Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow.

Like most of her peers, MMB maintained a lively correspondence. Some of it is reproduced in A House of Letters, edited by Ernest Betham (though he prints more letters to than from her). She...