Geoffrey Chaucer

The story recalls that of Chaucer 's Wyf of Bath's Tale. A Scottish chieftain has three ugly daughters: his formidable wife makes him marry the ugliest of all to his defeated, handsome enemy, instead...

JB 's true attitude to her own poetic vocation is hard to fathom. In An Expostulatory Epistle to Sir Richard Steele upon the Death of Mr. Addison she calls herself the meanest of the tuneful...

ES balances her story of love and adventure with the depiction of everyday life in a Scottish castle, including food, clothing, pastimes, heraldry, and chivalric tournaments, in the reign of Edward III . Her preface...

Her historical romance The Pilgrims of Walsingham, 1835, is written on the Canterbury Tales model (as practised originally by Chaucer and more recently by Harriet Lee and her sister ). AS 's pilgrims who...

This sets out to explore the effects of various technological media on the novel genre. It begins with the apparent forcible entry into a story by Jane Austen of a great German contemporary of Austen:...

The novel is set in southern France: the action begins in Avignon and concludes in Marseilles. Epigraphs to chapters range through the traditional English literary canon—Chaucer , Spenser , Shakespeare , Robert Browning

M. B.'s purpose in story-telling is not moral improvement but making little girls feel better (the youngest is seven): cheering them up since, newly sent to boarding school, they are crying for home; alleviating their...

Chaucer 's depiction of Rumour's house in the sky in the Hous of Fame inspired her to think of a poetic space open to all voices, currents, weathers. With the house as a metaphorical space...

His youthful letters to Sutton are clotted with obscenities in a schoolboy manner, boring and embarrassing to a later generation: My tooth still aches. Balls & anus! I feel shat upon. The pained exaggeration...

DPC was one of those claiming serious status for the novel by literary allusion. She uses Horace on her title-page, Pope to head the whole novel, and for chapter-headings Chaucer , Shakespeare , Goldsmith ...

The title-page bears a quotation from Prior 's verse romance Henry and Emma, but SS lays explicit claim, too, to a canonical tradition of prose fiction. The book begins with a series of tales...

SL 's frame story delightfully introduces the series. Her narrator is a male poet, poverty-stricken but eager for fame. Having been driven out of his house by bailiffs, he goes sightseeing and is snowed in...

UAF was anthologized by Adrian Barlow in Calling Kindred: Poems from the English Speaking World, 1993. At Poetry International 2000, she chose Robert Browning as her Presiding Spirit. Other influences she claimed are...

In Lady Campbell, with a Female Advocate, SF calls her first published work fatal: Go, fatal book, she writes, showing off her learning by modifying the Go, little book formula used by...

The first act makes brilliant use of historical anachronism, bringing together six women—some fictional, some actual—from different historical periods: nineteenth-century Scottish traveller Isabella Bird ; Lady Nijo , a thirteenth-century Japanese courtesan turned nun; the...