George Gordon, sixth Baron Byron

The plot concerns an English governess to an Italian family in Rome, who opposes the love which develops between her and the grown-up son. AL plants allusions to Jane Eyre and to famous English...

In considering the question of why Mary Shelley created monsters, LL says she was haunted by that phrase from Goya : The sleep of reason produces monsters. If you try to force things to be...

The play was written for the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company , who first performed it in Edinburgh on 24 January 1986. Lochhead surprised herself with her use of the Scots language: my grandmother's ....

The title-page bears a couplet from Byron 's Don Juan: 'Tis pleasant sure to see one's name in print, / A book's a book, although there's nothing in't.

This strikingly inventive and ingenious tale seems to owe a good deal to Mary Shelley 's Frankenstein (though Shelley receives no tribute in passing, as do R. B. Sheridan , Byron , and especially Scott

MBL 's paternal, French grandmother, Louise Swanton Belloc , was a children's writer, a translator, intimate friend of Stendhal and Victor Hugo , and the author of a life of Byron (for which Stendhal supplied...

Later again there was affection, if not much respect, in Byron 's declaration that he disdain[ed] to write an Atalantis (that is, to drop names about Don Juan's activities in England). But DM 's...

Taught by governesses until she was thirteen, Margaret Haig Thomas learned to read at about five. She was taught German and French, and she also learned Welsh as a child but did not retain it...

In GenoaMarguerite Blessington formed a friendship with Lord Byron ; her conversations with him over nine weeks became the basis of her most popular book.

A Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron with the Countess of Blessington appeared in the New Monthly Magazine.

Conversations of Lord Byron with the Countess of Blessington appeared in volume form.

Marguerite Blessington wrote non-fiction, poetry, and novels, many of them in the silver-fork category. Although she was a popular novelist in her day, well reviewed and respected by a number of other writers, her account...

When she approached the New Monthly Magazine as a prospective contributor, assistant editor S. C. Hall rejected the topics she proposed, and suggested that she should write on Byron . She based her work on...

It is a point of debate among scholars whether Blessington saw and used the memoirs of himself which Byron wrote but later burned. Later editions include those of 1893 and 1969 (the former mangles...

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...