Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Here she began to gather the circle of friends which by the end of her long life had touched every cranny of English society. She had already met Edmund Burke in Bristol the previous September...

While working for the Featherstones, Sydney Owenson met Thomas Moore at a party given above his parents' grocery shop in Aungier Street, Dublin. She gained access to Ireland's bluestocking circle through Alicia or Alice Lefanu

Lady Anne lived much of her life in fashionable society, and her acquaintance was very wide. In Edinburgh in her early twenties she impressed and delighted Samuel Johnson with an impromptu and complimentary bon mot...

When Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, died, Lady Elizabeth was left in a quandary as to what her own status would be at Devonshire House for the future: whether she would have to find a new...

Mary Russell Mitford was another who knew FK well even apart from their connection through the theatre. Other friends from this period or soon afterwards included the future poet and novelist Caroline Norton

In 1813 she again met de Staël (who was visiting London) and introduced her to Elizabeth Inchbald . Others she met after her husband's death included Richard Brinsley Sheridan , Byron , and Sir Walter Scott

The Duchess of Devonshire knew virtually everyone in London society. Set apart was the Devonshire House Circle: a clique of wealthy and fashionable Whigs with rakish or bohemian leanings, who even spoke in their...

FB 's friendship with Woffington led to her meeting Peg's sister Polly , who became her lifelong friend. Eight years older than Brooke, Polly Woffington was a close friend of Samuel Johnson , Sir Joshua Reynolds

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

In Recollections of a Scottish Novelist, LW records her early love of literature. The books she read as a child, especially at the age of seven—including Charlotte Yonge 's The Little Duke, works...

The title, flagging a gender-role reversal from George Farquhar 's Beaux' Stratagem, 1707, suggests a return to the wit and worldliness of Restoration comedy. The sub-plot in which Sir George Touchwood tries to keep...

Baillie's preface explicitly denies that she was influenced by (even that she had read) German tragedians, while implicitly calling attention to the similarities in style and subject-matter between her work and theirs: for instance between...

The subtitle of this novel (which in earlier centuries had been the title of a bawdy song) here alludes to a proverb about the impossible perfections of maids' husbands and bachelors' children. This first novel...

Sidney Bidulph was also influential. It helped shape the depiction of unhappy marriage in Lennox 's Euphemia. Though FS 's son Richard Brinsley claimed not to have read it, he borrowed from it...

The title of this last book, adapting from the drinking song about girls sung by Charles Surface in Richard Brinsley Sheridan 's The School for Scandal, suggests the attitude taken to the high-living behaviour...