Laurence Sterne

Here SHR makes a preface out of her unwillingness to write a preface: this concept is Sterne an, and so is the abrupt opening. I can't for my life see the necessity of it, said...

Henry Dellmore remains throughout his picaresque adventures innocent, if not chaste. After being (it seems) seduced by the rector's daughter he suffers agonies of guilt because he does not feel he can bring himself to...

Another juvenile poem, the Inscription Written on an Hermitage in one of the Islands of the West-Indies, composed at sixteen, is a celebration of female friendship. In the hermitage the author and her friend...

The Inquisitor is a character, again Sterne an, who wanders about doing good. He has a wife and two daughters. His wish to be invisible is made when he is asked for money by someone...

In the central plot a number of lives are ruined by the fact that a generation ago an upper-class rake, James Neville, has fathered various children by different women, most of them illegitimate, who have...

In addition to quotation from Milton , Pope , and Thomson , this book has a Sterne an flavour, with passages titled from sights (like The Theatre Royal and The Merchants's Court) alternating with...

The hero of this episodic novel, a happily married curate with three children to bring up on £80 a year, and repining on their behalf at his poverty, takes Sentimental Rambles in Hyde...

A preface (in the first volume) quotes the words of Samuel Johnson (with apology for applying them to so trifling a matter as novel-writing) about working at his dictionary amid grief and illness, feeling cut...

Here MS found the mixture that would characterise all her travel writing: vivid first-hand narrative and evocation, and reliable well-set-out information about practical matters like mileages and information about the state of roads and inns...

There follows a fighting critical Dissertation Respecting Patrons and Dedications, which covers the issues of male disrespect for female authors, the tyranny of critics, and over-insistence on moral instruction (with Hannah More 's Coelebs...

Robert Lee Wolff argues that this is one of MEB 's very best Wilkie Collins -style investigations. As in much of MEB 's other fiction in this style, the reader can easily and...

ML here accords honorific citation to Dryden and Pope , repeated mockery to the over-long words she sees as favoured by Dr Johnson , and contempt to the famous John Bunyan of...

Tomkins (whose words open the novel in very much the way that Sterne 's narrator opens A Sentimental Journey) is in search of a wife, but early rules out the heroine from consideration. She...

Her first chapter explicitly addresses critics, and the authorial voice is often in dialogue with imagined readers—who are given a kind of life as typical young eligibles: the lovely Florinda and her favoured swain.AL

Each volume has an introductory chapter, addressing the reader in the manner of, and with some images borrowed from, Henry Fielding or Laurence Sterne (the latter, indeed, is mentioned by name). MM hopes her reader...