John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester

AW 's education was above average: she learned French and Italian. Her uncle Rochester , she said, taught her the difficult, sacred art of poetry.

She came from a line of distinguished literary amateurs, and was a collateral descendant of the poet Lord Rochester .

AW 's uncle Lord Rochester , notorious as rake and poet and later as a deathbed penitent, was a formative influence on her life.

AB has been repeatedly fictionalised in recent years. Ross Laidlaw published in 1992 a fiction, Aphra Behn—Dispatch'd from Athole, which added a coda to her life. In his story Gilbert Burnet enlists her to...

LH , with the poet Lord Rochester and his mother Anne, Countess of Rochester (her cousin), visited her patron Lord Anglesey .

AB was intimate with the writers' and artists' circles of her day. She befriended Thomas Otway , and allowed him to act in her first play, when he was an insecure youth of nineteen. She...

MM 's friends included, in London, a number of scientists or natural philosophers: inventor Robert Hooke (who often visited her, and with whom she discussed dreams), physician and collector Sir Hans Sloane , and scholar...

Of these female disciples, Mary, Lady Chudleigh , and the younger Elizabeth Thomas enjoyed personal friendships with JD . But his career was conspicuous for professional enmities as well as friendships. His feud with Thomas Shadwell

If Ephelia's poems of compliment are taken to imply personal friendship, she may have been a friend of Aphra Behn , whom she praises warmly and with polite humility about her own abilities in her...

The plot owes something to Charlotte Lennox 's Female Quixote. The father of Green's heroine has lived through many crazes for novelists: first Burney , then Radcliffe , then Owenson , then Rosa Matilda

BP began this novel as a story about Hilary and me as spinsters of fiftyish—that is, about a then unimaginable future. Its dry humour and irony, its concentration on middle-aged spinsters, clergy, and the...

SLC flags some items of her own under Observe by beginning them I observe. In a series about books of the Bible she comments in some detail on the behaviour of King Saul and...

Not all the poems in the volume are written in Ephelia's voice (which adds an extra dimension to argument over the ascription of those written in other voices). It seems that Ephelia enjoyed ventriloquizing the...

It opens in France and England during what was in England the interregnum period, and moves onwards into the reign of Charles II . The heroine writes her story retrospectively in a letter to a...

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.