Virgil

Pope's thesis here (for which he evades responsibility by attributing it to Blount ) is that women are too changeable to have any lasting character or personality. The fickleness of women was of course a...

SP 's masterful use of early writers and mythical belief-systems is exemplified in Seven Horizon Poems. Each of the poems snatches a separate grain of meaning, pressing into service to do so a wide...

CR demonstrates the widest possible reading: from Homer , Virgil and Horace (all revered) and Juvenal and Persius (used to prove that not all classical authors are admirable) through the heroic romances like those of...

The title-page quotes Virgil . The prologue expresses the hope that the product of her adventurous muse will prove equally acceptable to English and Scottish readers, who are all alike British.

FAR was clearly a key element, perhaps the key element, in the success of the Hans Place school. She taught the general curriculum there for nearly twenty-five years, from its founding until 1818, and she...

The title-page quotes Samuel Johnson asserting that an author has nothing but his own merits to stand or fall on. The Birth of Genius, an irregular ode, offers advice to my son to love...

The Land irresistibly recalls Virgil 's Georgics, the poem which gave its name to the genre of which it remains the best-known example; indeed, for some time VSW intended to call her poem Georgics...

Virgil , once thought of, became the poem's tutelary deity. He supplies an epigraph. VSW opens in the epic manner—I sing the cycle of my country's year, / I sing the tillage—and...

In the house of an aunt she was surprised to find novels (particularly those of Richardson ) a topic of conversation, and that (in her own judgement) Fielding and Smollett , and various...

The poem, appropriately, is written in heroic couplets. Its opening boldly echoes Virgil only to distance itself from the project of the Aeneid: Arms and the men for deeds of arms renown'd ....

Oscar Wilde offered slightly faint praise. AS , he wrote, had tried to guide modern readers through Dante's great poem as Virgil guided Dante through the afterworld, and her modest literary guide-book was unlike many...

The summer Mary was thirteen she lived at Jedburgh and there, from her Liberal uncle Thomas Somerville , found her first significant intellectual encouragement: for the first time in my life, I met ....

The title-page quotes are from Nicholas Rowe 's Jane Shore and an unidentified old play. The actual woman behind the story was Rebecca Berry, later Elton . The coat of arms of her...

LAS had a varied upbringing, living in the households of Bess of Hardwick, Mary Queen of Scots, and her aunt and uncle Mary and Gilbert Talbot. Before she was eight she was betrothed for the...

Her first school, where she went at the age of six, was a little private establishment called Leopold House, which gave a grounding in English and maths and team games. When Betty was eleven...