William Shakespeare

She opened with remarkable clarity, confidence, and accuracy for an entirely self-taught critic: Before Jane Austen began to write, the novelists of her day had depended on involved plot, sensational incident, and the long arm...

In further Ladies Companion competitions the same year, FT went on to win joint second prize for her essay on Emily Brontë (which, again, the magazine printed) and another first prize for her essay on...

FT had grown up reading poetry and wishing to be a poet. For years this was the direction of her deepest literary aspirations, in which Ronald Campbell MacFie helped and encouraged her. Stressful periods in...

From her account it is clear how she respects, even loves, the people she describes, but also how she is not one of them, but is marked off by tiny gradations of knowledge and privilege...

The title-page quotes Shakespeare on the divinity that shapes our ends. EST 's preface (dated at Chaldon on 25 June) challenges the current prejudice against novels. She argues that the novel deserves some...

CET was self-taught, although she studied hard in her childhood, and memorized a great deal of Shakespeare .

Instead of taking up her university scholarship, PLT went to work. First Aunt Ellie wangled her a secretarial job for which she had to fake competence in maths. Then she managed to get permission to...

Her father, the famous actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree , named her after the Viola of Shakespeare 's Twelfth Night (though he almost named her Rosalind, for As You Like It). At her birth...

Throughout her life, VT took direction from her father, the actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree , who had abandoned his job in the family corn-trading business to pursue a career on stage, and had changed...

In her early childhood, she read Andrew Lang 's fairy tales, and particularly his Brown Fairy Book (1904). She learned history from the plays of Shakespeare , with which she became familiar in her many...

At this stage of her life, Rosie's great interest and talent was not writing but painting, like her sister. She set out to make a huge, hanging, illustrated copy of Keats 's Ode to Autumn...

Most of the stories concern love, and some make creative use of the lives or works of other authors, like Tolstoy and Daphne Du Maurier . In The Closing DoorRT created a character who...

Her dedicatee was a bookstore owner in Nashville, Tennessee, where he involved himself in the Civil Rights movement in 1960. (His son Richard is known as a writer). RT uses three epigraphs: from St John of the Cross

After the deaths of her parents Melesina Chenevix was committed to the care of a governess who had a determination to rule by rigour. . . . The fear and distaste I had for her...

Her successive years with different guardians account for the apparent inconsistency in her comments about her education. In maturity she named her favourite youthful reading as Shakespeare , Molière , and Sterne . Yet she...