William Shakespeare

DPC was one of those claiming serious status for the novel by literary allusion. She uses Horace on her title-page, Pope to head the whole novel, and for chapter-headings Chaucer , Shakespeare , Goldsmith ...

The narrative voice (a Scottish one, apparently as a kind of joke) is complex and shifting, with irony fed by unstable reference to the central couple (now Muriel and Henry, now Mother and Father, and...

Jemima here makes her first attempt to be a detective as a fifteen-year-old convent schoolgirl. While many of these pieces, like the sardonically titled Have a Nice Death, are indeed murder stories, On the...

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...

This novel is set in Cornwall, as well as in a contemporary landscape of violent exclusion, lies, suffering. Its protagonist, Sophia, dwells on these things in her mind, while her activist sister, Iris, has...

The theatre where the action unfolds is the Dolphin, from Marsh's novel of 1966. The personages include a range of life-larger actors including a mysterious young New Zealander of Maori blood and the looming, awful...

She also says that it can be read as the mirror-image of her earliest novelistic theme: the child's relation to the mother. Duffy dedicates the book to St Venus (a saint whose festival is...

Although Shakespeare 's Richard III clearly plays a major role in shaping the myth of Richard's villainy against which Tey writes, she alludes to this play only in passing, when a character comments on Laurence Olivier

EH seeks to raise the canonical status of the novel in this work not only by serious politico-philosophical content, but also by chapter-heading quotations from the classics (from Horace , Shakespeare , and Milton to...

Jane, a widow whose only child is dead, decides to marry again, and picks the young Marquess of Montrath, heir to an earldom, whom she has first seen as a fellow visitor to the spunging-house...

The title refers primarily to a legend about a wand of palm (the country name for willow) which brings good luck if it is found on Palm Sunday (when, traditionally, English people carried branches of...

Many chapters are headed with quotations from Shakespeare or Cowper . This novel pits domestic (upper-class) ties against destructive passions, the latter aroused by the fascinating Marchioness of Laisville (whose vices do not ruin her...

The book's first and longest piece, The History of an Enthusiast, is strongly influenced by Germaine de Staël 's novel Corinne; ou, L'Italie. Protagonist Julia Osborne is an orphan being brought up...

The novel opens with an epigraph from a Shakespeare sonnet.

Pearl Richards (later JOH ) read widely as a child and adolescent, and her parents' liberal views (and considerable fortune) meant that she could pursue her tastes in both the lending libraries and the less...