William Shakespeare

Critics have pointed to a range of influences and allusions in this novel. Kate Flint has suggested that the representation of the sorrowful-eyed aesthete Francis Chaloner was a satiric jab at Oscar Wilde , who...

During her schooldays literature was her greatest escape. She remembers Hansel and Gretel, the first story she read in English and reread many times, followed by Snow White. She also read...

The subtitle of this novel (which in earlier centuries had been the title of a bawdy song) here alludes to a proverb about the impossible perfections of maids' husbands and bachelors' children. This first novel...

Critic Amanda Burgess sees this as perhaps the earliest example of the Irish national tale, and of a shift in RMR 's literary focus from England to Ireland which coincided with her own move in...

This is a satirical novel set on a US campus—though not, PHJ insists, embodying any identifiable place or people. The title, from Shakespeare 's Midsummer Night's Dream, suggests that the campus of the story...

The title-page bears a quotation from Shakespeare ; the dedication argues that the rebel Monmouth was wrong but deserving of pity. The story traces the fate of a family named Bruce; it opens with a...

In this version of her life-story, ESG traces her fall back to her mother's refusal to allow her to marry her first love. She accords this refusal a passage of purple prose beginning Ah! wherefore...

A first prologue addresses Pope , and invokes the ghosts of Shakespeare (The Wonder, as the Glory of the Land) and Dryden (Shakespear's Freind) as mentors to EB 's performance in...

Her theatrical memoirs are unchronological, unsorted, anecdotal, and vivid. She enjoys relating clashes or conflicts in which she comes out on top. She describes herself as solidly patriotic, though not one of the Union-Jack-waving Britishers...

Several stories in Good Bones delight in giving something to say for themselves to literary characters generally understood to be beyond sympathy (the stepmother, the ugly sister, Gertrude in Shakespeare 's Hamlet). Others employ...

A Beginner tells the story of Emma Jocelyn, a young woman who writes a novel called Miching Mallecho. (The title, drawn from Hamlet, elicits the following exchange between Emma and her aunt in...

The title-page quotes Shakespeare 's Macbeth. A vivid, to-the-moment opening introduces a tale of revenge and restored inheritance. Add another fagot [sic] to the fire, and replenish the flask, said the aged Martin to...

The title-page quotes Shakespeare . This novel follows, with serious concern as well as satirical humour, the career choices made by the sons of the Cleavland family. Their father favours science and agriculture, which he...

The earlier Adelaide and Antonine, whose lovers take refuge from the French Revolution in England, is balanced by Agnes, or The Wanderer, whose protagonist (another Revolution victim) is ordered by her doomed husband...

The heroine suffers under not one but two bad mother-figures, neither of whom is her birth mother. It opens with Greville, a country curate whose spirit has been wounded by the vice and deceit of...