William Shakespeare

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...

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...

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...

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...

The 1809 title-page quotes Shakespeare 's The Merchant of Venice. In 1811 this place is taken by lines from Henry VI Part III, in which the future Richard III avows his villainy and...

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

MCH raises the tone of her work with chapter-headings from Wordsworth , Shakespeare , Dryden , and others, most of them asserting the value of the poor and powerless, or protesting about the deficiencies of...

The title comes from Mercutio's speech about the Queen of the Fairies in Shakespeare 's Romeo and Juliet; MK quotes the opening of this speech on her title-page.

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 title-page quotes Pope and Staël . The novel's opening sounds like a tale of mysterious origins, but without the mystery. A quotation from Shakespeare 's Tempest—Prospero telling Miranda the story of her past—introduces...

The book is simple and singular in plot and sparse in characters compared with CMW 's first, but here too a central character is pregnant through most of the action. Here too literary references come...

The book does not reach complete closure in a traditional sense, but the narrator does sense that her father has come back to her consciousness for the last time. She finds solace in her voice:...

The novel opens with an epigraph from a Shakespeare sonnet.