William Shakespeare

The first letter, the earliest piece in the volume, was said to have been written seventeen years ago at the age of seventeen: to Myra, which suggests that ML may have been one among...

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...

Valisneria tells the story of a young couple who decide, since they have abounding wealth and happiness in each other, they will resign the company of all other society. After a time however, the two...

Arguably Hardy's most melodramatic novel, The Return of the Native closes with a happy ending requested by the magazine editor. In a preface to a later edition, Hardy compared the story to Shakespeare 's King Lear.

The Inheritance opens with what sounds like an allusion to Jane Austen : It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that there is no passion so deeply rooted in human nature as that of pride.

This novel is both social history and satire, covering territory similar to that of Virginia Woolf 's The Years and May Sinclair 's The Tree of Heaven. Like these, it traces the lives of...

Its setting is Catford Street, an ordinary, poor street in shabby postwar London, and the elegant Square round the corner. Its protagonist is a child waif, Lovejoy Mason; RG 's theme is the childhood...

As the work opens, Cordelia, slight of body, determined of will, savvy of mind (who is to reappear later in another book, The Skull Beneath the Skin), is running a seedy detective agency...

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 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...