William Shakespeare

It is set in the late nineteenth-century on the boundary between Westmorland and Lancashire, an exquisite country whose landscape has a profound effect in the narrative. Alan Helbeck, of an old Catholic family...

Miranda and Ore try to understand the house's haunting in terms of the soucouyant, a Caribbean supernatural character that sheds skin and traverses boundaries. Ore describes the terror of the soucouyant as the danger of...

Janice Thaddeus discusses the prerogative MD assumed in giving names of her own invention to people and places. Her uncle Lansdowne was Alcander (a violent man mentioned in Plutarch 's Lives, who was forgiven...

In the opening scene a woman psychiatrist, Dr Hildegard Wolf, is consulted by a man claiming to be the famously missing Lord Lucan .

The title-page quotes James Beattie and Shakespeare . For dedication, five stanzas from Longfellow addressed to absent friends invoke again members of the Eighth Hussars . FID 's preface declares her intention of reporting the...

This is the first of Woolf's a London novels, and is set unambiguously in the recent past, in the period of the suffrage struggle before the first world war. It is a story of courtship...

RL sets out to portray Dante and Beatrice's relationship in the context of the social and political conditions that surrounded them, while simultaneously arguing that the Divina Commedia emerged from this real love, this...

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...

The title-page quotes Shakespeare , who is then cited in the preface to justify the genre of historical fiction. HRM mentions her consultations of records and documents, and expresses her thanks to the gentlemen of...

The chapter headings quote a range of canonical or contemporary writers, including Shakespeare , Milton , Pope , Thomson , Goldsmith , William Mason , John Langhorne , Burns , Erasmus Darwin , Edward Young

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...

Sister Invention is a new name for or new concept of that creative power that has sometimes been called the Muse, which recalls the way St Francis would address non-human beings as brothers. JK writes...

The first half of the story is set in an imaginary western Irish village called Cloonoila, a strange but utterly convincing hybrid of the idyllic and the stultifyingly parochial. The second half is set in...

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.