William Shakespeare

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...

As well as her central allusion to Barbauld, AG claims authority for her work by quoting Milton on her title-page and later as well, and by echoing, in her deliberately derivative, that is traditional style...

Rachel, an heiress, gives her heart to a poor man whose family oppose the match for fear of being seen as mercenary. She is also something of a social rebel, a feminist (fond of gender-bending...

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...

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...

The satiric Our Side of the Question, dedicated to the Sarcastic Bachelors' Society counters misogynistic views of matrimony with reference to Shakespeare 's Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. JR notes wryly that...

Most of the section called Poems, as well as some other pieces, describe flowers or other features of the natural world. Nature and poetry (which is celebrated in the opening Invocation to Song)...

Without ever owning the complete works of Théophile Gautier , Alphonse Daudet , Shakespeare , Byron , or Swinburne , she read bits and pieces of them all, and they helped to shape her style...

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...

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 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...

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...

RB 's satire here embraces the publishing industry and its pandering to readers' tastes. Emma's cousin Lesbia is apparently representative of a particular type of circulating-library reader; much to Emma's mortification, she likes Miching Mallecho...

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

BE substitutes another name for the surname she shares with her father, but gives her mother's birth name as in life. Her narrator is not Bernardine but Lara, short for Owolara, which means the family...