William Shakespeare

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...

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:...

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)...

GA defends her central subject (which eclipses the requisite romances in the plot) in these terms: if Shakspeare scorned not to picture the sweet influence of female friendship shall women pass it by as a...

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 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...

The theoretical essay with which FPC headed Josephine Butler 's landmark collection Woman's Work and Woman's Culture, 1869, launches out with wit: Of all the theories current concerning women, none is more curious than...

While the present-day plot produces a series of surreal confrontations, it is punctuated by a string of glimpses into the past. These begin when Swanscombe Man (the prehistoric human whose bones are the earliest evidence...

Pearl Richards (later JOH ) read widely as a child and adolescent, and her parents' liberal views (and considerable fortune) meant that she could pursue her tastes in both the lending libraries and the less...

The title-page quotes Shakespeare 's Richard II about the deposing of a king. The novel opens with precision: at five o'clock on 22 June 1791, with aristocrats fearful for their fate in the aftermath of...

CF assumes an attitude of outraged dignity: can his antiquarian eyes / My Anglo-Saxon C despise? Her tireless parody is here directed at antiquarian and linguistic learning. Ostensibly, she demands to be wholly disassocated...

CN refers to several canonical English names (Pope , Reynolds , Garrick , Shakespeare , and Edmund Kean in her first poem), and relates closely to continental women. She praises Germaine de Staël for...

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...

MADH , like her daughter, was a keen theatre-goer and attender of concerts. She enjoyed the occasional melodrama, but preferred serious plays, and was delighted to discover that the New YorkShakespearean repertoire was far...