William Shakespeare

She was a regular member of the audience at Shakespeare performances at Sadler's Wells Theatre .

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...

With books hard to come by, RG read and re-read those she had, often sent her by relatives and often new publications. She called Austenexactly what I need and likened herself to Emma.

At some time after 1736 EB became a member of the Shakespeare's Ladies Club , whose activities included pressuring the theatres to stage more Shakespeare plays.

While at school, PHJ was a regular attender in the sixpenny gallery of the Old Vic Theatre , then run by Lilian Baylis .

As to the drama, QV thought the works of William Shakespeare to be very coarse. She recommended Faust and French plays, about which she said that [o]ne's dislike to a nation need not...

EH was a frequent participant in amateur dramatic readings. She often read the works of Robert Browning . Shakespeare , perhaps owing to her childhood deprivation, was also a particular favourite. She was praised as...

MSC kept up with contemporary publications. She asked her son Astley to send her from London the latest volume of Johnson 's edition of Shakespeare and found the works of Hannah Morea...

AD was often a subject for other artists. Sometime before 1775 Daniel Gardner painted an unusual fancy picture of her, with her friends Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (a particularly frequent sitter on account of her...

JP was, with her sister , one of those praised by John O'Keeffe in his poem Female Authors, Being an Answer to a Lady, who asserted, that by transmigration the soul of Shakespeare lived in...

Aurora Leigh was, according to Barry Cornwall (father of Adelaide Procter ), the book of the season.John Ruskin wrote shortly after its appearance, I think Aurora Leigh the greatest poem in the English...

Edith and Katharine must have also been extremely pleased with the praise they received from the critics. A review in The Spectator heralded a new voice which is likely to be heard far and wide...

At the end of 2009 Jean Hannah Edelstein enrolled herself in the ranks of ex-admirers and actual denigrators. She related in The Guardian how during her childhood her parents had operated a ban on Blyton...

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge , reviewing Puck of Pook's Hill for the Times Literary Supplement, saw Kipling as a realist who in later life had learned to represent the dreaminess of life. Though his Puck...

Some Austen news items are regrettable. In an interview with the Royal Geographical Society in June 2011, V.S. Naipaul , in asserting his own superiority to women writers (and claiming he could tell male from...