William Shakespeare

The plot of this novel is a version of a romance archetype: poor but deserving girl confounds all expectations by marrying up. Elizabeth Bennet is the quintessence of the witty and resourceful heroine who had...

The play is a Senecan tragedy, written for the closet, not the public stage, though it is worth remembering that upper-class circles reading or performing such plays were connoisseurs of the highly dramatised masque...

The selection ranges from Shakespeare to Angus Wilson , from the Bible to Liz Lochhead .

MD centred her story on a woman whose life is drifting, who has plenty of leisure but no direction. The idea came to her when she herself was bustling around London on her short visits...

This novel is set during the opening production at The Dolphin, a recently derelict and now lovingly restored Victorian theatre beside the Thames in London. The central character, Peregrine or Perry Jay, is a...

The book's contents consisted largely of already published journalism, carefully revised for the collection. Woolf had put detailed consideration into the idea of making a structure for the book, but she ended by rejecting...

In an amusing fantasy entitled Trial of Jane Austen the accused stands charged with masquerading as a great writer. Pompous or foolish witnesses accuse her of ignoring national politics, social problems, sex, professional careerism...

The action, which takes place in a magic forest, fantastically enables second chances which nevertheless fail to be better exploited than the first choices were. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls this the most...

This was not the first dictionary of English, but its predecessors had remained more or less close to the model of a word-list, omitting common words or any attempt to distinguish one idiomatic usage from...

Writer Liz Lochhead comments that these tough, transparent fables of longing, of difficult delight and consolation, are romances in the Shakespearian sense.Judith Thurman calls this volume the most Danish of ID 's works...

Her range of literary reference and comment is wide: as well as Richardson (whose Clarissa she unequivocally praises), it encompasses Blair , Sterne and Smollett as travel-writers, and Homer . Grant charges Samuel Johnson

There are occasional moments of wit, as when destitution reveals that the family servants think terms of practical life rather than sentimental fiction: the old-fashioned type of servant, who appears so frequently in Morton 's...

Attached to Septimus is a different cluster of characters that includes his anxious young Italian wife and his doctors, the bluff Dr Holmes, who tells him to pull himself together, and the dogmatic and unfeeling...

Hatchways is one of ES 's more humorous novels, since much is made of a foreign visitor's response to English culture and his desire to know more about what he takes to be its representatives....

EN does not come clean here about the complicated sexual and genealogical relationships in her family, but she gives a sensitive account of her own development and attitudes as a writer. It is here that...