William Shakespeare

An Advertisement claims that The Recess is a version, in modernised English, of a manuscript memoir from the reign of Elizabeth I . It breaks new ground for the English novel in various ways: it...

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...

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...

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...

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...

As she was preparing to stage La Prise de l'école de Madhubai in 1984, she met Ariane Mnouchkine , the director of the experimental Théâtre du Soleil , who was known for her innovation in...

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

Her heroines always remained chaste until they were married, no matter how great the temptation. I do allow them to go to bed if they're married, but it's all very wonderful and the moon beams...

This book makes some pretence of being an early text, though the way that Nicholas Moldwarp is named and introduced suggests the superior eye of posterity. Manning once again imitates not only early spelling, but...

JP divides this novel into three parts, one for each woman. Much of the section on Catherine of Valois (whom many readers would remember as a charming young woman being wooed in broken French at...

This text is divided into short, discrete paragraphs which seem often unconnected with each other. The first one reads Oh, my lost ones. The protagonist and speaker has some difficulty placing herself in time...

Here KN writes a lively style, with ingenious images and examples, paradoxes like giving a name a bad dog (by which she means taking a concept like Liberalism or Science and using it pejoratively),

The periodical's theatre reports, provided by a little court of female criticism that includes Mary Singleton and a further six virgins, deplore the displacement of Shakespeare 's original King Lear by Nahum Tate

Severo, brother of the heroine, Lellia, has a pathological distrust of women which is rather lamely explained by his having loved a faithless, wicked woman who then drowned herself. Despite his excesses, Lellia succeeds in...

Randall Martin notes how Dowriche's use of Gentillet/Patrick brings her work into the anti-Machiavel tradition. Her Machiavel is a female one: Catherine de Medici (which was not unusual). Her Catherine speaks in gendered terms when...