William Shakespeare

In fact the book deals with gardening in town as well as in the suburbs. The cloth cover is attractively designed with a vignette of London above the title and a country scene below. The...

This collection represents a significant departure from AW 's earlier work in its adoption of literary conventions. Peopled with jesters, knights, witches, and shepherdesses, the poems in this volume incorporate historical (Anglo-Saxon and Elizabethan), mythological...

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...

From her account it is clear how she respects, even loves, the people she describes, but also how she is not one of them, but is marked off by tiny gradations of knowledge and privilege...

The title-page quotes Shakespeare on the marriage of true minds. This novel explores various motives for marriage and traces the experience of a group of married couples. It begins with the five Miss Phipson sisters...

Jane, a widow whose only child is dead, decides to marry again, and picks the young Marquess of Montrath, heir to an earldom, whom she has first seen as a fellow visitor to the spunging-house...

The title-page quotation from Paradise Lost features the archangel Raphael's pronouncement that it is better for human beings to know That which before us lies in daily life than things remote. According to critic...

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 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...

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...

A Beginner tells the story of Emma Jocelyn, a young woman who writes a novel called Miching Mallecho. (The title, drawn from Hamlet, elicits the following exchange between Emma and her aunt in...

JP divides the experiences of life into three stages: anticipation—reality—and reminiscence; and it is more difficult than it at first appears to be, to decide on the comparative extent and value of each. Hope is...

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...

Southampton turns out to be too bashful to speak in parliament, and also too weak to withstand the mockery of rakish friends for his fidelity to his wife. He suffers agony of conscience over his...

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...