William Shakespeare

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...

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...

This novel, like the others in the trilogy, is set in the fictionalised Norwich: Morningquest. SG opened it with a quotation from Emilia in Shakespeare 's Othello, claiming the right and duty to...

The preface opens by quoting Johnson 's view of Shakespeare as the poet of nature who moved away from the universal reliance of dramatists on romantic love as the only motive for action. What a...

In the opening scene a woman psychiatrist, Dr Hildegard Wolf, is consulted by a man claiming to be the famously missing Lord Lucan .

The play's impulsive young protagonist, Dorothy Archibald, opposes her parents' wishes by falling in love with a bank clerk who plays the violin. Critic Rudolf Weiss has noted that the play is full of echoes...

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)...

For readers familiar with the Shakespeare comedy (as Jemima certainly is), parallels are discernible between the personages and situations on stage and those of the actual world—parallels which are unsettling rather than helpful for Jemima...

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 satiric Our Side of the Question, dedicated to the Sarcastic Bachelors' Society counters misogynistic views of matrimony with reference to Shakespeare 's Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. JR notes wryly that...

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 title-page quotes Shakespeare on the divinity that shapes our ends. EST 's preface (dated at Chaldon on 25 June) challenges the current prejudice against novels. She argues that the novel deserves some...

PA kept a very detailed diary between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. She published excerpts and illustrations from it, with passages from her two juvenile novels, in I Should Have Been a Hornby Train...

The title-page quotes are from Nicholas Rowe 's Jane Shore and an unidentified old play. The actual woman behind the story was Rebecca Berry, later Elton . The coat of arms of her...