Algernon Charles Swinburne

Geraldine Jewsbury wrote a review of Twilight Hours for the Athenæum in which she describes SW 's work as promising, but unfulfilled and melancholy. The review explains that her life . . . seems to...

When EN asked Bernard Shaw to review the first Lays and Legends for To-Day, he responded with a pretend review contained in a letter, a masterpiece in faint praise: The author has a fair...

This bowdlerized version of EB 's novel and her poetry circulated widely and received many reviews. H. F. Chorley in the Athenæum pronounced the re-publication of the two novels an illustration of English female genius...

The poems attracted little attention initially, except for their connection to ES 's life. Swinburne was unusual in his estimation of her as a veritable artist in her own right. He discerned in A Year...

Critic Kenneth Churchill argues that Ouida was the first English writer to chronicle the sense of growing disillusion with the practical outcomes of the new state established in Italy by the Risorgimento. She...

ES loved Christina Rossetti from her childhood, and later thoroughly admired Gertrude Stein . As a young woman, however, she believed: Women's poetry, with the exception of Sappho . . . and Goblin MarketChristina Rossetti and...

In this novel Valentia Wyburn, another clever woman, has been five years married and has a lover (though their sexual relationship is never particularised) besides her husband. But she breaks with him when she discovers...

AL acknowledged the influence on her poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley , Goethe , Heine , Robert Browning , Swinburne (whose poem Félise she answered in Félise to Her Lover), and James Thomson (the...

The novel brings together the fashionable upper-class society which EF had experienced in her youth, with the question of women's employment which was the burning issue of her working life. She acknowledges the work of...

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...

MG was six when her five-page, semi-illegible saga on the life of an Indian woman teapicker won third prize in the Typhoo Tea Handwriting Competition (which despite its name must, she says, have disregarded writing...

SW read the poetry of George MacDonald , Dora Greenwell , and Algernon Charles Swinburne , and commented on it in her letters. Of the last-named she wrote, Surely such music cannot be destined...

Praise for this second public collection was more muted and criticism more probing than before. John Westland Marston , reviewing this volume too for the Athenæum, was still positive, but regretted that most of...

The first poem in the volume, Baal, uses the biblical story of the prophet Elijah (believer in Jehovah) pitted against the pagan priests of Baal. The prayers of the priests alternate with narrative, till...

LMS 's earliest works, which emerged from a romantic sense of beauty, defined her for decades of readers. In the first phase of her writing career, from 1900 to about 1915, she sought the delicate...