William Shakespeare

The volume provides lavish notes to explain its sometimes quite obscure historical figures and settings, and cites a wide range of authors including Plutarch , Shakespeare , Milton , and Germaine de Staël . FH

She opened with remarkable clarity, confidence, and accuracy for an entirely self-taught critic: Before Jane Austen began to write, the novelists of her day had depended on involved plot, sensational incident, and the long arm...

At this point Gertrude hears a noise in her late husband's room; Ethelind sees a mysterious armed personage resembling him; Winifred sees a tall, white figure; Ormond offers to lie in wait for the ghost...

DPC was one of those claiming serious status for the novel by literary allusion. She uses Horace on her title-page, Pope to head the whole novel, and for chapter-headings Chaucer , Shakespeare , Goldsmith ...

The title-page (like several earlier ones of BH ) quotes Shakespeare . The novel opens in 1726, with Catherine the first holding court in Russia after Peter the Great 's death. She had come to...

Bessie and her more assertive friend Ursula Hamilton are challenged by men in their social circle about the alleged inferiority of women, as proved by their failure to produce serious artistic work. Bessie thinks of...

Under a perfunctory pretence of writing about the monarchs Henry VI and Edward IV , with dignifying chapter-headings from Shakespeare , Milton , Thomson , Prior , Gray , Pope , and the poems of...

Jemima here makes her first attempt to be a detective as a fifteen-year-old convent schoolgirl. While many of these pieces, like the sardonically titled Have a Nice Death, are indeed murder stories, On the...

Indeed, as in MM 's previous novels, the narrative technique contributes largely to the reader's enjoyment. The narrator addresses the reader as dear Madam, then (without modifying this address) invites her to call the narrator...

The four characters, who meet periodically, chat, complain, and reminisce. They also rehearse as the witches in Shakespeare 's Macbeth. They dance, they backchat. To a happy retirement, Katie. . . . To gravetime...

That JO intended to publish is suggested by her dedication To the Worthy and Constant Catholickes of England—especially, she says, rich ones. She expresses conventional humility, asking her readers to pardon I pray...

She also says that it can be read as the mirror-image of her earliest novelistic theme: the child's relation to the mother. Duffy dedicates the book to St Venus (a saint whose festival is...

This novel is a comedy of manners set in London in springtime, the start of the social season. Critic Charles Burkhart suggests that the title alludes to Shakespeare 's Twelfth Night; it also, paradoxically...

She writes often here about the landscape and plants at Steepletop, using them as a metaphor for life and joy and the past. The final piece included in her Selected Poems, 2003, a...

The book's epigraph from Shakespeare 's The Tempest (What's past is prologue) provokes the narrator's question, how far back do you want? How far will do?What's past in this book...