William Shakespeare

Several stories in Good Bones delight in giving something to say for themselves to literary characters generally understood to be beyond sympathy (the stepmother, the ugly sister, Gertrude in Shakespeare 's Hamlet). Others employ...

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...

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...

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)...

The heroine suffers under not one but two bad mother-figures, neither of whom is her birth mother. It opens with Greville, a country curate whose spirit has been wounded by the vice and deceit of...

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...

CG calls Quid Pro Quoa bustling play of the Farquhar , or George Colman school. Her prologue makes the point that the rapidity of modern life, symbolised by the railway, leaves no time...

The language, entirely spare and unadorned, links the play on the one hand to contemporary television reports and on the other to the ancient mode of tragedy. Ian with his eyes put out unaffectedly recalls...

Ragged Banners also addresses questions of genre. The text includes an index which lists on the one hand names of notable literary figures (including Ethel M. Dell , T. S. Eliot , and Shakespeare ...

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...

The epigraph is a statement about truth from Shakespeare 's Henry IV Part One. The protagonist of this novel, Sarah Barcant, was born in Smitsrivier, a dusty little South African town dominated by its...

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...

RB 's satire here embraces the publishing industry and its pandering to readers' tastes. Emma's cousin Lesbia is apparently representative of a particular type of circulating-library reader; much to Emma's mortification, she likes Miching Mallecho...

BE substitutes another name for the surname she shares with her father, but gives her mother's birth name as in life. Her narrator is not Bernardine but Lara, short for Owolara, which means the family...