E.E. Duncan-Jones

SIR: It is possible to be glad that Mary Brunton’s novel Self-Control (1811) has been republished without being able to perceive that it is, in Pat Rogers’s words (LRB, 7 August), ‘beautifully constructed’, still less that, as the blurb says, it ‘still has great significance today’. But it ought not to appear under the protection of Jane Austen. Sara Maitland’s statement in the Preface...

I remember saying to my old friend Helen Gardner long ago, perhaps while she was preparing her edition of Donne’s love poems (1965), that I was haunted by the possibility that Donne’s poem ‘The Anniversarie’ celebrated the ‘marriage of souls’, as Isaak Walton calls it, between Donne and John King. Helen said succinctly: ‘Forget it.’ But I didn’t forget it and, decades later, the interest...