Norma Clarke’s latest book is a family memoir, Not Speaking.
There is a moment in Jane Barker’s 1723 novel, A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies, which prefigures Jane Eyre, and makes one wonder how much or how little 19th-century women like Charlotte Brontë were acquainted with their sister writers (as Barker might have put it) of this earlier period.
Barker’s heroine, Galesia, is supporting herself by practising medicine in London...
The first edition of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs Hannah More sold out within three weeks; a second and third followed rapidly. ‘Holy Hannah’, as Horace Walpole called her (William Cobbett called her ‘the Old Bishop in petticoats’), was already a celebrity. William Roberts, the family friend entrusted with the task of producing the book, made her into a saint. He...
‘If ever a woman wanted a champion,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘it is obviously Laetitia Pilkington.’ Norma Clarke intends to vindicate both the author and her Memoirs (she...
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