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“... of what may have inspired the poems. In this admirably sensitive and also very sensible biography Frances Thomas goes over the known ground, and makes some shrewd suggestions of her own. She is an excellent scholar of the period, and she writes with humour, clarity and restraint. In spite of their Italian looks and background the Rossettis were wholly ...”

“... no corresponding chapter on ‘My Father’. The sprightly daughter of a West Country clergyman, Frances Milton waited until she was 30 before making a good match with a London barrister. Thomas Anthony Trollope had professional prospects and ‘expectations’ of a rich, unmarried and conveniently antique uncle. The ...”

“... When​ Frances Burney’s journals were published by her niece in a seven-volume series of highlights (Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, 1842-46), they were savaged by John Wilson Croker in the Tory Quarterly Review. Hatchet jobs were Croker’s speciality: it was his review of Endymion that Byron joked was the cause of Keats’s death in Don Juan (‘’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,/Should let itself be snuff’d out by an article ...”

“... I ought to have been among other things a good poet,’ Thomas Lovell Beddoes wrote in the postscript to the brief and perfunctory note he left before swallowing a lethal dose of poison. He was 45 years old and had published nothing, save the odd poem, for a quarter of a century. In 1821, as a precocious Oxford undergraduate, he had brought out a volume called The Improvisatore, which was followed in 1822 by a verse drama, The Brides’ Tragedy ...”

“... and what better way to prepare than by reading The Poet’s Manual and Rhyming Dictionary by Frances Stillman. Thames and Hudson first published it in 1966 – even then it was based on The Improved Rhyming Dictionary by Jane Shaw Whitfield, in its turn an updated version of an earlier unimproved edition – and they’ve reprinted it a dozen times ...”

“... her terrifying talk about damnation. It so happened, however, that one day Stevenson’s father Thomas came on a document drawn up by Louis and his friends – it was the constitution of a secret society known as the ‘L.J.R.’ – calling for the abolition of the House of Lords and a rejection of the doctrines of the Established Church. It caused him to ...”

“... On​ the face of it, Frances Wolfreston from Staffordshire looks like an unlikely literary star. She was born around 1607, had eleven children and lived in the manor house at Statfold near Tamworth, where her descendants still live today. But what she left when she died at the age of seventy was unusual: a library of several hundred books, dominated not by the standard theological works of the time but by an unmatched collection of what we would now call English literature ...”

“... In England during her exile of 1792, Mme de Staël was puzzled as well as offended that Frances Burney, who was then 40, should have felt it necessary to obey her father’s instruction no longer to associate with the adulterous Baronne. Mme de Staël remarked in some puzzlement to Susanna Phillips, Burney’s younger sister: ‘But is a woman under guardianship all her life in your country? It appears to me that your sister is like a girl of 14 ...”

“... in that career, Forman’s connection with the amorous projects of the Jacobean society beauty Frances Howard, who wanted to divorce her husband and marry James I’s favourite Robert Carr, and apparently procured the death by poison of Carr’s friend Sir Thomas Overbury, who was against the marriage. Howard had ...”

“... kind of shadow club’ where Johnson could spar at leisure with other intellectual women: Frances Burney, Elizabeth Montagu, Hannah More. Johnson had his own room at Streatham Place, and wrote most of Lives of the Poets there, reading manuscript sections aloud to those present much as Samuel Richardson had read draft novels to his ‘female ...”

“... resident in the parish of St Giles without Cripplegate, and a woman from Whitechapel called Frances Williams. The charge was fornication. Though not in itself unusual, the charge had an extra twist, repeated with minor variations in most of the entries relating to it: ‘they were all 4 seene in bed together at one tyme.’ The documentation is ...”

“... But while Byron was disowned by the Victorians, embarrassed that this ‘huge sulky dandy’, as Thomas Carlyle called him, should have received so much adoration and respect, Felicia Hemans’s reputation grew, and her work went out of print only after the First World War. Her importance in dictating the taste for patriotism, obedience and sacrifice in ...”

“... the manuscript that bears her meaning gets blown up. Maybe Brookner’s view, which holds, like Thomas Mann’s, that to be a writer means dying to ordinary life, is less discouraging. Wolf’s Kleist feels something of this kind, but struggles at the boundaries between ideas and writing and life. Boundaries are important, too, in connecting these ...”

“... is to reconstruct the old affirmative art history by another means. No such risks are run by Frances Pohl’s two chapters on American art, which in many respects function as the exceptions that prove the rule. Neither monographs nor surveys, they consist instead of thematic studies on issues of race and its representations: one chapter deals with the ...”

“... bewitching a cow belonging to Pynchon’s servant Francis Pepper. Another of Pynchon’s servants, Thomas Miller, cut his leg with a saw and immediately assumed that Parsons was responsible. Up to this point, Mary had kept quiet about the fact that she had given herself to the devil and that her soul, leaving her body, had attended a witches’ meeting. But ...”