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“... any more’. A chastened inadequacy is more honourable than avidity.In ‘Poor Franzi’ (1954), Elizabeth, a well-intentioned American girl working for the occupation forces after the war, simply can’t comprehend the experience of the young man she’s going to marry, around whose history and character – ‘blandness and good manners and something ...”

“... Princess Mary. Anne’s first pregnancy was successful, and produced another girl, the Princess Elizabeth. Then she miscarried at least twice. It was not until his third marriage that Henry had a son who lived. Both those daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, were women of great ability, and in their very different ways were ...”

“... where he ran amok, insulting generals and riding the equestrian statues. His second marriage, to Elizabeth Hardwick, was essentially an enduring one, and her devotion and intelligence illuminate and support this biography. Other women promised a new leaf, and eventually there was the romance of a departure for England: ‘a new alliance’, as he put ...”

“... left for that purpose. There is a mother in Pride and Prejudice, but there are also two aunts: Elizabeth Bennet’s Aunt Gardiner and Mr Darcy’s aunt Lady Catherine de Bourgh. It is an aspect of Austen’s genius that, while the novel negates the power and influence of Elizabeth’s mother, neutralises her by being ...”

“... what housewives make of his sailors, like the one who leans on a table spread with good things in Elizabeth David’s Book of Mediterranean Food. The housewives doubtless thought they were nice lads; in life and art the physical types which attracted Minton were butch. The boys in Hockney’s Cavafy illustrations would not have stepped so easily or so ...”

“... of a project. Poovey’s book clearly owes much to the three-volume collection of primary texts by Elizabeth Helsinger, Robin Sheets and William Veeder, published by Garland Press in 1983 under the title The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America 1837-1883. The avowed purpose of this substantial work, which has now made a welcome ...”

“... unremarkable. This matter-of-factness is seen also in a series of violent narrative surprises. Elizabeth, an old college friend of Dexter’s, who turns up at the beginning of the novella, strolls into a shop and begins stealing things. We’ve had no preparation for her behaviour at all, and the narrative immediately moves on. Athena waits at a tram ...”

“... remark. It takes us straight out of Tennyson country into the land of Ivy Compton-Burnett. Or Elizabeth Bowen, or Elizabeth Taylor. Mutual marital embarrassment – how un-Victorian and un-Tennysonian – is one of the little things those novelists are so good at conveying. The most absorbing aspect of Ann Thwaite’s ...”

“... a Hero, has not worn well. The parents of George, the ‘hero’, are parodic monsters. The wife, Elizabeth, and the mistress, Fanny, are the sort of predatory women who can and do drive a man to his death. George nourishes ambitions to break into the world of letters, for reasons that are mysterious, since he despises that world: ‘In the course of his ...”

“... common – Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Rebecca West, P.L. Travers, Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bishop, Nadine Gordimer and Anne Sexton, who appear in the volume alongside the writers already mentioned – is that they are not men, which is not as tautological a proposition as it looks. Being a woman writer is only partly a matter of how any ...”

“... every literate citizen of Red Cloud or scholar at the university – most notably Bernice Slote, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Mildred Bennett and Elizabeth Moorhead. Her earlier biographers had all been men who shielded her gallantly from any disrepute and in some cases – E.K. Brown, James Woodress – raised her to the ...”

“... gratitude. There are moments of kindness and forbearance in his correspondence with the novelist Elizabeth Harrower, the painter Brett Whitely and Cynthia Nolan, as well as supportive letters to Randolph Stow, his modest and neglected peer. There are moments, too, in his long relationship with Viking’s Ben Huebsch, but the brightest example, the most ...”

“... her daughter died and (incredibly) the year she began Miss Marjoribanks, Oliphant had taken up Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë, and found that shecould not help comparing myself with the picture more or less as I read. I don’t suppose my powers are equal to hers … but yet I have had far more experience, and, I think, a fuller ...”

“... mortifying, and cause deep pain to his long-suffering wife Simone – and later to his girlfriend Elizabeth Hurley – along with his three children. What can he do except hold his hands up and ask for forgiveness? But he refuses to learn his lesson. One evening in 2006, in the middle of a match he was playing for Hampshire, he got a text from a woman he’d ...”

“... by their own laws. Traders had operated from Genoa, Venice and even England before this, but after Elizabeth I was declared a heretic in 1570, the English saw their contacts with the Ottomans not only as a way of circumventing European control of the passage of luxury items from the east but as a means of challenging the Catholic countries’ presence in the ...”