“... to take her up. Vanity Fair gushed in 1877: ‘All male London is going wild about the Beautiful Lady who has come to us from the Channel Islands ... She has a husband to make her happy, but still awaits a poet to make her known.’ Her husband most certainly did not make her happy, but Oscar Wilde volunteered for the poet’s position and spent a night ...”

“... rather than in a bargain for sex. Perhaps, but who knows? It is the very invisibility of the young lady, or the impossibility of interpreting her, that fascinated Goethe, as it had fascinated Ter Borch before him. While Steen extended performance to include one and all, Ter Borch here is opting out, as it were. He calls attention in his own way, as Vermeer and ...”

“... rewriting ‘The Jolly Corner’ or possibly even The Turn of the Screw, but not The Portrait of a Lady or The Tragic Muse, much as their subjects would interest her. The claims I have been making – for the whole oeuvre, I should add – are high, and I do indeed think of her as our best novelist. Although she is much admired and giggled at, I doubt if this ...”

“... figures such as William Godwin – who called her “a piquant mixture between a milkmaid and a lady” – to the elegant Sir Charles Bunbury, formerly the husband of the Lady Sarah Lennox with whom George III had been so much in love before duty forced him to marry his German queen.’ There’s also a Victorianism of ...”

“... his continuing search for a father. His mother emerges as a feckless but not altogether unlikeable lady who conditioned her child to moonlight flits from hotels in the Cromwell Road, and who was constantly explaining to his chums, and everyone else, that she had mislaid her handbag and was short of a fiver. On one occasion, Guinness came home on leave to find ...”

“... she elides dialogue and comment, kidnapping voices to express what an individual would never say. Lady ‘Rogue’ Singleton is courted with a jingling rhyme which dashes her hopes of a glamorous match: Come, wed me, Lady Singleton, And we will have a baby soon And we will live in Edmonton. Her reply has the boom of ...”

“... near what people in this country feel like inside. Coming back from town, I see Mrs Holmes, the lady next door, standing on her doorstep. She shows me her knitting. She’s had migraine badly, so could only manage to cable two-thirds up and knit the rest plain, but it looks fine. She’s lived here for over thirty years, and she’s waiting on the step for ...”

“... the window of a music store in Great Falls when she was 14 and made up her mind. She dried out the lady-killing drunk in him, becoming her stepdaughter’s greatest nemesis along the way. There is a lot more here, told in a simple style just jaunty enough to make it persuasive that Ms McFadden has survived. There is the well-meaning Ila Mae, Pat’s ...”

“... Sackville-West and Sitwell), topped off with occasional politicians (Astor, Bonham Carter and Lady Lloyd-George) and royals (Princess Marina, Queen Victoria Eugénie, the Princess Royal). Vera Brittain, Ivy Williams (‘the first woman to be called to the English bar’) and Rachel Crowdy (she ‘belonged to a generation when women had to possess very ...”

“... century than one has any right to expect ... the prioress clearly wants to be thought more of a lady than she is, and the franklin – a rich farmer in whose house it “snowed with meat and drink” – is eager that everyone should know what trouble he is taking to educate his son as a gentleman. These social pretensions, these subtly differentiated ...”

“... be sorry to know that a woman had looked into it past the title page.’ One woman who did was Lady Wilde, Oscar’s mother, an early enthusiast for Leaves of Grass. Another was a lady in Hartford who at once experienced ‘a mysterious delicious thrill’ and wrote to the poet assuring him that her ‘womb was pure and ...”

“... a medical questionnaire to all the women who had attended Newnham and Girton in Cambridge, and Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville in Oxford. They were asked to assess their state of health on a scale from ‘excellent’ to ‘dead’ (some forms were necessarily completed by the families of those who had not survived) at different periods of their ...”

“... for the Northwest Passage in the 1840s only further fuelled the imaginative drama of the ice. Lady Jane Franklin, reminding the nation of her husband’s heroism with her own heroic bearing, whipped up sympathy and money for years of searching which finally located the bodies of the party – though not the remains of Franklin himself. But the drama of ...”

“... are absolutely at home with her disrupted deeps, mingling with them as freely as a society lady with lushes and misfits at a cocktail party. This is shown in a specially graphic way by what must remain her masterpiece, though she always hated hearing it referred to as such, The Death of the Heart. The young Eddie and the 16-year-old Portia live darkly ...”

“... ritualised combat, though in that case the contestants were usually the champions of a cause, or a lady, or simply fighting like athletes for a prize, usually before an admiring audience. He also considers so-called judicial combat, where it was understood that God would determine a just outcome. But divine intervention was not claimed for the duel. At stake ...”