Supersensual Ear

Patricia Lockwood: Willa Cather’s Substance, 2 April 2026

The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop 
by Garrett Peck.
New Mexico, 309 pp., £22.99, March, 978 0 8263 6925 3
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Death Comes for the Archbishop 
by Willa Cather.
Everyman, 344 pp., £16.99, October 2025, 978 1 85715 089 6
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... was forthcoming. The first biographical works about Cather were personal remembrances by Lewis and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, both from 1953. The first critical biography, by E.K. Brown, appeared the same year. A proscription in Cather’s will against quoting from or publishing her letters had disastrous consequences: scholars were forced to ...

Societies

Perry Anderson, 6 July 1989

A Treatise on Social Theory. Vol. II: Substantive Social Theory 
by W.G. Runciman.
Cambridge, 493 pp., £35, February 1989, 0 521 24959 7
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... burden on common definitions. But even here acute problems arise. The England of Edward I and of Elizabeth I was one country: but was it really the same kind of society, within the terms of the taxonomy itself, when villeinage had disappeared between the two? Sung China was a contemporary of Norman Sicily, and Runciman judges them absolutist alike. But where ...

Fielding in the dock

Claude Rawson, 5 April 1990

Henry Fielding: A Life 
by Martin Battestin and Ruthe Battestin.
Routledge, 738 pp., £29.50, October 1989, 0 415 01438 7
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New Essays 
by Henry Fielding, edited by Martin Battestin.
Virginia, 604 pp., $50, November 1989, 0 8139 1221 0
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The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding. The True Patriot, and Related Writings 
edited by W.B. Coley.
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An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, and Related Writings 
edited by Malvin Zirker.
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The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register Office 
by Henry Fielding, edited by Bertrand Goldgar.
Oxford, 446 pp., £50, December 1988, 0 19 818511 1
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Fielding and the Woman Question: The Novels of Henry Fielding and the Feminist Debate 1700-1750 
by Angela Smallwood.
Harvester, 230 pp., £35, March 1989, 0 7108 0639 6
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... biography. Zirker’s volume includes seven works, one of which, ‘A Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning’ (1753), concerns the well-known case which provided the basis for Josephine Tey’s novel The Franchise Affair. The Covent-Garden Journal (1752) is the last of Fielding’s major works of journalism, and perhaps the most interesting to ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1998, 21 January 1999

... is to a 17th-century Savile and his son and daughter-in-law, done by Maximilian Colt who sculpted Elizabeth I’s monument in Westminster Abbey. Elsewhere in the church are two faceless reclining figures and, acting as corbels, some huge grotesque stone heads. I don’t take much notice of these but it turns out that these carvings are why the church is ...

In the Workshop

Tom Paulin: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 22 January 1998

The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets 
by Helen Vendler.
Harvard, 672 pp., £23.50, December 1997, 0 674 63712 7
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Shakespeare's Sonnets 
edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones.
Arden, 503 pp., £7.99, September 1997, 1 903436 57 5
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... argues –is both remembering lines he wrote perhaps ten years earlier in the reign of Elizabeth, and also recalling performances by the actors who spoke his lines. He seems to be drawing on nature for his conceit, but equally he is drawing on the created nature of his own art. The young man is a flawed, brilliant royal actor, and he is also an ...

Light Entertainment

Andrew O’Hagan: Our Paedophile Culture, 8 November 2012

... the BBC for nearly forty years and can still be heard in the archives introducing young Princess Elizabeth as she delivers her wartime address to the children of Britain. ‘Goodnight children, everywhere,’ was Uncle Mac’s catchprase. Though Gamlin’s activities were under wraps until now, there have long been rumours about McCulloch. He was given the ...

Poor Dear, How She Figures!

Alan Hollinghurst: Forster and His Mother, 3 January 2013

The Journals and Diaries of E.M. Forster Volumes I-III 
edited by Philip Gardner.
Pickering and Chatto, 813 pp., £275, February 2011, 978 1 84893 114 5
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... prejudice?), and then ‘the sea full of floating brown pennies of oil’, an image and a phrase Elizabeth Bishop might not have disdained, with its quiet metaphorical swell. The rhythms and play of sounds, the subtle presence of things remembered in things seen, convey a genius for observation that one doesn’t think of as Forsterian. The Bishop-like ...

Places Never Explained

Colm Tóibín: Anthony Hecht, 8 August 2013

The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht 
edited by Jonathan Post.
Johns Hopkins, 365 pp., £18, November 2012, 978 1 4214 0730 2
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... In January 1945, as she was preparing her collection North & South for publication, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her publishers to say she was worried that she had written nothing about the war: The fact that none of these poems deal directly with the war, at a time when so much war poetry is being published, will, I am afraid, leave me open to reproach ...

What Henry Knew

Michael Wood: Literature and the Taste of Knowledge, 18 December 2003

... breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. Elizabeth Bishop, ‘At the Fishhouses’ ‘Like what we imagine knowledge to be’. There are many ways of imagining knowledge – this is a proposition not likely to provoke much dispute. But how about this one? There are many ways in which the imagination ...

Mr and Mr and Mrs and Mrs

James Davidson: Why would a guy want to marry a guy?, 2 June 2005

The Friend 
by Alan Bray.
Chicago, 380 pp., £28, September 2003, 0 226 07180 4
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... more than one cultural tradition flowing into the river of same-sex unions in the British Isles. Elizabeth Brown in the Traditio volume suggests that the distribution of wed-brothers in (the chronicles of) Norman lands may imply a powerful Scandinavian tradition. Brent Shaw cites an account of Celtic homosexual marriage, overlooked by Boswell, preserved by ...

Pipe down back there!

Terry Castle: The Willa Cather Wars, 14 December 2000

Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism 
by Joan Acocella.
Nebraska, 127 pp., £13.50, August 2000, 0 8032 1046 9
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... and theory: Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Jonathan Goldberg, Judith Fetterley, Jean Schwind, Elizabeth Ammons. Acocella takes no prisoners. She is queen of the devastating citation, and more than happy to let the jargon-mad professors hang themselves. Thus poor Robert Nelson, author of a 1988 book on the novelist, gets mercilessly dinged for writing ...

Wringing out the Fault

Stephen Sedley: The Right to Silence, 7 March 2002

... in the Countie of Lancaster (1613), illustrates the importance attached to unforced confessions: Elizabeth Device ‘made a very liberall and voluntarie Confession, as hereafter shall be given in evidence against her, upon her Arraignment and Triall’; and passing sentence, Justice Bromley said: ‘very few or none of you, but stand convicted upon your own ...

My Girls: A Memoir

August Kleinzahler: Parents, lovers and a poetic punch-up, 19 August 2004

... had designs on me, for marriage. You see, marriage for Melodia was what it must have been for Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Hutton, no big thing; and in Melodia’s case, a natural consequence of sodomy and prayer. Mother sat between Melodia and me, with Father across the table, scowling at the prices on the dinner menu. I know what he was thinking: how ...

Whirligig

Barbara Everett: Thinking about Hamlet, 2 September 2004

... myth’: the strong Tudor will to believe that God had worked through history to bring about Elizabeth I, whose spiritual progenitor was the great and good Henry V. Perhaps he did, up to a point. But the plays say something rather different, with a full human meaning that goes well beyond political propaganda. The climax of the second sequence, Henry ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: My 2006, 4 January 2007

... Charge of the Light Brigade, Cecil was a frail woman with a tiny birdlike skull, looking more like Elizabeth I (in later life) than Edith Sitwell ever did (and minus her sheet metal earrings). Irish, she had a Firbankian wit and a lovely turn of phrase, ‘Do you know the Atlantic at all?’ she once asked me, and I put the line into Habeas Corpus and got a ...