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“... National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and other non-militant groups, enabling Jane Robinson to write a history of the constitutionalist cause in much the same vein. Robinson focuses especially on the six-week suffrage pilgrimage in the summer of 1913, when constitutionalists marched from all corners ...”

“... nor offshoots, but playful and original tributes to the work that’s set them off. With Jane Gardam’s latest novel the background book, and enriching ingredient, is Robinson Crusoe. Mrs Gardam is not new to the practice. The Summer after the Funeral (1973) has a heroine (aged 16 – it’s ostensibly a ...”

“... meaningless. Emily, then, was much less wholeheartedly in her novel than Charlotte was to be in Jane Eyre. Wuthering Heights concealed itself in its own structure, even in its own properties – passion, Gothicism and so forth – much as Lermontov was doing at the other end of Europe in A Hero of Our Time. Drug addicts are adepts at hiding what they are up ...”

“... glass eye. The painter Benjamin Haydon approaches a crisis in his unhappy career. Browning annoys Jane Carlyle by putting a hot kettle down on her new carpet. Haydon takes his own life. So, from day to day and street to street, the sublime and the ridiculous appear in the proximity they occupy in life. This is surely one reason for the rise of ...”

“... Either way it put me in mind of a passage early in Donald Antrim’s first novel, Elect Mr Robinson for a Better World: I keep seeing Jim’s face, lit red by tail lights, in the long moments before the lines snapped taut, while Bill Nixon tried and retried to start his fume-spewing, out-of-tune Celica. It was all so profoundly uncomfortable; there ...”

“... of vocal harmony, imaginative portrayal, and arrangement of the details of thought.’ For David Robinson, writing in the Twenties and reprinted in the Sixties, the ‘perfection’ of Sappho’s verse was clear enough proof of her unblemished character. He was perhaps unusual in his unshakable confidence that (at least in the case of female writers) fine ...”

“... view we share, even if she is in the third person, is Owens’s illegitimate and disowned daughter Jane. She is ten years old at the beginning, the questing girl in search of Dad whom Simpson always needs to get the show on the road. This is another plot in which parents have failed to grow up, to stay together, to make a home, or even to concoct a shared ...”

“... to staunch Mary’s haemorrhage by plunging her up to the waist in ice: his flirtation with Jane Williams (with whom Mary herself was later to fall in love); his nightmares of strangling Mary and of the sea overwhelming the house; various hallucinations including the one about meeting his own double, who asked him disconcertingly, ‘How long do you ...”

“... biographies, their intellectual significance has often been doubted. Shelley’s daughter-in-law Jane wrote an ‘antiseptic’ biography claiming that Shelley and Mary eloped only after his wife had died, which led to Mary being seen as merely a virtuous wife, tender of her husband’s flame following his early death. In 1951, Muriel Spark rescued Mary’s ...”

“... are luxury editions, befitting the occasion, and reprints of the novels and of the manuscript of Jane Eyre, updated selections of the letters, non-updated editions of Charlotte’s and Emily’s poetry, books about the novels (scholarly and not), books of essays, books about their belongings, about the parsonage and Haworth, comic books, volumes of artwork ...”

“... were ‘familiar chat spread upon paper’ she was parroting a line at least as old as Erasmus. Jane Austen, unsurprisingly, was mistress of the conventions: ‘I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth; I have been talking to you almost ...”

“... joyless document’, as the Hamburgers call it, was unpromising. No fictional would-be husband in Jane Austen, George Eliot or Meredith outdoes Austin in epistolary stiffness. Having set before Sarah his prospects – not good – in the legal profession, and the probability that they would have to wait several years before they could marry, he asked her to ...”

“... was earning on average £6000 a year and he went on to stamp his ideal landscapes, including, as Jane Brown estimates, about a hundred and fifty ornamental lakes, all over the face of England. Not everyone liked his work. Some contemporaries were hostile and even friends and clients were occasionally uneasy about the scale of his influence. A neighbour in ...”

“... rewarding than Fielding (largely on moral grounds), Maria Edgeworth to write more enjoyably than Jane Austen, Villette to be superior to Jane Eyre, and a certain Mrs Jenkin to be a finer writer by far, in the realistic mode, than George Eliot. (Mrs Jenkin was a close friend of the Ruffinis.) At 15, Vernon Lee was already ...”

“... iron to make nails.) Even the armour they wore was made from shiny paper. (In the second part of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe had ridiculed China’s trade, pitiful in comparison with ‘the universal commerce’ of Europe, and its pathetic army, furnished with erratic firearms and powder lacking in strength. What particularly annoyed Defoe in his fiction was ...”