Ted Hughes has always possessed in his poetry the gift that D.H. Lawrence had whenever he took up his pen: the gift of joining his ego to the visible world so that both not only energise each...
The literature of pre-literacy reaches its audience by way of adults – parents, teachers, librarians and so on. The best reason for learning to read is to escape from what they prescribe or...
Lawrence felt that Hardy’s Sue Bridehead was ‘no woman’ because ‘that which was female in her she wanted to consume within the male force … in the fire of...
The 19th century loved George Sand: the Brownings, the Carlyles, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Ruskin, Whitman all read her; Arnold preferred her to Dickens; George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë were...
Brigid Brophy’s novels have often been described as ‘brilliantly written’: a judgment which can have done her sales little good. (‘Don’t bother with that book...
Unfinished Mystery Enter Hamlet, stabbed, no longer baffled, Stepping across his mother, drowned in a pearl, Carrying lifeless Ophelia. Now enter Stabbed Othello, enlightened at last, From his...
The boundary between books said to be ‘for children’ and the undoubted literary province of adults is a debatable land. Unless their pursuits are historical, psychological,...
Dorothy Richardson can seem to have conspired with those critics of her vast novel, over 2,000 pages long, who have complained that it is boringly avant-garde, inchoate, and vitiated by what...
Bernard Levin recently summed up in one sentence the most ambiguous form of mental sickness in our age: ‘But there are those who live by an enervated reason that owns no master in the soul,...
Staying in Castries for the wedding was a young man called Mr Kennaway. When he watches me I can see that he doesn’t think I am pretty. Oh God, let me be pretty when I grow up. Jean Rhys...
In the novel’s domain, plots were the earliest and the poorest relations to arrive. For the last two hundred years there have been repeated attempts to get them to leave, or, at least, to confine...
What makes children laugh? First and foremost, disaster – other people’s disasters, naturally.
I think it would be wiser to admit that the sensuous and intellectual attractions of almost any given page of Finnegans Wake don’t include much inducement to turn to the next page, and that the...
Scott perhaps illustrates more clearly than other writers the gap between the ideas of the general educated reader and those of the professional academic. The non-professional thinks of him as...
We are waking early now – filled with the urgency small animals must feel as they prepare for winter. I had forgotten how cold it would be – like coming back after a summer of...
John Cheever’s two celebrated novels, The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal, are now reissued in one volume. In this form, we can see that the two are really one and the end was...
There are several reasons why it is possible, or perhaps even desirable, to disapprove of Tom Wolfe’s writing. It is sometimes verbose; occasionally it is too pleased with its own effects;...
That language changes, and that we cannot prevent it from doing so, is a fact known to all, though some of us can no more contemplate it with resignation than we can death and taxes. It is two...