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“... and people do not confine their reading to new or recently published books. St Clair cites Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman as an example of a book whose later prestige has led scholars to overstate its influence at the time. Although it had a respectable, but not spectacular, sale in the 1790s, St Clair believes that it made ...”

“... your person.’ The occasion was his meeting in the autumn of 1799 with the Hutchinson sisters – Mary, Sara and Joanna – at their brother Tom’s Yorkshire farm. Coleridge laid himself out to charm them and succeeded. The middle sister, Sara, whom he would call Asra, to set her apart from his own wife Sara, became his prime female figure of worship and ...”

“... to letters seems to be inseparable from ‘the intellectual measuring of bust and hips’, as Mary Ellmann calls it in Thinking about Women. Even when the poetry is criticised, her dress sense is brought in. ‘Her taste is vitiated,’ Mary Howitt complained. ‘It is just like her dress; it has too much glare and ...”

“... range of sexual satisfactions. At first glance, the enterprise looks promising. Didn’t Blake and Shelley believe in free love? Didn’t Coleridge and Southey plan to establish a liberationist commune in America? Didn’t Byron and Hazlitt write with startling candour about sex? On closer inspection, things are more tricky. Whatever their views on ...”

“... was that he believed in something else, and did so to the end. He really believed in Carlyle, Shelley, Meredith, civic altruism, the countryside, Garibaldi, and the lives of heroes teaching by example. If he had not been more gentleman than intellectual, he might have become a Comtean; as it was, he remained a Carlylean. His last two publications were ...”

“... orderly account of sexual and matrimonial chaos. Diana Trilling outlived Lionel by many a book; Mary McCarthy enjoyed the same revenge on Edmund Wilson; the witches of Eastwick (lacking only their Hardwick) have vented about Robert Lowell. To interview all the exes of Philip Rahv would be an undertaking from which the most committed Boswellian might ...”

“... anyway? Who holds off from the lyrical afflatus, when it happens? Not Malcolm Bowie of Queen Mary College, London (‘all in a splendid surge of creativity’); not Claude Rawson of the University of Warwick (‘no doubt of the power ... at the acute cutting edge of feeling’); not Elaine Feinstein, from Cambridge (‘the talent is unmistakable’). The ...”

“... he insisted they should not be kept from the world and a manuscript was sent to their friend Mary Russell Mitford in Reading with instructions to print a very limited number of copies. These slim volumes, bearing the title Sonnets by E.B.B., then seem to have disappeared from view, parcelled up with some of Mitford’s other books and papers at her death ...”

“... who effected the introduction; Cornelia, in earlier years, had enjoyed a brief flirtation with Shelley before her husband, Thomas Turner, carried her out of danger to a remote corner of Devon. Her letters, edited by the late Felicitas Corrigan, allude to ‘dear Shelley’ with near risible frequency; like Teresa ...”

“... been paying tribute to Browning’s ‘genius’ as a ‘true poet’ in her correspondence with Mary Russell Mitford: ‘I estimate him very highly – – so do you,’ she had rather coercively informed the more sceptical Mitford almost three years earlier, ‘– so must all who know what poetry is – turn their faces towards its presence ...”

“... men friends, they all seem to be dying of Aids. She has written several novels and a biography of Mary McCarthy, but, in the States, she seems most widely known for her broadcast book reviews on National Public Radio, and elsewhere for her annual contribution to the Britannica Book of the Year. By chance, she meets, once again, the withered near-death ...”

“... selection of the poet’s oeuvre. Formally, Wordsworth’s life has been written for our time by Mary Moorman, in her detailed two-volume biography (1957 and 1967). But her effort has over the last twenty years been paralleled and supplemented by Jonathan Wordsworth, who operates in an area between textual scholarship and literary biography, using the ...”

“... argument: poets who liked to turn things upside down could begin with a six-line rhymed unit (as Shelley did to evoke the topsy-turvy world of ‘England in 1819’), or use quatrain to refute quatrain, or break up the quatrains into couplets in quizzical dialogue with each other – as Alison Brackenbury does in her mischievous sonnet of 2004 called ...”

“... a woman to try to enter the patriarchal literary tradition. Emily Dickinson cowering in her room, Mary Shelley trying to work between pregnancies, Kate Chopin hounded out of print, Harriet Beecher Stowe writing with one hand while holding a baby with the other: these women tell the story that the feminists are trying to tell. But Cather? If anything, she ...”

“... verse the same Biblical punning is more heavy-handed, as in the jingle about ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Mary Jane’ of the Salvation Army, who ‘tumbled off the platform in the station/And was cut in little pieces by the train’. Mary Jane, the train is through yer:         Hallelujah. Hallelujah! We will gather up ...”