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“... banished the fear of ghosts? What is the trick that makes the reading chill? How is it engineered? Jane Harris’s first novel, The Observations, which is set in 1863, has all the necessary ingredients for a Rebecca-like absorption. There’s a bright young Irish maid for a heroine, with a mysterious past that is only gradually revealed; a beautiful ...”

“... In one respect at least we must be glad Jane Austen refused the proposal of marriage made her in 1802. Literature would be a little less seemly had she obliged us to think of our greatest (indeed, I more and more suspect, the greatest) novelist as Jane Bigg-Wither. Her invention was more euphonious ...”

“... Moderns, her provocative critical survey of English cultural life between 1930 and 1945, Alexandra Harris points to Eliot’s lines in ‘East Coker’ about ‘Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth/Mirth of those long since under earth/Nourishing the corn.’ Harris argues that the poet was thinking about the dead ...”

“... intention of abandoning the comfort, good humour and sheer domestic efficiency provided by Jane Wells. Rebecca, however, was convinced that she could persuade him to seek a divorce and marry her. She persisted in this belief for fifteen years, with a great deal of trauma and misery as a consequence. Furthermore, although he had made generous provision ...”

“... up to Cambridge in 1938, he intended to become a medical missionary, and met his first wife, Ruth Harris, at Congsoc (the University Congregational Society). Soon she was ‘washing his test tubes’ and they were tacitly engaged, though they wouldn’t have sex until 1943, when they got married.Early in the war, as he began his practical medical training and ...”

“... Gonne; I assume Kiernan is the novelist’s creation). Kiernan has two feisty daughters, Bella and Jane, who supply the romantic subplots very efficiently. Bella will ingeniously escape the siege with her Portuguese hairdresser by observation balloon. The Biographer’s trooper boyfriend will have his head shot off, and his brother, also a trooper, will finish ...”

“... The publication of three substantial biographies of Jane Austen within a decade smacks of excess. But, compared with Lord David Cecil’s A Portrait of Jane Austen (1979) and John Halperin’s The Life of Jane Austen (1984), the work under review is in so many ways the best that it deserves to make its mark ...”

“... Garrison Keillor. Perhaps they got it from Shakespeare’s sonnet. At any rate, when the play of Jane Eyre opened in New Haven on 26 December 1936, in a stage version by Helen Jerome, the critics wondered ‘if it is not easier to see Katharine Hepburn in Jane Eyre than Jane Eyre in ...”

“... I had written a dissertation on the literary-critical legacy of the ‘Cambridge Ritualists’ (Jane Ellen Harrison, F.M. Cornford, Gilbert Murray and A.B. Cook, turn-of-the-century classicists who had written on the connection between Greek myth and ritual and the origins of drama), and had then read a good deal of Frazer, who influenced the Ritualists ...”

“... us from the tiny, crowded house without a bathroom, where she shared a bed with her gran, Martha Jane, until the first day she ventures further than a cycle ride from home, her rail ticket in her glove, her worst fears about her future at college in Swansea assuaged by her mother’s promise to keep up the postal supply of STs and avoid her having to visit a ...”

“... and Aristophanes can procure a pardon for that sort of thing. Other reviewers may commend Thomas Harris for committing ‘not a single ugly or dead sentence’ but Amis finds enough of them to label Harris ‘a serial murderer of English sentences’ and Hannibal ‘a necropolis of prose’. He finds the opposite response ...”

“... work, in the poetry of Grace Nichols and David Dabydeen, and, especially, in the fiction of Wilson Harris. (I once invited Harris, a long-time resident of Chelmsford, to talk about what it was like to live in Essex: he wrote back to say that he had no idea – his mind was always in Guyana.)Gilroy’s grandmother was a ...”

“... Suffolk and Essex; soldiers, sailors, gunsmiths and clergymen; Quakers, aristocrats and radicals. Jane Austen, for instance, enjoys no more prominence than her brothers Francis and Charles, both officers in the navy. While Uglow devotes considerable attention to campaigns on sea and land, her primary concern is the rhythm of life on the home front during ...”

“... Until​ the mid-20th century Jane Collier was known only for a clever satire on how best to irritate people, An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753). After her death in 1755 it was considered a shame that she hadn’t tried writing something less rebarbative. Her younger brother Arthur ‘often lamented’, the 1804 editor of the Essay recalled, ‘that a sister possessing such amiable manners, and such abilities, should only be known to the literary world by a satirical work ...”

“... sailed with him, Antony Knivet, a young gentleman volunteer; John Davis, the great navigator; J. Jane, a friend of Davis’s; and Thomas Lodge the poet. Thomas Cavendish was a man of considerable estate but varying fortunes, and like many of his contemporaries he took to the sea to improve them: they were at their charming height in 1588, when he returned to ...”