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“... good, he found, for grandiose magic lantern effects. Presumably it was decided early on by Jane Stevenson or Cape (perhaps both) that, given the wealth of filmed interviews, surviving correspondence with racy friends and the ever interesting state of his health tested by remarkably extensive travels, Edward Burra: Twentieth-Century Eye could be ...”

“... not a ‘rouch’ tongue but a courtly one – though such a distinction would not be allowed by Jane Stevenson, who contributes an intelligent introduction to the pamphlet, invoking MacDiarmid and erecting some formidable battlements for her fragile protégé: The virtues and capacities of the Northern tradition are quite different from the mainstream ...”

“... and in 1997 transcriptions of her ‘Elegies’ in an article in English Literary Renaissance. For Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson, who edited Early Modern Women Poets (1520-1700): An Anthology,* Norbrook’s attribution to Lucy Hutchinson of Order and Disorder makes her ‘one of the most important poets, man or woman, of the mid-century’. This is a ...”

“... According to Stevenson’s wishes, his letters were first presented to the public by his friend, the art historian Sidney Colvin. Colvin, described by Stevenson as a ‘difficult, shut up, noble fellow’, did the job reasonably conscientiously. He was, however, an arch-bowdleriser, using, as he said, ‘the editorial privilege of omission without scruple where I thought it desirable’ and painstakingly altering the novelist’s ‘bloody’ to ‘beastly’, his ‘constipation’ to ‘indigestion’ and his ‘God grant’ to ‘I only hope ...”

“... publish big chunks of previously unpublished correspondence between Ted Hughes, Olwyn Hughes, Anne Stevenson and Al Alvarez? While she so vehemently condemns the motives of those who rifle the drawers of the dead, Malcolm is herself impelled to do the same, and it is this pull between its overt and covert narratives that makes The Silent Woman such a tour de ...”

“... master – of the riddles of sado-masochism, the dark underside of his ‘magic’. So also was Stevenson – a predecessor in his ‘sedulous ape’ period; so too, later, is the bookish cross-bred Borges. Miss Angela Carter, whose preface speculates here on his famous novel Memoirs of a Midget, glances at Borges and goes on to the possibility that de la ...”

“... on the Portobello Road, and lives next door to Mrs Hyde, but round the corner, off the main road. Stevenson’s setting is comparably precise and symbolic: the front of Dr Jekyll’s home is part of a square of ‘ancient, handsome houses’, while the back, which Mr Hyde uses, belongs to a sinister block of buildings bearing ‘in every feature the marks of ...”

“... the ambiguously titled (bitter to whom?) and extraordinarily hostile biography written by Anne Stevenson with the assistance of Olwyn Hughes, this criticism suggests that something terrible about Plath herself, a kind of plathology, is the source of lies, distortions, perversions and obsessions. At the other extreme has been a polemical feminist criticism ...”

“... year in Madrid, we read a third-person narrative of his childhood. We also hear from his mother, Jane Gordon, a famous feminist psychologist; from his father, Jonathan Gordon, an analyst who specialises in lost boys; and from Darren Eberheart, one of those lost boys himself. They all speak in the first person. In fact, it’s only at the very end of the ...”

“... These novels originally consisted of Middlemarch (Virginia Woolf’s nomination), the works of Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence, Dickens’s Hard Times and half of Daniel Deronda. The ‘great tradition’ doubtless stands for something much less rigorous in Mr Patten’s mind, but it is nevertheless likely to deny to early ...”

“... isn’t much she hasn’t read, or doesn’t remember. Oscar Wilde, the Brontës, Robert Louis Stevenson, Tennyson, George MacDonald, Charles Reade, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, Conan Doyle, Du Maurier, and plenty more. Her literary memory is a compendium of every syllabus ...”

“... Shelley ménage – in a book that also explores his biographical ‘intimacy’ with Robert Louis Stevenson, Gérard de Nerval and Mary Shelley’s remarkable mother Mary Wollstonecraft – that occasions the reflection. There is something about ‘the Shelley circle’, and particularly its bizarre life abroad, that produces this effect. At its most ...”

“... bien pensantes, but to be fair to Gaskell (it’s perhaps too late to start calling her Stevenson – her maiden name) it seldom sounds in her work with our contemporary note of ideological complacence. On the contrary: her prose is always in too much of a rush (her cousin Henry Holland called her charming letters ‘a heterogeneous mass of ...”

“... might have had an influence on this undertaking, and on James’s writing: there is a reference to Stevenson, and one to Gissing. Curiously, there is no reference to the author’s unsuccessful plays. His time as a failed dramatist may have convinced James of the need for passionate authorial control, of constant adverbial direction as to how sentences were ...”

“... lectures one of Dickens’s children on her delight at being served plum pudding on Boxing Day. Jane Carlyle swoops: Mrs Reid leaning tenderly over her (as benevolent gentlewomen understand how to lean over youth) said in a soft voice – professedly for its ear but loud enough for mine and everybody else’s within three yards distance – ‘Would not ...”