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“... In many ways, Paula Backscheider has written a highly appropriate life of Defoe. Fat, fact-filled and repetitious, her book offers a meandering narrative of merchant adventures and spying, opportunism and piety, taking us from fire and plague to bankruptcy via the battlefield of Sedgemoor, Newgate prison and the pillory ...”

“... Augustan and masculine? In her passionate and wide-ranging study of 18th-century women’s poetry, Paula Backscheider quotes Isobel Armstrong’s framing of such questions in a suggestively entitled essay, ‘The Gush of the Feminine’ (1995): We have had two hundred years to discover a discourse of and strategies for reading male poets. They belong to ...”

“... and her theoretical discussions clear. Unlike so many of her colleagues, Egan never mumbles. Paula Backscheider comes from a very different stable. I suspect she would give short shrift to Egan’s evasive autobiographers. She writes a fluent, good-humoured, often humorous prose, she wears her extraordinary erudition as lightly as a scarf, and her ...”

“... our seas’. In her meticulously detailed biography of Defoe, which was published in 1989, Paula Backscheider says that at least four of his schoolmates from Morton’s Academy were executed in the wake of the rebellion. They were Kitt Battersby, William Jenkyns and the Hewling brothers. Another former schoolmate, John Shower, was pardoned on 5 ...”