John Milton

FR denied that she knew Latin, yet she used Latin tags in her letters. As an adult she worked persistently at self-education. Her commonplace-book contains her reading notes on Plato , Aristotle , Pliny ,...

Of her childhood, AG wrote that she developed early powers of imagination and memory, but received little attention: no one fondled or caressed me . . . I did not till the sixth year of...

Siddons was also an author: she published The Story of Our First Parents, Selected from Paradise Lost: For the Use of Young Persons, 1822 (to make Milton accessible for her children), and left unpublished...

Margaretta married, against her father's wishes, a French Jacobin doctor; the marriage turned out unhappy. Besides her posthumous edition of her mother's works, she published a blank-verse tragedy, Belisarius, and poems including one on...

Nor was this AS 's only opportunity to marry. In 1742 she was approached with an ardent love-letter (likening her to Milton 's Eve as she first strikes love into the heart of Adam) by...

Hester's father, James Ley , was a lawyer (in time a judge) who sat for many years as Member of Parliament for Westbury (under Queen Elizabeth, James I and Charles I). At the time of...

LHP 's elder sister Margaret (later, by marriage, Margaret Hobson ) had the distinction of being the recipient or dedicatee of Milton 's sonnet in praise of her father. Another sister, Dionysia, married the son...

The wedding was sumptuous and the bride's marriage portion was £6,000. It seems that after her wedding the bride, now My sister Brackley, was too young to be bedded, and so remained...

KP 's maternal grandfather, Daniel Oxenbridge , was a physician with an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Her uncle John Oxenbridge was a friend of Milton and Marvell .

One of these night-school students later emigrated to work for a business firm in the USA. Of all AK 's students, rich or poor, she was the one who loved learning most...

The most important friends of the young Anne MacVicar were Catalina Schuyler (whom she calls Madame, and with whom her first bond was a shared love of Milton ) and the little girl Catalina...

The diary's first volume opens with a preface which expresses conventional modesty bluntly, without the customary effort at elegance or grace: Books generally begin with a Preface which draws in the Reader to go on...

In addition to quotation from Milton , Pope , and Thomson , this book has a Sterne an flavour, with passages titled from sights (like The Theatre Royal and The Merchants's Court) alternating with...

As it stands, Frankenstein is no ghost story, though it is rich in the uncanny, and aims to chill its reader's blood. MS shows an astonishing power for such a young author of weaving together...

The title-page quotes Milton 's Paradise Lost (There wanted yet the master-work); the preface quotes Samuel Johnson saying that the novelist needs to have first-hand experience of the living world, but that...