‘She has poured forth her tender tale of love in vain and exposed herself forever to the contempt of the whole world’ These three short works show Jane Austen experimenting with a variety of different literary styles, from melodrama to satire, and explor

Valentine's Day is all about love -- and one thing I love is a great novel that inspires me to read the author's other books. Something I hate? You'll have to look near the end of this post for that! I recently finished my first Margaret Drabble book, Th

On the wall in front of him are 18 television screens, all showing films he shot of the landscapes near his home. Does it conjure images of an unchanging blue Californian sky? I

'The fin has come a little early this siecle...' Angela Carter talking about her own life and impending death and I have her on my list of women writers to zone in on through 2012. After tackling some of the Big Scary Male Authors last year, and all a bi

The kitchen walls are painted dark green, against which the shelving and the various machines-of-all-work gleam, white and forbidding with their dials and unfamiliar settings. Stout and elderly, displaced and disgruntled, Sylvia Calvert is all at sea in

When the Royal Academy asked David Hockney to con­tribute a painting to its Summer Exhibi­tion 2007, "it was clear that if he had more space, he would have used it," says Edith Devaney, curator of Hockney's first major landscape exhibition in the UK, ope