‘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

When she was a child, she kept on her bedroom mantelpiece a little oblong blue-grey leaden plate saying: "danger of death". It portrayed a rudimentary skull-shape and a symbolic zig-zag bolt of electricity and displayed these three plain words of warning

It is 1905, and Bessie is a small child living in a South Yorkshire mining town. Unusually gifted, she sits quietly and studies hard, waiting for the day when she can sit the Cambridge entrance exam and escape the way of life her ancestors have never eve

Please activate cookies in order to turn autoplay off • An article about Margaret Drabble's early novel Jerusalem the Golden referred to the heroine, Clara, coming across a Gabriel in the pages of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Gabriel Oak app

Armed with intelligence, a fine pair of breasts and aspirations far beyond anything her spartan upbringing might have led her to expect, Clara Maugham is in her final year at university in London, waiting for her life to begin. This is the story of a poo

Amazon has launched the Kin... Margaret Drabble is the win... The titles are available individually, and there is also a two-book bundle of Flashman and Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes. George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman is based on the schoo