In this roman à clef, the author contrasts Victorian repression with the freer attitudes, values, and behaviors of the 1920s. The novel’s protagonist is Willie Ashenden, a representation of Maugham himself. Ashenden, a writer, is friends with another writer, Alroy… Read More ›
autobiographical fiction
Analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary: A Fiction
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her first novel, Mary: A Fiction, to express her most personal beliefs. An autobiographical work, Mary has been evaluated by later critics as too sentimental an expression to represent high-quality writing, and that inferiority in expression results… Read More ›
Analysis of Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline
Like all Charlotte Smith’s novels, her first, Emmeline, contained strong autobiographical elements. Through fiction, Smith found a way to protest her situation as mother to a large brood of children with a profligate husband who had abandoned the family. According… Read More ›
Analysis of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield
In his novel David Copperfield, Charles Dickens produced his own favorite work and the favorite of many of his readers. He had honed his style through previous novels, and David Copperfield reflects his mature skill, partially accounting for the novel’s… Read More ›
Analysis of Thomas Hope’s Anastasius, or Memoirs of a Greek
Thomas Hope’s Anastasius, or Memoirs of a Greek, reached instant popularity. The anonymously published three-volume novel was at first credited to George Gordon, Lord Byron, who had written popular accounts of the Near East; Hope later claimed authorship in Blackwood’s… Read More ›
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