Mrs Dane's Defence (1900) Quick reference
The Oxford Dictionary of Plays (2 ed.)
...now admits he made a mistake, Mrs Bulsom-Porter's slander isolates Mrs Dane from the community. Lionel (Lal) Carteret has fallen in love with Mrs Dane, so his adoptive father Sir Daniel, an experienced lawyer, mounts Mrs Dane's defence. He wishes to force Bulsom-Porter to retract her story and clear Mrs Dane's name, so that she is free to marry Lionel. However, his skilful questioning reveals that she is indeed Hindemarsh, mother of an illegitimate child, who has lied in order to be able to re-enter society. Her real defence is that, in the harsh world of...
Jones, Henry Arthur (1851–1929) Quick reference
The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature (4 ed.)
...A friend and contemporary of Arthur Pinero , Jones was a prolific playwright, who did much to re‐establish serious themes in the theatre, and fought for the abolition of censorship. His finest work included The Case of Rebellious Susan ( 1894 ), The Liars ( 1897 ), Mrs Dane's Defence ( 1900 ), and The Lie ( 1923...
Jones, Henry Arthur (1851–1929) Reference library
The Oxford Companion to English Literature (7 ed.)
...encouraged by G. B. Shaw and Max Beerbohm . A friend and contemporary of Arthur Pinero , Jones was a prolific playwright, who did much to re‐establish serious themes in the theatre. His finest work included The Case of Rebellious Susan ( 1894 ), The Liars ( 1897 ), Mrs Dane's Defence ( 1900 ), and The Lie ( 1923 ). Jones also promoted the cause of serious English drama through articles and speeches, and fought for the abolition of censorship. William Archer judged Jones the most popular playwright of the 1890s, but his popularity, like that of...
Novels in English. Beginnings to 1900 Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (2 ed.)
...‘rewrite’ the same situations dealt with in the novels Mrs. Blood ( 1970 ) and Blown figures ( 1974 ), both of which are set in West Africa, where Thomas lived in the 1960s. Most of her fiction is written from a woman's point of view (the hauntingly suggestive story ‘Aquarius’ is one of the few important exceptions) and attempts to render, in a supple and sardonically witty style, a woman's sense of reality. Her women are shown at a critical, and therefore revealing, moment in their lives: Mrs. Blood follows a woman through a painful and complicated...
Jones, Henry Arthur Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English
... The Liars ( 1897 ). However, his reputation in his own era depended primarily on ‘problem plays’ which, like those of Pinero, and from a stance fundamentally as conventional, treated such subjects as the woman with a dubious past and double standards of sexual behaviour. Mrs Dane's Defence ( 1900 ) remains the most effective of these, but the same theme intrudes in Saints and Sinners ( 1884 ) and Michael and His Lost Angel ( 1895 ), two plays in which the protagonist is a clergyman afflicted by scandal. The latter was praised by Shaw , as much an...
Pinero, Arthur Wing Reference library
The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature
...state of pathetic helplessness. Feminist critics point out that the audiences of these plays—and of Jones's The Case of Rebellious Susan ( 1894 ) or Mrs. Dane's Defence —are directed by dominant male characters who serve as figures of “the law of the father” and define the parameters in which the woman's past is interrogated (this is truer of The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith and Mrs. Dane's Defence than of Mrs. Tanqueray) . The result is that women are either punished or lapse into conventional language, so that ideals like “the angel of the house” are upheld...
Shakespeare, William (1564–1616) Reference library
Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot
...his defence, he calls on the aptly named Froth as an alibi. Though amusing, the scene parallels Claudio's serious plight: he is arrested on similar charges and then condemned to death by Angelo. The ‘truth’ that Pompey refers to can be summarized this way: if Escalus punishes him for sinful behaviour, he will have to punish most of Vienna; and if that happens, in ten years there will be no one left to punish (cf. ii. i. 227–40). In this case, common sense prevails and he is let off. In Middlemarch , the ‘truths’ arrived at by Bambridge, Hawley, Mrs Dollop,...
London Reference library
The Oxford Guide to Literary Britain & Ireland (3 ed.)
...you looking just as well as ever? Hardly a day older. No really …’ The Wren church of St Clement Danes (rebuilt after bombing in the Second World War) still has an oranges‐and‐lemons ceremony, and the bells chime the air of the nursery rhyme. John Lyly was married here in 1583 and Nathaniel Lee ( d. 1692 ) and Thomas Otway ( d. 1685 ) were buried here. Dr Johnson worshipped in the old church and a statue of him, with low reliefs of Boswell and Mrs Thrale on the base, stands outside. The largest of the maypoles set up at every street corner after the...
Jones, Henry Arthur (1851–1929) Quick reference
A Dictionary of Writers and their Works (3 ed.)
...Henry Arthur ( 1851–1929 ) British dramatist The Silver King ( 1882 ) Drama Saints and Sinners ( 1884 ) Drama Judah ( 1890 ) Drama The Case of Rebellious Susan ( 1894 ) Drama The Liars ( 1897 ) Drama Mrs Dane's Defence ( 1900 ) ...
Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) Quick reference
The Oxford Dictionary of Plays (2 ed.)
...to go abroad with her elderly suitor. In this, Wilde's first London success, he treats a favourite Victorian theme, that of the ‘fallen woman’. Even more than in The Second Mrs Tanqueray and Mrs Dane's Defence , Wilde is sympathetic towards her situation (she is the ‘Good Woman’ of the subtitle and original title). Despite its wit and realistic contemporary setting, the piece has not yet wholly removed itself from conventional sentimentality to carry the mark of Wilde's brilliantly cynical observation of society. The full text is available at: ...
England, Poetry of Reference library
K. Davis, E. Johnson, E. H. Sagaser, J. Keith, E. Gray, and C. D. Blanton
The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (4 ed.)
...to weave northern Eur. hist. into the strands of universal hist., dominated by biblical Heb. genealogy and the ascendance of the Roman Empire. Despite its many fantastical elements, Beowulf is deeply grounded in hist.: it documents the military and territorial campaigns of the Danes, Swedes, and Geats; it describes Grendel as “kin of Cain,” thus incorporating its narrative into the sweep of biblical hist.; and it features ancestors who also appear in genealogies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other historiographical texts. Together with more localized...
