Catherine Peters
He Stoops to Conquer
Brothers of the Quill: Oliver Goldsmith in Grub Street
By Norma Clarke
Harvard University Press 399pp £25 order from our bookshop
Oliver Goldsmith is remembered today chiefly for his play She Stoops to Conquer and one sad, angry and poignant poem, The Deserted Village. The title of his only novel, The Vicar of Wakefield, is familiar to many but I would guess the book is seldom read. Yet for more than a century after his death he was considered a major author. In her entertaining and scholarly new book, Norma Clarke reanimates Goldsmith for the 21st century by setting him in the context of the London literary world in which he lived from 1757 until his premature death in 1774.
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