Where All the Ladders Start

Julian Lovelock has spent his life in education, as a teacher, headmaster and university lecturer. He is now a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Buckingham, where he was previously Dean of Arts and Languages and Pro Vice-Chancellor.His most recent publications with The Lutterworth Press are From Morality to Mayhem: The Fall and Rise of the English School Story (2018) and The Business of Reading: A Hundred Years of the English Novel (2022).

Where All the Ladders Start moves easily between text and context, teasing out the human interest between the lines. Reflecting too on existing points of critical debate, it will fascinate both the casual reader and the student of literature. In particular, some much-deserved light is cast on remarkable yet often unseen women such as Anne Donne and Mary Wordsworth. Nicola Borman, Head of English, Stowe School.Roll up! Blow the trumpet! Julian Lovelock has done it again. He takes us authoritatively to the heart of the real and imaginary characters who are central to the poems studied. Through his insights, this literary detective enlightens us about some of our greatest writers. The circus metaphor of Yeats allows us a wonderful tour in this beautifully written book. En route we encounter plenty of sex and entertainment via erudite consideration of serious matters.Professor Chris Orr RA A wonderful meditation on Art and Heart as realised in the works of nine English poets and their muses, male and female. Lovelock uses his considerable scholarship to turn the biographical fallacy on its head. The characters we come to know so well in this fascinating book are as much a creation of the poets who loved them as the poems which made them immortal.Emeritus Professor Alan Kennedy, author of A Thoroughly Mischievous Person: The Other Arthur Ransome.

• 1.Shakespeare's Sonnets9The 'Friend(s)', the 'Dark Lady' and Anne2.'John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-Done'35John Donne and Anne More3.A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle56John Milton and Lady Alice Egerton4.The Rape of the Lock77Alexander Pope and Miss Arabella Fermor5.A Tangled Web98William and Dorothy Wordsworth6.Love and Death127John Keats and Fanny Brawne7.Sonnets from the Portuguese151Elizabeth Barrett Barrett and Robert Browning8.'Woman Much Missed'172Thomas Hardy and Emma Gifford9.'Where All the Ladders Start'196W.B. Yeats, Maud Gonne and Others