Penelope Lively has been a prolific writer since the appearance of her first book in 1970. Some of her books for children have already been called classics, and her more recent novels for adults have ...
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Penelope Lively has achieved popular success and high critical acclaim for her books for children written in the 1970s and for her later novels and short stories for adults. She is regarded today as o...
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A prolific novelist and short-story writer, Penelope Lively thus far has published more than forty books for children and adults in a writing career spanning a little less than thirty years. In no way...
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Critical Essay by John Mellors
There is nothing very original about the plot [of The Road to Lichfield]….
The book is lifted out of the ordinary by its author's treatment of her two ...
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Critical Essay by Angela Huth
In Perfect Happiness Penelope Lively concerns herself with the subject of loss. This, so often in the past, has proved a dangerous subject, particularly in the hands of ...
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Critical Essay by John Mellors
Penelope Lively has chosen to write about the painful problems facing a woman after the sudden death of her husband…. The book's title, Perfect Happiness,...
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Critical Essay by Clancy Sigal
[In "Next to Nature, Art," something] is wrong at Framleigh Hall, deep in the Warwickshire countryside. And we soon discover the problem is that the 18th-...
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Critical Essay by Frances Hill
The American Jewish immigrants of Bernard Malamud's stories inhabit a world of their own spiritual past and an unanchored present. Anxious, needy, pathetic, blin...
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Critical Essay by Alida Becker
[The main theme of "Perfect Happiness" is not] just the matter of bereavement, as experienced by her fiftyish heroine, Frances, who, when we first meet he...
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Critical Essay by John Mellors
In one of the 14 stories in Nothing Missing but the Samovar, an elderly spinster makes a habit of walking in Hyde Park: 'She studied her fellow walkers with avid...
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Critical Essay by Susan Hill
[In Treasures of Time, Lively] reveals a gift for highlighting character-types, picking out revealing details of social behaviour, manner and conversation, and a certain ...
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Critical Essay by Patricia Craig
[An] orthodox television production is the subject of Treasures of Time. The overt subject at any rate: Penelope Lively has always been preoccupied with time, continu...
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Critical Essay by John Mellors
Penelope Lively gets better with every book. In Treasures of Time she raises all sorts of issues about the past. Does a place have an atmosphere given by its history? O...
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Critical Essay by John Naughton
[Judgement Day is about decay]. Set in a credible modern (i.e., socially heterogenous) English village, it chronicles the impact which the arrival of an intelligent yo...
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Critical Essay by Francis King
[Penelope Lively's] quality can best be conveyed by saying that she is the kind of writer that Barbara Pym might have been if she had married and had children. T...
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Critical Essay by Alan Brownjohn
In Laddenham, a neat village near the light industrial township of Spelbury in the southern English heartlands, Penelope Lively has set a nicely pertinacious account ...
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Critical Essay by Bryn Caless
Penelope Lively exemplifies her name and [with Next to Nature, Art she] surpasses her previous achievements in fiction. She has produced a splendid satire on the pretens...
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Penelope (Margaret) Lively
Critical Essay by John Mellors
