Barbara Everett, who died on 4 April 2025 at the age of 92, was for many years a fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. She will be much missed.

This collection, selected by Seamus Perry from Everett’s many pieces for the LRB, includes several essays on Shakespeare, as well as on Jane Austen, Henry James, Keats, Pope, Larkin, Kipling and Barbara Pym. Everett defines no theoretical position, and indeed has spoken on occasion with acute misgiving about the ‘systemic method’ to which a professionalised discipline is drawn. The really decisive point, she believes, is that ‘some people are much better readers than others, whether of books or of reality, better in the sense of “truer”, more accurate and more revealing.’ Everett, Perry writes, ‘reads both books and reality wonderfully well. No one could better exemplify Eliot’s axiom that “there is no method except to be very intelligent.”’  

Barbara Everett’s books include Poets in Their Time and Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare’s Tragedies. She published editions of Antony and Cleopatra and All’s Well That Ends Well, as well as writing many influential essays on the plays – some of which are contained in this volume.