as scholarly readers". Honan described his intention thus: "One of the main efforts of our time has been to write contextualized biographies attentive to feeling as well as to ideas, objective and yet close, rooted in an 'historical present', alive to childhood, creativity, growth, and above all painstakingly accurate and not self-indulgent. I've tried to contribute to this." David Lodge wrote in The Guardian that Honan's work has "the effect, for the reader, of accompanying the biographical subject as she or he moves through time and space." In writing his "outstanding biographies of classic English writers", Honan had an "inexhaustible patience and a willingness to spend many years – to do anything, read everything and go anywhere". Honan "had a lifelong interest in drama and his work demonstrates a dramatist's skill at bringing personalities to life." Professor Arthur Kincaid wrote that Honan's Browning's Characters is "one of the few books ... which can safely be recommended to undergraduates as sound Browning criticism." Paul Vitello, in The New York Times, noted that Honan's biography of Arnold "recast him as one of the most influential progressive voices of Victorian England". In the Los Angeles Times, Merle Rubin reviewed Honan's Austen biography, commenting that Honan "is able to correct errors of previous biographers and editors. His extensive research, including a close perusal of materials in the hands of Austen family descendants, yields significant details ... about her extended family, her confidantes, friends, and acquaintances. ... Honan fills in the details of [the] wider world." Edward T. Oakes called Honan's Austen biography "Marvelous ... succinct ... shrewd". In The Telegraph, Kathryn Hughes wrote that his Austen biography set "a daunting high-water mark" for future biographers. Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells thought Honan's Shakespeare book "the best biography in existence." Oakes found the Shakespeare biography "especially skillful in working up a full-bodied portrait of the man from Stratford ... for under Honan's ministrations the evidence proved to be more plentiful than one might initially suspect." Lodge explained that "by widening the focus of his study to take in all kinds of data about the social, historical, familial and topographical context of the playwright's life ... a more rounded portrait than the received one could be inferred." Of Honan's Marlowe biography, Wells wrote in The Guardian: "Honan ... is scrupulous in his re-examination of what is known and ingenious in the connections he makes between apparently disparate