According to the MHRA Style Guide, this item should be cited in a bibliography as follows:

Simpson, James, Goethe and Patriarchy: Faust and the Fates of Desire (Legenda, 1999)

This is how standard MHRA style would look. Some of its book series (notably Legenda) allow an alternative citation system called 'author-date', but please talk to your editor before using it. (To see the demonstration for author-date, follow this link.)

Let's take this bibliography entry one step at a time:

Step 1. The entry begins with the author(s) or editor(s) of the volume, with the first name inverted into Surname, Forename. This is because a Bibliography is a list in surname order, so we need a surname up front.

Simpson, James

Step 2. Now a comma, not a full stop:

Simpson, James,

Step 3. Here we have the book's title, in italics, not quotation marks.

Simpson, James, Goethe and Patriarchy: Faust and the Fates of Desire

Step 4. Since this is a book, not a journal issue, we have to identify its source, in round brackets. Until 2024, MHRA style required a place of publication - for example, New York or Oxford. This is no longer given except in special circumstances.

Simpson, James, Goethe and Patriarchy: Faust and the Fates of Desire (

Step 5. Now a colon, a space, and the publisher's name. Here that's Legenda because this is the imprint name under which the book is published, even though Legenda is not strictly speaking a company. To decide these things, one must look at the exact wording of the preliminary pages. Our preference is for Legenda books to be cited as 'Legenda', and we word our preliminaries with that aim.

Simpson, James, Goethe and Patriarchy: Faust and the Fates of Desire (Legenda

Step 6. Then the year of first publication, and we're done with the bracketed part.

Simpson, James, Goethe and Patriarchy: Faust and the Fates of Desire (Legenda, 1999)

And that's the finished bibliography entry. Note that there's no final full stop.

So how about citations in footnotes or endnotes?

In standard MHRA style, the first time the work is cited in a note, it should be cited in full. This looks very like a Bibliography entry, but:

• The author's name doesn't always come first: only for monographs. For collections and editions, the title comes first.
• Even if the author's name does come first, it's back to being the right way round, so it's Forename Surname, not Surname, Forename;
• Unlike Bibliography entries, notes are punctuated as sentences, and usually end in full stops.

Suppose we want to cite a passage on pages 24 to 27:

³⁴ See James Simpson, Goethe and Patriarchy: Faust and the Fates of Desire (Legenda, 1999), pp. 24-27.

But in any subsequent notes, a heavily abbreviated form is used:

³⁷ Compare Simpson, p. 17.