Most people assume that the first historical novel was written by Sir Walter Scott, but this one was penned by Maria Edgeworth while he was
This is a very hard book to read, when one is aware at all times that it was written by a living, breathing woman who
I found it fascinating for a bunch of different reasons. First I enjoyed the story, even though the two main women in it were pretty
Reading the 18th Century novel is very much like riding a rambunctious horse. Actually, bowling along in a carriage; 100 years later, Eliot and the
This type of story has been around a long time. Who knows, Chaucer might have pilloried people in his life, presenting them as characters on
Early on in The Bearskin Rug, protagonist Jewel Heiss fondly looks back on a relationship she’d had at seventeen with the family’s septuagenarian lawyer. He
I had a gas reading this book. Brenda Clough maintains she writes historical SF, maybe too confining a label? She has set a number of
I’ve noticed over the years that a lot of Austen fans (the ones who tend to want to confine Jane Austen to a tiny box
Discussions like this can be so interesting. I love discovering what works for who, and why. But it’s equally easy to descend into variations on
The title, the reader soon learns, is literal. The author explains why she decided to assemble a shelf of Jane Austen’s books—that is, the ones,
This is the mystery Austen novel, in that some Austen scholars, like Arthur Axelrad, have surmised that this novel was a very early one that
My favorite of the Brontes is Anne. This is my favorite of her novels. In this and Jane Eyre, we have governess-eye views of the
This is the first book in Anthony Trollope’s famous Barsetshire series, which inspired spinoffs by Angela Thirkell, and a ton of various filmic versions. Nobody
