Wuthering
Expectations

The 1801 and 1851 chapters of Jonathan Rée’s Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English are both built around writers I do not normal...

I am early in the marriage plot of The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885).  Corey, from Boston society and 18th century money, will perhaps marry I...

A poem of Giacomo Leopardi made a surprising appearance in Daniel Deronda (1876).  I mean I was surprised.  The beautiful Jewish singer Mira...

No, I have changed my mind.  I will write that post about Eliot’s humor. It is a funny book; Eliot is a funny writer.  The Jewish side of ...

In a comment to a Levi Stahl post on Daniel Deronda , Mark Marowitz advances the crackpot idea that the villainous husband Grandcourt is a...

The second big innovation or experiment in Daniel Deronda is the one readers dislike so much, the joining of two stories written in discord...

George Eliot was a great formal innovator.  This is not the way I think about her, nor the way I usually see her described, yet it is true. ...

Having read the novel badly, I do not want to waste time making an argument about Daniel Deronda .  Mostly I just want to mess around with t...

If I had more sense I would set Daniel Deronda (1876) aside and not write about it as I did with  Middlemarch (1871-2) when I read it seve...

Today I look at two recent books that directly mix memoir and criticism, Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch (2014) and William Deresiewi...

Ow, my eyes.  You can see the 1863 “ Birth of Venus ” by Alexandre Cabanel in the flesh – or in the marzipan (see the Zola quotation at the ...

Since I do not want to write about Salem Chapel all week, I will resort to unconnected numbered points. 1.  Yesterday I suggested that Sa...

What an amazing run the Victorian novel had from 1859 to 1861, or, really, from 1847 ( the annus Brontëus ) through the 1870s.  Amazing in t...

When I wrote, or did not write , about Middlemarch last month, I offhandedly complained that the novel had too much dialogue.  I am in an e...

If I were not going on vacation next week, I would likely spend it writing about Middlemarch (1871-2), puzzling over it, whining about it. ...

No novel is anything, for purposes either of comedy or tragedy unless the reader can sympathise with the characters whose name we find upon ...

This week’s text will be The Victorian Art of Fiction: Nineteenth-Century Essays on the Novel , Broadview Press, 2009, ed. Rohan Maitzen.  W...

James Thomson sent George Eliot a copy of The City of Dreadful Night .  He sent it to Carlyle, too.  M. E. Lewes, as she signed the letter, ...

Three extra-large Humiliations were crossed off my list: Walden , The Scarlet Letter , and The Flowers of Evil , all highly rewarding.  Let...

How crazy is it to say this: The development of the idea of sympathy in 19th century literature was one of the great achievements of the tim...