Wuthering
Expectations

When I conceived the Scottish Challenge, or, really, when I researched it, I began to wonder what, exactly, Scottish literature was.  The Sc...

I keep thinking I ought to do something more like a review of The House with the Green Shutters .  It’s an excellent novel easily worth read...

I’m going to keep the magnifying glass out.  The House with the Green Shutters begins obliquely: The frowsy chambermaid of the ‘Red Lion’ h...

The House with the Green Shutters (1901) is an extraordinary novel.  I suppose I should try to make that case, and not just assert it.  For...

Why not spend a week with a little-known novel?  At the end of the week, it might be better known.  It should be. The grim and pessimistic...

This curious item, copied from page 187 of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature (1980), depicts the streets and buildings near the hou...

What have I read, four Scotch novels of Robert Louis Stevenson?  Some Scottish stories, too, none of which were among his best, except, perh...

Weir of Hermiston – I keep wanting to call it THE Weir , but Weir is a person, a surname, not a title or object or ghost – is a story of a ...

For all of the Robert Louis Stevenson I have read in the past year, I have perversely avoided writing about his novels.  I read all of the m...

Napa Valley was gone; gone were all the lower slopes and woody foothills of the range; and in their place, not a thousand feet below me, rol...

How about a Robert Louis Stevenson travel writing roundup?  Well, how about it?  As long as it doesn’t go on too long.  I hear ya. My list...

Launching the Scottish Literature Reading Challenge , I predicted that I would be sick of the whole thing in August, which was pretty much s...

As I plan out my writing, I realize I’m working with a concept: it’s Books Few People Should Read Week.  Thank goodness it’s not Blog Sweeps...

Since I started Wuthering Expectations, I’ve had this mass of overheated gibberish dragging along at the bottom of the blog: I too could no...

Geez, I take a break and I can’t write a word.  Wait, here I go. Margaret Oliphant wrote most of her books in the middle of the night, aft...

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Ebb-Tide with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne.  Stevenson was forty-four, and would soon die; Osbourne was twe...

Why read sixteen books by Robert Louis Stevenson?  I ask this, because I have done so, more or less in the last six months.  Are there sixte...

Let's say that I, newly converted to the pleasures of Margaret Oliphant, wanted to put together an Oliphant reading list.  What do the P...

Margaret Oliphant’s first three Carlingford stories – The Executor , The Rector , and The Doctor’s Family , all published in 1861 – are more...

I’ll slip away from Carlingford today.  Fay of Historical / Present has been filling me in on the hostility of some early feminist critics...