Wuthering
Expectations

I'll be in Munich and environs until January 11, setting aside 19th century literature for a while. Maybe I'll put up some travel sn...

Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-hous...

Number of books read: 85 or so. This is right in line with other people who write book blogs. Sociologists take note. Longest book: Against ...

It's the season for best-of-the-year lists. In 200 years, almost everything on them will be forgotten, except by a few scholars, perhap...

Ma femme and I were lucky enough to see Hunchback in Chicago on Saturday, the Redmoon Theater production of Notre Dame de Paris . Redmoon ...

In his 40s, Clare began to suffer from delusions. He spent the last 25 or so years of his life in an insane asylum.* During that period, he ...

Another mode of John Clare - "Rural Morning", "Sunday Walks", "Hay Making", "Angling". Affectionate,...

from My Mary Who lives where beggars rarley speed? And leads a humdrum life indeed As none beside herself would lead? My Mary. Who lives whe...

Birds Nests How fresh the air, the birds how busy now. In every walk if I but peep I find Nests newly made or finished all and lined With ha...

John Clare (1793-1864) was genuinely poor, an agricultural laborer. A peasant. He received enough of an education, just enough, to allow him...

Beginning any sort of discussion of Stendhal, as I did yesterday, with a question of style is probably a good way to confuse people. For thi...

"This Minister, despite his frivolous manner and his brilliant remarks, did not possess a soul à la française ; he was not able to forg...

Dead Souls and The Overcoat , Nikolai Gogol A Hero for Our Time , Lermontov Poor Folk and The Double , Fyodor Dostoevsky The challenge is ...

A kindly anonymous reader reminds me of the duel in Tom Jones . Here it is, in its entirety: " Jones was a little staggered by the blo...

Yesterday’s post on the duel in Nicholas Nickleby reminds me of two things. First, that there is a sort of dueling scene in Chapter 2 of ...

I was surprised to find a duel, between two minor characters, in Chapter 50 of Nicholas Nickleby . It's a first-rate scene. It seems to ...

Fanny Price, the protagonist of Mansfield Park , is not much of a heroine. She is almost always in an environment where she has no direct or...

Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice, is something along the lines of the most likable fictional person in history.* This i...

An anonymous commenter spurs me to undo, or at least contradict, yesterday's misAustenic rantings. English professor Paula Marantz Cohe...

This is a quote from Chapter 9 of Emma . Some pleasures I completely fail to understand are those found in hack* novels parastitically rope...