Wuthering
Expectations

The Tunnel (1919) by Dorothy Richardson, the fourth book in the Pilgrimage series, is what I will write about here.  There are always inte...

More books I read in May. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931).   A difficult book.   It pushes Woolf’s ideas about the representation of con...

This is a piece about how readers change.   And about food. The long dinner chapter of To the Lighthouse (1928), Chapter XVII of “The Win...

Wrapping up Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis .   He ends with three chapters on the modern novel, mostly French, but covering a lot of territory. ...

Everybody has to establish how badly Thomas Hardy writes.  “The novels therefore are full of inequalities; they are lumpish and dull and ine...

Meine Frau has described Thomas Bernhard as the anchovy of German literature, meaning that although many people savor him, for others even ...

One-ninth of the way through Algernon Swinburne’s six-volumes of collected letters, in 1866, he has not even mentioned Christina Rossetti.  ...

Should I write about what Henry James does especially well rather than what is missing from The Spoils of Poynton ?  Ignore the missing furn...

If I have felt little urgency to read James, I blame his continual presence in my reading.  He rivals anyone but  Samuel Johnson as a subjec...

Although I doubt it is visible, I write with models in mind, critics who read well, think well, and, most importantly, write well.  All erro...

Walter Scott was, early on, a relentlessly experimental novelist.  He had discovered a new kind of novel with new, unknown rules.  Many of t...

Two views of Walter Scott, of his third novel, The Antiquary (1816). Virginia Woolf, first, picking out her favorite Scott: I can’t read t...

No, not extending my research to mummified baboons, or bog cats.  I'm all done with that. Skeptical readers of Wuthering Expectations ...

I tried to do some genuine research for Sympathetic Character Week, to try to shape my rhetoric, if nothing else.  Besides Wayne Booth's...

Edgar Allan Poe wrote two reviews of Barnaby Rudge in 1841. The first review was of the first few chapters, serialized, the final review of...

Thomas Carlyle, at the beginning of the lectures titled On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History (delivered 1840, published 1841)...