Wuthering
Expectations

Epitaph on a Hare (1783), William Cowper Here lies, whom hound did ne'er pursue, Nor swifter greyhound follow, Whose footprints ne'...

A Description of the Morning Now hardly here and there an Hackney-coach Appearing, showed the ruddy Morns Approach. Now Betty from her Mast...

"Sir Patrick Spens" exists in several versions, and dates from who knows when. It could be from a quite old source, or it could be...

Robert Herrick (1591-1674) was a parish priest who wrote a book of delicate, light-hearted love poems, the Hesperides (1648). I suspect he...

I took a (totally fair) crack at Michael Drayton (1563-1631) a couple of weeks ago. I'll make it up to him by having him lead off Favor...

Esther loved Lucien at a glance, and gave up everything for him. Monsieur de Nucingen loved Esther at a glance. The great criminal Vautrin r...

"What Love May Cost an Old Man" - that's the title of the second part of A Harlot High and Low , published in 1843, four years...

Balzac, the prose writer. The Good, a description of Sanson, the executioner, a real person: "Aged, at the time of our story, about six...

I mentioned that I could imagine a reader who really loved A Harlot High and Low . Here’s one: “One of the greatest tragedies of my life i...

"'All for love!' said the duchess proudly. 'Destroying oneself is a pleasure at the time.'" (Penguin, p. 494) Ro...

The puzzle about Prosper Mérimée (1803-70) is why he's not read more, outside of France. He wrote Carmen (1845), the source of the oper...

Sam Weller is writing a valentine. His father is helping him: 'That's a wery pretty sentiment,' said the elder Mr. Weller, remov...

The proprietor of Lizok's Bookshelf left a comment to my Lermontov notes over at the Russian Reading Challenge that is too good to lea...

Lermontov wrote a number of narrative poems. These are well-suited to be read in translation. At least the translator can communicate the st...

Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41) lived and worked in the shadow of Pushkin. His verse forms, his subject matter, and his death in a pointless due...

Landívar's Rusticatio Mexicana is part of a tradition of describing the whole world in a book. Anyway, some enormous chunk of it. Landí...

Neo-Latin literature* is the realm of specialists. A couple of books - Thomas More's Utopia (1516) and Erasmus's In Praise of Folly...

Here's a Sven Birkerts review of two Knut Hamsun novels, Hunger (1890) and The Growth of the Soil (1917). Hunger is a first-rate no...

The Great Naturalists (2007, Robert Huxley, editor) is a collection of short biographies of naturalists, from Aristotle to American botanis...

This version of the Proust questionnaire, which I may have changed a bit, was written by A Striped Armchair , and passed my way by the Incur...