Wuthering
Expectations

From the aggravating Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass : The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters...

This is the city and I am one of the citizens, Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars,     markets, newspapers, schools,...

Frederic Remington illustrated the 1891 edition of The Song of Hiawatha (1855).  That’s the one I have been using, reprinted by David R. Go...

So for some reason I thought it might be instructive to read Walt Whitman and Henry Longfellow together, specifically the first edition of L...

The question is not:  Will I (meaning, you) read Herman Melville’s massive epic poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) ...

For some reason, I have been claiming that Mary Barton  was published in 1849, which is wrong.  October 1848, that’s the right answer, amids...

Some Mary Barton first sentences: Another year passed on. (Ch. 6) One Sunday afternoon, about three weeks after that mournful night, Jem...

Mary Barton is almost unrelievedly grim through its first half (and not a lot cheerier later).  Unemployment, fires, fevers, alcoholism, dr...

This is "Work" (1852-65) by Ford Madox Brown, available for perusal in the City Art Gallery, Manchester.  Image, with much other ...

Fiction writers are such liars.  That title is from Elizabeth Gaskell’s Preface to her first novel, Mary Barton (1848), a novel at times fa...

Not the long ones.  I know that.  But in general.  The idea that Russian literature is characterized by long books is a misconception.  When...

Anyone who visits me via an RSS reader should hop over for a minute to see the redesigned weeding site.  Worth it, I swears. For advice on...

The problem with praising a library is that there is little point for anyone not able to actually check out a book.  If I induced a single S...

How to praise a library?  It has a lot of books!  The buildings are nice!  The above painting of the central branch of the St. Louis Public...

Just going by how I have been spending my time, that's what I'll have to write about.  Weeding yes; reading no.  On Fridays, I'l...

For the Amateur Reader, not for Wuthering Expectations.  Posting will be intermittent or non-existent until life becomes less kerfoozled. ...

I left myself a note to look at page 235 of Years of Childhood .  Why?  Ah: After a period which differed much in different cases, the outer...

Crazy-sounding claim first: Sergei Aksakov writes like Proust, sixty years earlier.  Aksakov is combing through his memory, recreating his c...

With obscure writers, I have to resist the temptation to write, or, really, paraphrase, an encyclopedia entry.  Mostly I resist.  If you can...

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