Wuthering
Expectations

The Charles Dickens pieces collected as Christmas Stories (1871) have been a ragbag.  They vary in length, tone, quality, and purpose.  Som...

The artificiality of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is most obvious in the chapters where he suddenly switches rhetorical modes, when his wr...

The key to The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is its deliberate artificiality.  George Meredith’s conception of the novel is unusual.  He fits p...

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

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel , a novel by George Meredith published in 1859.  Meredith would later be not only famous but regarded as a gre...

How to move from book blogging to something better?  Michele Bailat-Jones has done it.  She started around the time I did, calling herself t...

Or, In Praise of Folly. Every two years I assemble a Selected Wuthering Expectations .  Best, favorite, representative?  I am not sure tha...

One more great Swinburne poem before I give up on him for now, “Ave Atque Vale,” his 1868 elegy for one of his favorite poets, Charles Baude...

A little break from Swinburne’s poems.  His letters are available in six volumes, in a heroic compilation made by the great Swinburne schola...

“Anactoria” went all right.  I will escalate the difficulty. In 1865 Swinburne published a kind of imitation Greek play, Atalanta in Calyd...

A harder Swinburne sample from Poems and Ballads today.  I’ll make an attempt at sense, not just sound.  “Anactoria,” immediately notorious...

Swinburne’s poems are hard to excerpt within giving up on sense, and they are all interesting, so I have had trouble settling on one for tod...

Introducing him to myself, I mean.  I believe that he was, until a couple of months ago, the only major Victorian poet I did not read in col...

When I read Christina Rossetti or her lyrical peers, I feel regret that the nineteenth century was such a poor one for English composers.  T...

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

What I have been finding in Christina Rossetti – this is hardly unusual for Wuthering Expectations – is nothing like a new discovery.  This ...

“The Prince’s Progress,” the long narrative poem that leads off Christina Rossetti’s The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems , begins (and con...

I seem not to have written about poetry for a while.  I will bet I had a good reason, although I do not remember it.  Christina Rossetti’s s...

This is a bibliographic post about Just So Stories .  Useful and nicely illustrated. On the one hand, there is no reason to fuss over gett...

At time the Jungle Books were clearly books for children, at times something else.  The animal and origin fables in Kipling’s   Just So Sto...