Latest posts
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The Wessex Novels: Thomas Hardy and the Cruelty of Fate
There is a moment in Tess of the d’Urbervilles when the whole machinery of Thomas Hardy’s universe shows itself in a single misplaced object. Tess, unable…
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A Tale of Two Cities: Revolution, Sacrifice, and Dickens’s Darkest Triumph
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Everyone knows the opening, and almost no one finishes the sentence, which runs on for another two…
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Charles Dickens: Where to Start With the Great Victorian
Most people meet Dickens through abridgment, adaptation, or a school assignment they resented, which means most people have never met Dickens at all. They…
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The Brontë Sisters: One Family, Seven Novels, and a Myth
Read on its own, Wuthering Heights looks like a book that fell out of the sky — a work of such concentrated strangeness that it seems to have no…
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Cranford and the Comedy of Small-Town England
There is a moment early in Cranford when a cow, having tumbled into a lime-pit and lost most of her hair, is dressed by her devoted owner in a flannel…
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The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Anne Brontë, the Boldest Sister
For a century and a half the verdict on Anne Brontë held firm: she was the quiet one, the lesser sister, the third Brontë who never quite reached the heat…
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Where to Start With Wilkie Collins
There is a particular pleasure in reading a writer who does not trust you to sit still. Wilkie Collins, the most ingenious and least respectable of the…
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Elizabeth Gaskell: The Novelist of the Industrial Age
When Charles Dickens wanted a writer who could make the cotton mills of the north feel like a moral emergency rather than a statistical abstraction, he…
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Wilkie Collins and The Moonstone: The First Great Detective Novel
T. S. Eliot called it “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels,” and the verdict has held for a century and a half, which…
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George Eliot and Middlemarch: The Greatest English Novel?
Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” and the backhanded compliment still stings because it is…