Latest posts
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The Invention of Jane Austen: How a Spinster Became a Global Brand
When Jane Austen died at Winchester in July 1817, at the age of forty-one, she was an unmarried woman of small means whose novels had been published…
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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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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…
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B. M. Bower: The Woman Who Wrote the West Behind a Man’s Initials
Near the close of Chip, of the Flying U — the 1904 novel that launched B. M. Bower’s career and a series that would feed her for thirty years — a cowboy…
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Shirley and the Forgotten Side of Charlotte Brontë
What is Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley about?
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The Real Jane Austen: Life Behind the Novels
What was Jane Austen’s life actually like?
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The Life of Charlotte Brontë: Gaskell’s Classic Biography
What was Charlotte Brontë’s life like?
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Persuasion: Austen’s Quietest and Saddest Novel
Is Persuasion the best Jane Austen novel?
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Virginia Woolf and the Stream of Consciousness
What is stream of consciousness in Virginia Woolf?
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Frankenstein: Mary Shelley and the Birth of Science Fiction
Did Mary Shelley invent science fiction?