Dorothy Richardson’s Dawn’s Left Hand, and Clear Horizon

With nine volumes of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage down, and four to go, Dawn’s Left Hand is the one in which Miriam has sex with H G Wells. It’s an extraordinary episode, and if you’ve read H G Wells’ Ann Veronica, you’ll be fuming, because the setting is exactly the same as the attempted rape of … Continue reading Dorothy Richardson’s Dawn’s Left Hand, and Clear Horizon →

Now posting on Vulpes Libris: Ida Cook’s Safe Passage

I posted a partial rant, and a partial wave of enthusiasm over on Vulpes Libris today, on Ida Cook's (reprinted) memoir We Followed Our Stars, now calling itself (annoyingly) Safe Passage. Go there to discover the tangled web of marketing versus editorial, the heroic imaginative rescue of 29 Jews from pre-WW2 Austria and Germany, and a … Continue reading Now posting on Vulpes Libris: Ida Cook’s Safe Passage →

Dogged mid-West endurance: Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark

This time in the Really Like This Book's podcast script catch-up, I’ve gone west, to Willa Cather’s beautiful novel The Song of the Lark from 1915. If ever there was an advertisement for idyllic American settings, this novel is it. The descriptions evoke desert life near the Mexican border, clean and tidy Scandinavian-immigrant town life in … Continue reading Dogged mid-West endurance: Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark →

Working is good for you: Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl

Louisa May Alcott's most famous novel, Little Women, and its three sequels make her still a highly popular author, but until fairly recently these were her only novels that most people could name. Many of her Gothic thrillers and sensational potboilers have been resurrected by scholars, the most well-known of which is a rather depressing adult novel of … Continue reading Working is good for you: Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl →

George Eliot with the gloves off: Patricia Duncker’s Sophie and the Sibyl

Expect energetic storytelling in this excellent novel about the manipulative life and marital sufferings of George Eliot. It’s also a gently funny love story between Max Duncker, a vain and very young dilettante publisher and the thunderingly hearty Sophie, a German countess who never glides gracefully when she can pound across a ballroom. Other pleasing details in … Continue reading George Eliot with the gloves off: Patricia Duncker’s Sophie and the Sibyl →

The Importance of Being Earnest: the opera

I have never heard anything like this before. The Irish composer Gerald Barry wrote a comic opera based on The Importance of Being Earnest, performed for the first time in 2012, in France (and later on in London at the Barbican). I had no idea of its existence, but when I was given the CD … Continue reading The Importance of Being Earnest: the opera →