BLOG POSTS

Agnes Grey was Anne’s Brontë’s first novel, written at the time when her sister Emily was working on Wuthering Heights and sister Charlotte on The Professor. David Stuart Davies takes up the story. ‘The statistics touching lunatic asylums give a frightful proportion of governesses in the list of the insane.’ – Fraser’s literary magazine, 1844… Read More

How might a different marriage have impacted on D.H. Lawrence’s writing career? David Ellis considers a literary counterfactual. There are some historians who are inclined to ask `what if’ questions: what if the Spanish Armada had managed to land on these shores, or our air force had lost the Battle of Britain?  These speculations are… Read More

The story of Robinson Crusoe is familiar to us in many forms; here Sally Minogue re-evaluates Daniel Defoe’s novel some 300 years after it was first published. I touched briefly on Robinson Crusoe (1719) in my final ‘Empire’ blog as an example of a novel whose depiction of power relations received a countering fictional response in… Read More

As the nights draw in, the leaves turn red and gold with a chill wind easing them from the branches to provide a rainbow carpet below, and so we move into the Haunting Season. It is the time of Hallowe’en, when all the ghosts and long-legged beasties come out to taunt us poor mortals –… Read More

‘A Literature of Cosmic Fear’: An Introduction to H.P. Lovecraft A blasted heath where nothing grows yet dead trees seem strangely animated; an abandoned well that glows with a colour that has no name; a disastrous expedition to Antarctica written by a survivor only to warn others to stay away; cathedral-sized buildings from before the… Read More

‘I shall try to fly by those nets’: Sally Minogue offers a final reflection on literature and Empire. If we needed a reminder of the ability of the British to erase the blood-steeped events of our imperialist history, look no further than the late Queen’s funeral. Charlotte Higgins, writing for The Guardian (online September 19),… Read More

Although best known for her novels such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton was a talented writer of supernatural fiction. David Stuart Davies takes up the story. The genre of the ghost story has attracted writers from the highest echelons, none more so than the Pulitzer Prize winner, Edith Wharton. As a… Read More