BLOG POSTS

Part One: ‘We made everything larger than life…’ This year, the arrival of spring will be accompanied by what promises from the trailer to be a radical reimagining of Dicken’s immortal coming of age story Great Expectations, written by Peaky Blinders creator Stephen Knight. This will be Knight’s second Dickens screenplay, following A Christmas Carol… Read More

Keep out of Chancery… it’s like being ground to bits in a slow mill; it’s like being roasted at a slow fire; it’s being stung to death by single bees; it’s being drowned by drops; it’s going mad by grains.’ John Jarndyce, Bleak House Bleak House (1851-53) is one of Dickens’ greatest novels. It has… Read More

George Eliot’s Middlemarch is set in the period of the 1832 Reform Act and general election. Sally Minogue uncovers some similarities with the present. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is a compendious novel, generous in its sweep, with a cast of characters of near-Dickensian proportions (though Eliot is an entirely different kind of novelist), taking in Italy… Read More

Far From the Madding Crowd has disaster and desperation within it, but it remains one of Hardy’s most optimistic novels. Sally Minogue considers why. To begin at the end –  Far From the Madding Crowd is one of Thomas Hardy’s happier novels, which is to say, it ends happily. This being Hardy, there is much… Read More

David Stuart Davies looks at the second published novel of Charlotte Brontë Shirley is one of the lesser-known works of Charlotte Brontë (1816 -55), overshadowed somewhat by her blockbuster Jane Eyre, which is a shame because it is a fine novel with an engrossing narrative. Hurt by certain the criticisms of Jane Eye as being… Read More

‘Try a Little Tenderness’: as Lady Chatterley’s Lover comes to Netflix, Sally Minogue looks at both novel and adaptation. I always labour at the same thing, to make the sex relation valid and precious, instead of shameful. And this novel is the furthest I’ve gone. To me it is beautiful and tender and frail as… Read More

Holding fast with Emma Rice’s Wuthering Heights: Stefania Ciocia embraces the power of Nature and of artistic adventures. I remember the first time I read Wuthering Heights. I remember it for all the wrong reasons. I was still in high-school, and the long summer holidays afforded me ample time to read. With classes over from… Read More

Although also an artist and composer, Edward Lear is deservedly best-known for his nonsense in all its many forms: songs, stories, poems, drawings, recipes, alphabets and limericks, a form which he popularized. Described by Lear as simply ‘innocent mirth’, his Complete Nonsense is not only an experience in the absurd, but reveals much about children’s… Read More

Steve Carver discovers the supernatural fiction of Pulitzer Prize-winning author. The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts is the house that Edith Wharton built. She designed it as an elegant retreat from New York society in which she could write and her mentally ill husband, Teddy, could hopefully find some peace. The couple lived within its white… Read More