It's Personal

Check out this great article in the NYTimes on Victorian personal ads and the blog of the Ph.D. candidate studying them. Fun reading and gives me a great avenue of research (albeit, she does American) for that long-considered article on museums as a place of courtship in Victorian England.

Book Watch

One of our favorite novelists, Sarah Waters, who has a lesbian-Victorian bent, will be publishing a new book in April entitled The Little Stranger. Her last book,The Night Watch, dramatizing the effects of WWII on a community of women, was a finalist for the Booker Prize. Her earlier novels, Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith, are all novels centered on strong female characters and their (oftentime dysfunctional and even cruel) relationships with each other in the 19th century.

And so, while we were looking for information about her new novel, we came across this article in The Guardian about her Top 10 favorite Victorian novels. Now, I remember her recommending Eliot's Middlemarch at some point, but if I had known these were her favorites, I'm not sure I would've read her novels! Which just shows how closed-minded I am, because I love her books (but then, I do also like Jane Eyre, The Woman in White, and The Picture of Dorian Gray). It's not my list, but she's the English professor and it certainly does contain some heavy hitters. I think I've read almost all of them but Gissing.

1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
2. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
3. Vanity Fair by W.M. Thackeray
4. New Grub Street by George Gissing
5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
6. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
7. Dracula by Bram Stoker
8. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
9. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
10. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins