The title of Paula Byrne’s Hardy Women is a pun on Thomas Hardy’s name and a gesture to the enthusiasm that greeted Hardy’s fictional women. Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess Durbeyfield in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure were new kinds of women, and Hardy’s fame, which was immense
Judith Flanders has undertaken a mammoth task. The Victorian period is widely known for its excessive, sometimes scarcely believable interest in death and everything that surrounds it. There are so many set pieces involving death in the fiction of the era, particularly the scenes of children dying in Dickens’s writings. The demise of Little Nell
Some scholarly biographies can bridge the gulf between an academic audience and the general reader. Whether this one will make it is uncertain; our conclusion would have to be, à la Goldwyn, ‘a definite maybe’. The first thing to be said about this book is that the authors and publisher have given too many hostages […]
No engineer in history has come close to rivalling the fame of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. His career reads like fiction. At nineteen, he worked for his father on the first tunnel to pass beneath the Thames, a feat of engineering still connecting Wapping to Rotherhithe on the East London Line. Before it was even finished, […]
Pleasure Bound is organised around the lives and work of the most prominent members of two bohemian societies, the Aesthetes – which consisted of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his Pre-Raphaelite associates – and the Cannibal Club, a dining society founded by the explorer, sexologist and uber-male iconoclast Richard Burton. From these two bodies sprang, as […]
Talk about mysteries: why does the British public continue to lap up books on real Victorian crime? Surely it is not simply because writers now find the necessary research material, from The Times reports to Metropolitan Police archives, easily accessible on the web? And it is not as though these stories serve some warped paternalistic […]
These two studies of Victorian religious scepticism are extremely welcome, and for largely different reasons. Giles St Aubyn’s Souls in Torment is a magisterial account of the background and growth of doubt, structured according to theme, so that the ideas of the leading thinkers reappear in several places. In The Age of Doubt, Christopher Lane […]
Sarah Wise’s two previous books about the darker regions of Victorian life, The Italian Boy and The Blackest Streets, have been rightly acclaimed for the extensive research they contain and for the clarity and intelligence of the writing. Both books reveal a degree of paranoia in the politer ranks of 19th-century society about the ‘evils’ […]
Self-centred, demanding, often maddeningly so, Queen Victoria commanded the devotion of the people who worked for her, as Kate Hubbard skilfully illustrates in Serving Victoria. The book is based on the letters and papers of six of her more important courtiers: Sarah Lyttelton, a Spencer who married into the Lyttelton family of Hagley Hall; Charlotte […]
We think we have an idea of the Victorian city precisely because so many of our cities still look, in part, Victorian – not just the obvious suspects such as Leeds, Manchester or Bradford, but much of London too. Yet, as Judith Flanders explains in this well-researched and often fascinating book, the London in which […]
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm