Jonathan Barnes
Here Be Dragons
As an adolescent I was forever nursing crushes on female characters from Victorian literature: wild Catherine Earnshaw, demure Little Dorrit and artful Irene Adler, she who will, at least for Sherlock Holmes, always be the woman. If Sarah Perry’s second novel, The Essex Serpent, had been published a couple of decades earlier, my younger self might well have added to that list the book’s protagonist: striking, erudite, melancholic Cora Seaborne.
We begin in London in 1893, where we discover Seaborne, ‘a tall handsome woman whose fine nose was specked with freckles’. Her chilly, distant husband has died, leaving her a young widow. Together with her autistic son, ‘self-contained and contentedly silent’, she leaves the metropolis in search of some sort
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The trick of a successful mercenary ... was somehow to get on almost as well with your enemies as your allies, since those two positions could be reversed at dizzying speed.'
Sarah Dunant on the life of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/scholar-in-arms
'McDormand has come closer to Lady Macbeth in some of her previous grimly comic performances ... Here she can convey only the banality of evil, as when she fussily curtails the banquet after Macbeth’s hallucination.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/come-thick-night
'"Extinct" comprises eighty-five essays on defunct objects, from arsenic wallpaper to the Zeppelin. The format does not immediately inspire confidence ... but "Extinct" turns out to be more satisfying than one might expect.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/ode-to-an-ashtray