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
Surveillance, facial recognition and control: my review of @jonfasman's "We See It All" https://literaryreview.co.uk/watching-the-watchers via @Lit_Review
I reviewed Diary of a Film by Niven Govinden for @Lit_Review https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-directors-cut
'Retired judges have usually had long careers on the bench, during which they have acquired an ingrained reticence when it comes to speaking on controversial topics. Not so Sumption.'
Dominic Grieve reviews Jonathan Sumption's 'Law in a Time of Crisis'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-case-for-the-citizen