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Victorian Fiction

Book Reviews

  • BOOK REVIEW: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson

    Like Stoker’s novel Dracula, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic-Horror novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a familiar and foundational work of Horror that is much different from the story that has become part of our collective imaginations. And for that same reason. like Dracula it is a book that is good Read more

  • BOOK REVIEW: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

    Sherlock Holmes stories are something I return to quite regularly. In the month of September this year, I reread the Sherlock Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles. For those who have not read it, the story begins with Dr. James Mortimer visiting Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in London. He presents them with a Read more

  • Victorian Technologies in Dracula

    On my rereading of the novel Dracula this year (that I posted about yesterday) one of the details that caught my attention was that Jonathan Harker references having a Kodak. This was a detail I had not noticed before. Since I was listening to an audiobook recording of Stoker’s classic, I double-checked when I got Read more

  • On the Art of Rereading

    “Rereading, not reading, is what counts,” ~ Jorge Luis Borges.  “When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before,” ~ Cliff Fadiman.  ““If a book isn’t worth reading over and over again, it isn’t worth reading at all.” ~ Read more

  • SHORT STORY REVIEW: “The Cat” by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

    My pursuit of short stories available in the Public Domain has led me to discover a number of very fine 19th Century writers that I did not previously know. One of those writers is Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. I have now read a number of her short stories and will no doubt be reviewing more Read more

  • SHORT STORY REVIEW: “XINGU” BY EDITH WHARTON

    Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition. (cf. Wharton, Edith. Xingu.) I continue to balance out my reading of Noir, Hardboiled, Read more

  • Book Review: Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford

    “…there are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade’s End is one of them.”  ~W.H. Auden When I was in college, I had to make a choice one semester between taking Romantic Literature or Victorian Literature. Knowing just enough about everything to get myself into trouble, I chose to take Victorian Literature. Romantic Read more

  • Friday’s Food for Thought: Elliot West on History

    Segmenting time, or periodization, is something we have to do if we want to organize the past and give it meaning. But it’s dangerous. By choosing some dominating event and saying that its period starts here and ends there, we run the risk of neglecting other events that don’t fit well into the scheme we’ve Read more

  • Book Review: “The Woman in White” by Wilkie Collins

    The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins has been on my To-Be-Read List for a very long time. Considered to be one of the earliest Detective Novels, it is also a regular on lists of the greatest English novels ever written. It is also quite big, 700-800 pages! Two weeks before Thanksgiving, I downloaded the Read more

  • Book Review: Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope

    I have reached a place in my reading life where I am trying to fill-in some gaps. Reading some of the classic writers and books deemed important or foundational that I have not yet got around to reading. Anthony Trollope is one such writer. After his death, Henry James, who was not always a fan, Read more