Tag: Celebrity

The Tragic Poet: Whose Name was Writ in Water

Other, Victorians Beyond the Academy

There are those who consider the words of the sanguine poet scarcely worth the reading. A prescription formula for funerals, heartbreak and teenage angst, poetry has long been established as the literary tonic for the dilapidated human condition. In the name of authenticity, it naturally follows that the greater the suffering of a maudlin bard, the greater their work and legacy. Mythology has romanticised and popularised the tragic poet, a familiar archetype in celebrity literary culture. It is the reason

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Emily Bowles, ‘Writing Lives Together: A Conference on Romantic and Victorian Biography’

Published in JVC

Emily Bowles is a PhD candidate at the University of York. Her research focuses on Charles Dickens’s self-representation 1857-1870, and representations by Dickens’s friends and family in life writing 1870-1939. She is also a postgraduate representative for the Northern Nineteenth Century Network, and you can find her on Twitter @EmilyBowles_. She has co-edited a special issue of ‘Peer English’ on Victorian biography. Writing Lives Together was a one-day conference that took place on 18 September 2015, put together with the

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Sarah Wah, ”The Most Churlish of Celebrities’: George Eliot, John Cross and the Question of High Status’

Other

Published in 1885, John Cross’s biography of his late wife, George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, was written with the intention to ‘make known the woman as well as the author’. Yet, ironically, the biography is renowned precisely for the lack of insight it affords readers into the private life of George Eliot. Why did Cross make a promise that he could not keep? In JVC 15.3, Sarah Wah seeks to answer this question by examining

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