Tag: reading

Books, Reading, and Daydream Believing: Christy Carew Has ‘Nothing’ to Do

Other, Victorians on Display

The current pandemic triggered what appears to be a reading revival. As I noted media discourse on people accumulating books, I wondered whether sometimes these books were companions to a daydream, as individuals imagined an alternative present or felicitous future; experiencing, as Charlotte Bronte expressed it in Villette, “the life of thought, and that of reality”.[1] Researching fictional experiences of reading in women’s writing at the fin de siècle, I notice a book is often accompaniment to a daydream. It

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Alyson Hunt, The Great Academic Taboo

Published in JVC, Victorians Beyond the Academy

Alyson Hunt is a first year part-time PhD candidate in the English Department at Canterbury Christ Church University, Kent.  Her current research explores the concept of Victorian crime short fiction as a vehicle for social anxieties and considers how dress and clothing illuminates and encrypts these anxieties. She also works as a Research Associate for the International Centre for Victorian Women Writers and is currently working on a series of enterprises as part of a project entitled: From Brontë to

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Reading and Reacting: The Heir of Redclyffe

Victorians Beyond the Academy

Serena Trowbridge (Birmingham City University)    Recently I re-read The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), Charlotte M. Yonge’s most famous novel. This is the romantic novel over which Jo March cried in Little Women, a book described as ‘genius’ by Henry James, and which provided an ideal of chivalry to the young William Morris and Burne-Jones. It enjoyed enormous popularity in the nineteenth century, though this has faded over the years, but recent work on Yonge examines her as a professional

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