It’s been a satisfying and frustrating year; one of highs and lows, hope and something approaching despair (never actual despair; there would be no talking about full and ripe despair); productivity and slackness; the joyful and the maudlin…. Where am I going here? Straight to Dickens, it seems: 2015 really has encompassed the best and worst of…
Tag: Anthony Trollope
Beyond the common rules and back again: Anthony Trollope’s Dr Wortle’s School
He may have written something to this effect in his Autobiography, or I may just be incredibly perceptive, but I think Anthony Trollope reveals, near the end of Dr Wortle’s School, the scientific method underpinning all his novels: It is not often that one comes across events like these, so altogether out of the ordinary…
Redeeming Apollo
Anthony’s Trollope’s 1867 novel The Claverings picks up, thematically, where his 1864 novel The Small House at Allington leaves off. In the latter, Lily Dale falls head over teakettle for handsome London swell Adolphus Crosbie (whom she first mockingly, then lovingly, nicknames Apollo). They become engaged; he returns to the city; he suffers Great Temptation;…
Anthony Trollope mails it in
Anthony Trollope is known for many things: he (appropriately) invented those handy red postal boxes, so we could all mail it in when necessary; he wrote almost 50 novels in his lifetime; he worked full-time for the British post office while writing all those books; he penned an autobiography that consigned him to the hell…
The worst thing about not being an academic, or, I just read a very minor Anthony Trollope novel and it made me incredibly happy
As some of you know, I hold a PhD but use it only for activities such as washing the car or trying to get a free upgrade on international flights. It would be a lie to say I’ve never regretted my decision not to pursue an academic career, but for the most part my regrets…
We will together take our last farewell of Barset
This is a sad day for me, my friends. I have finished the sixth and final installment of Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire and there is a hole in my heart. I’m generally very bad at keeping my own reading promises to myself; yet, somehow, it’s become increasingly possible–doable and pleasurably so, even–since I began…
What marriage meant to the Victorians–and by “the Victorians,” I mean three novels by Gissing and Trollope
Oh, I am remiss. I know this. I keep breezing through delightful books and then not blogging about them. This must change, if only because I don’t want all my book posts to be jerk-faced complaint-fests. A couple of years ago, over at Bookphilia, I began a very serious Victorian Literature Project; I was to…
Approaching normal
What have I been doing? Moving, renovating, cycling, being sick (hubby and I were laid low with food poisoning this week and I’m still not really okay), and reading. What have I been reading? I couldn’t recall when I typed that compellingly original rhetorical question; I actually had to check the Goodreads to see what…
