Victorian Challenge Posts - August, September, & October

As you may have noticed, I have been having a hard time keeping up with the Victorian Challenge since I started my new job in May.  I sincerely apologize.  When I made plans for this challenge, I didn't realize that I would be starting a full time job half way through the year and developing an entire new program.  Things will slow down once all of my classes are developed . . . in 2014!!

August, September, and October are celebrations of some of my favorite Victorian authors: 

August: Anthony Trollope

September: Elizabeth Gaskell
October: Mark Twain

Have you been reading these authors?  What are you favorite works by these authors?  If you have any great guest blogs for these authors, I would be more than happy to post them.

Link to your Victorian Challenge reviews below.  As usual, make sure to include your blog name and your entry in the following format:  Laura's Reviews (North and South).  Post all items from these date forward at this post, but you can also repost items you may have already read by Trollope, Gaskell, or Twain.

Thank-you for your patience and your great reviews!

July Posts for the Victorian Challenge – Oscar Wilde

As I’m sure most of you have noticed I am constantly running behind on the Victorian Challenge 2012. It’s been a busy time with my new job, my sister’s bridal shower a couple of weeks ago, and her wedding this weekend. I thought I would get a quick post about Oscar Wilde up so that July reviews could be posted. I still have posts about George Eliot and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that I need to get posted hopefully next week.


On that note, there seems to be a lot of confusion on where to put your posts. The standard had previously been to put your posts on the current month, no matter the author. I’m going to change that to put it on the current month and/or on the month of the author you read. You are allowed to post twice.

On to a very brief biography of Oscar Wilde . . . Oscar Wilde was a late Victorian novelist and playwright. Born in Dublin Ireland, Wilde attended college first at Trinity and then at Oxford. He had a romance with Florence Balcomb, but she married Bram Stoker rather than Wilde. Wilde later married Constance Lloyd in 1884 and together they had two sons. Wilde started in literature by publishing poems and working as a journalist. He later became the editor of The Woman’s World magazine. He wrote The Picture of Dorian Grey in 1890 and his seminal play, The Importance of Being Earnest in 1894. Wilde was tried and convicted for being a homosexual in 1895 and imprisoned. Released in 1897 he left Britain forever for France, where he died of cerebral meningitis in 1900.

If you are interested in writing a guest blog about Oscar Wilde or his works, please send me an email at laarlt78(at)Hotmail(dot)com.

Post your July/Oscar Wilde reviews below in the following format (Laura’s Reviews (The Importance of Being Earnest).

June Victorian Challenge Posts – George Eliot and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I apologize for being so behind at getting the posts up for the Victorian Challenge. With starting my new job, I’ve gotten very behind at writing my reviews and have also lost the amount of time I used to have to write them. I am getting caught up so hopefully I will be more on top of getting these up and posted.

As I didn’t get May posted, we are going to celebrate both George Eliot and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle this month.

George Eliot is the pen name for Mary Ann Evans. She was one of the leading writers in the Victorian era, writing such seminal works as Middlemarch, Silas Marner, Daniel Deronda, The Mill on the Floss, and Adam Bede. All of her novels are set in provincial England. She was born in 1819 to Robert and Christiana Evans. Robert was a manager at Arbury Hall Estate. Robert and Christiana decided that young Mary Ann was not good looking enough to make her way in the world through marriage, so they invested in her education. Later in life, she used this education and moved to London. She became an assistant editor of The Westminster Review in 1851, which was highly unusual for a woman of her time.

Also in 1851, she met George Henry Lewes, a married man. He left his wife and moved in with Evans in 1854. They lived together until his death in 1878. This was very scandalous for the times. For this reason, and to be taken more seriously, Evans used a male pen name and started to work on her novels. They were well received and very popular, even with her shocking private life with Lewes. She published seven novels in her life time; with her last novel being Daniel Deronda. After Lewes’s death, she married John Cross, a man twenty years her junior. She died about seven months later at the end of 1880 at the age of 61.

For the Victorian Challenge, I listened to and loved Silas Marner earlier this year. Previously I had read one Eliot novel, Adam Bede. I have a new copy of Middlemarch sitting on the top of my pile that I REALLY want to read this month. Unfortunately, I am overbooked for the month, so I may not get to it until later this year. I will read an essay, poem, or something Eliot for sure though. What Eliot novels, essays, novellas, and poems have you read (or watched)? What is your favorite?

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a prolific Scottish writer, most famous for his creation of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes is an iconic figure and the stories about him are considered a milestone in crime fiction. Doyle was born in 1859 in Edinburgh Scotland. Doyle’s father was an alcoholic and his family lived in squalid tenement flats. Luckily, he was supported by wealthy uncles and sent to a variety of good schools. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and become a doctor in 1881. It was while he was studying to become a doctor, that Doyle first started writing short stories.

Doyle struggled to find a publisher for his works, but Ward Lock & Co published his first significant work, A Study in Scarlet, in 1886. This story was the first to feature Sherlock Holmes and Watson. The Holmes stories were wildly successful. In total there were four novels, and 56 short stories by Doyle featuring Holmes. He “killed” Holmes off in 1893 to focus on his “more serious” historical works, only to revive Holmes again in 1901 after vast public outcry.

Holmes married Louisa Hawkins, the sister of one of his patients in 1885. Together they had two children. She had tuberculosis and died in 1906. He married Jean Elizabeth Leckie the next year and had three more children. Doyle died of a heart attack in 1930 at the age of 71.

I have read the complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and loved it. For the Victorian Challenge, I listened to The Sherlock Holmes Theatre earlier this year. I’m going to reread a story this month as part of the challenge. I am also watching the Sherlock series on Masterpiece Mystery and hope to have my review on that as well. What works by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are you planning to review?

I look forward to reading your reviews this month!

Please post the name of your blog followed by the item you reviewed. For example, Laura’s Reviews (Middlemarch).

 

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886): A Brief Biography by Cynthia Dickinson, The Emily Dickinson Museum

I am honored to have Cynthia Dickinson as a guest blogger today to give a brief biography of Emily Dickinson.  Cynthia (no relation to Emily) works at The Emily Dickinson Museum.  I love what she has to say about the Museum and her pictures - it looks like another place I need to add on to my places to visit in the future list!  Thank-you Cynthia for the great post!

 Emily Dickinson is considered one of the greatest poets of all time, yet in her own lifetime her work—virtually all unpublished--was known only to a small circle of family and friends.   Dickinson is famous now as a recluse, yet her lively childhood and youth were filled with schooling, reading, explorations of nature, religious activities, significant friendships, and important encounters with poetry.

The Emily Dickinson Museum is dedicated to helping visitors fully understand Emily Dickinson’s remarkable story and to untangle some of the myths that surround her and her work.  Located in Amherst, Massachusetts, the Museum consists of Dickinson’s family home, the Homestead, and the home next door of her brother Austin. 


On this day of her death, here is a short introduction to the life and work of one of America’s creative geniuses.

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in the family Homestead on Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts.  When Emily was 9, she and her family (which also included older brother Austin and younger sister Lavinia) moved to a house on what is now North Pleasant Street in Amherst.  The family returned to the Homestead in 1855.  Emily, who, like Lavinia, never married, lived at the Homestead until her death on May 15, 1886.

The poet’s formal schooling was exceptional for girls in the early nineteenth century, though not unusual for girls in Amherst.  She attended the co-educational Amherst Academy for about seven years before entering Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1847.  She attended the Seminary for one year, the longest time she spent away from home. 


In Dickinson's early twenties, writing became increasingly important to her.  In a letter to Austin that took him to task for writing poetry, she reveals something more significant about herself:   "I’ve been in the habit myself of writing some few things, and it rather appears to me that you’re getting away my patent, so you’d better be somewhat careful, or I’ll call the police!”  (L110)  

Dickinson's letters to her brother also reveal a growing sense of "difference" between herself and others:  “What makes a few of us so different from others?  It’s a question I often ask myself” (L 118).  This sense of distinction became more pronounced as she grew older and as her poetic sensibilities matured.

Although Emily Dickinson's calling as a poet began in her teen years, she came into her own as an artist during a short but intense period of creativity that resulted in her composing, revising, and saving hundreds of poems.  That period, which scholars identify as 1858-1865, overlaps with the most significant event of American nineteenth-century history, the Civil War. 


During this time, Dickinson's personal life also underwent tremendous change. In the  mid-1850s, Emily Dickinson had moved with her family back to the Homestead, and her brother Austin had married and moved with his wife Susan (a dear friend of Emily’s) into a new house next door.  The couple named their house “The Evergreens.”  It quickly became a center for social and intellectual gatherings in Amherst. 

 Back at the Homestead, Emily Dickinson began to devote more time to her writing.  She did much of this work in her bedroom, the southwest corner room on the second floor.  By the time Dickinson turned 35, she had composed more than 1100 concise, powerful lyrics that astutely examine pain, grief, joy, love, nature, and art.  She once defined poetry this way:  “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry.  If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.  These are the only way I know it.  Is there any other way?” (L342a) http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/about_writings

Dickinson shared a portion of her poems with family and selected friends whose literary taste she admired, and a few of her poems were published in newspapers, though anonymously and apparently without her prior consent.  But the vast majority of her work remained known only to its author.  Many of these are recorded in small handmade booklets (now called “fascicles”), very private “publications” that she shared with no one. 

Dickinson's later life was marked by illness and death, including her father's, her mother’s, and her young nephew Gib’s.  The poet herself became ill shortly after Gib died:  "The Crisis of the sorrow of so many years is all that tires me" (L873).  She remained in poor health until she died at age 55 on May 15, 1886.  She was buried four days later in the town cemetery, now known as West Cemetery.

Each year the Emily Dickinson marks the anniversary of Dickinson’s death on the Saturday closest to that date with a Poetry Walk.  This year’s walk was an especially creative celebration of the “aliveness” of her verse. The walk marked the opening of a new exhibit on the Museum grounds:  “The Little White House Project.”  http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/littlewhitehouseproject

The Emily Dickinson Museum is open to the public from March through December each year and offers well-regarded guided tours of the Homestead and The Evergreens as well as a variety of public programs http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/.  We hope you’ll explore our website and make your own pilgrimage to Amherst to discover more about one of the world’s greatest poets.

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson a Guest Blog by Author and Scholar Jerome Charyn

Emily Dickinson died more than 125 years ago, yet it is as if she’s usurped our landscape and our language – Emily is everywhere.

Last week an article about the virtues of walking one’s dog appeared in the New York Times, bearing the cryptic title: “Started Early, Took my Dog.” The author had burglarized one of Emily’s poems, and never even mentioned her - or Carlo, the wondrous Newfoundland who accompanied Emily for sixteen years.

It was while mourning Carlo that she began to wear white. She was lost without her mute Confederate. But that’s another matter.

Started Early, Took my Dog. We don’t even have to attribute her lines anymore. She’s become one of the most poignant icons of our new century – a full-blooded renegade -rather than a reclusive spinster with red hair – or a helpless agoraphobic trapped in a room in her father’s house.

Last year Holland Cotter, an art critic for the New York Times, wrote about this metamorphosis in an article entitled, "My Hero, the Outlaw of Amherst.” Her upstairs bedroom was no secret sanctuary; it was “an empowerment zone.” [I felt that same power when I first visited her room in 2008, a kind of crazy thrill.]

Thirty-five years ago Emily was still the Belle of Amherst, as personified by Julie Harris, a harmless, asexual mouse. The play by William Luce was an enormous success, and it might have crippled Emily forever if Julie Harris hadn’t found other roles to play.

But around the same time that Belle romped around in her white dress, the late Adrienne Rich worked on one of the most perceptive essays ever written on Emily Dickinson – “Vesuvius at Home.” Rich dealt with Emily Dickinson as one poet contemplating another. She understood the depth of the problem. We’d turned Emily into some kind of “gnomic Garbo,” sentimentalized her in our own private menagerie of five or six poems. “I have come to imagine her as somehow too strong for her environment, a figure of powerful will, not at all frail or breathless.” Nineteenth-century women had no voice; intelligence was a curse for any female.

Dickinson invented “a language more varied, more compressed, more dense with implications, more complex of syntax, than any American poetic language to date.” I would ever go further than that. She has wormed her way into the psyche of the West.

Harold Bloom hated to teach her, because looking at her poems with his students always gave him a headache – it’s a headache I’d love to have. And Bloom admits in The Western Canon that “except for Shakespeare, Dickinson manifests more cognitive originality than any other Western poet since Dante.” I see her as a kind of female Hamlet with daggers in her mind. She’s murderous and playful, and ultimately unknowable. And her language shifts from second to second, so that we’re never standing on solid ground. Consider Hamlet driving Polonius a little crazy as he compares a cloud to a camel, then to a weasel and a whale. All we would have to is supply the dashes, and we’d be right inside one of Emily’s electric whirlwinds.

But finally, it’s a whirlwind all her own. That’s why we celebrate her again – and again.

’Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch

* * *

Not all Pianos in the Woods

Had power to mangle me —

* * *
I started Early – Took my Dog –

And visited the Sea –

The Mermaids in the Basement

Came out to look at me –
* * *

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—

As if my Brain had split—

I tried to match it—Seam by Seam—

But could not make it fit.



The thought behind, I strove to join

Unto the thought before—

But Sequence ravelled out of Sound

Like Balls—upon a Floor.

* * *

No one else on earth could have written those last two lines – these are her bolts of Melody, her invisible signature.

As Brenda Wineapple tells us in White Heat: “ . . . language like this had never been seen before; nothing like it, really, ever appeared again.” Emily was, according to Wineapple, a woman of secrets, who wanted her secrets kept but wanted you to know she had them: “. . . she seemed to exist outside of time, untouched by it. And that’s unnerving. No wonder we make up stories about her: about her lovers, if any, or how many, or why she turned her back on ordinarily life and when she knew the enormity of her own gift (of course she knew) and how she combined words in ways we never imagined and wished we could.”

Everyone seems to have his or her own version of Emily. In Aife Murray’s new book, Maid as Muse, we have a marvelous menagerie of ghosts – Emily’s servants, named and unnamed. Aife Murray relies on her own Irish roots to rescue these servants from oblivion, and she also rescues their habitat – that architecture of the unseen, where these servants labored and some of them lived – like Margaret Maher, who came to work for the Dickinson in 1869 and had a tiny room above the kitchen. Warm and wild and mighty, as Emily called her, she’s the real heroine of the text. It seems that Emily stored her “fascicles – her forty hand-sewn booklets of poems – in Margaret’s trunk. This explodes the whole notion of Dickinson’s “Immortality,” whether she ever wanted these booklets to be seen by another soul.

Why was Margaret the only one in Amherst who knew about the existence of these booklets and the rest of her mistress’ menagerie – that secret stash of poems. Emily wasn’t cavalier about other things. She left her own will and instructions about her burial – six Irish handymen from the Homestead were to carry her remains to the burial ground. But she left no instructions, to her own sister or her sister-in-law, Susan, about the most important matters of her life. Margaret didn’t burn this stash, as Emily had instructed her to do, and now, we have these poems, the wondrous shards of Emily’s existence, almost by accident.

Emily was an aberration, a female poet, who survived that terrible winter of nineteenth-century New England, where women weren’t allowed to think for themselves or reveal their own rage.

- Jerome Charyn

Jerome Charyn's most recent novel is The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson. He is currently working on a study of the reclusive poet for Harvard University Press.

 Contact the author through the Facebook Page dedicated to Emily Dickinson in the 21st Century: http://www.facebook.com/SecretLifeOfEmilyDickinson

If you would like to see more about this blog, it goes with this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZpXxBJRbXM (blog was taken from his recent talk at The Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA.)

Thank-you Jerome Charyn for this great guest post!  I can't wait to read The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson!

April Posts for the Victorian Challenge – Emily Dickinson Month!

I hope everyone is enjoying spring so far! It has been a very hectic one for me and I have gotten behind on posting on Laura’s Reviews. I’m working on catching up, but I now find that half of April has passed me by and I have yet to put the link up for April’s posts. I apologize! We are finally closing the reviews on the month of March– Robert Louis Stevenson month. We had a total of 21 reviews. I listened to the audiobooks The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Treasure Island by Stevenson. I also watched Muppet Treasure Island with my family. I was hoping to read and watch Kidnapped, but alas, I ran out of time.

Fittingly for National Poetry Month, April is Emily Dickinson month for the Victorian Challenge 2012. You can post any Victorian related item you like this month, but I am going to focus on Emily Dickinson and you are allowed to focus with me! We will hopefully have two guest blog posts on the Emily Dickinson before the end of the month also to celebrate. Please post your April reviews below in Mr. Linky (and not on the January, February, or March link-up). If you haven’t signed up for the challenge yet, go to this sign-up link.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American Poet born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1830. After going to school at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Dickinson returned home to live the rest of her days as a recluse in white. Most of her relationships were carried about by letter, and she also wrote almost two thousand poems through the course of her life. Less than a dozen of these poems were published during her lifetime and they were considered radical poems for the Victorian era. Dickinson died in 1886. Her poems have been continuously in print since 1891.

It has been quite some time since I’ve read any of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. I have a collection of her poetry buried in one of my bookcases. I’m going to hunt it down this weekend and read it. Do you plan on reading any Dickinson this month? If so, what works of or about Emily Dickinson interest you?

I look forward to reading your reviews this month!

Please post the name of your blog followed by the item you reviewed. For example, Laura’s Reviews (The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson).



March Posts for the Victorian Challenge 2012 – Robert Louis Stevenson Month!

I hope everyone is enjoying the final weeks of winter and is looking forward to the start of spring in just a few short weeks. We are closing the reviews on the month of February – Charles Dickens month. We had a total of 13 reviews in addition to a guest blog from Dickensblog and an author interview with Deborah Hopkinson, author of A Boy Called Dickens. Reviews were down from the month of January, but many of you still may be trying to finish up Dickens novels. It took me most of the month to read the massive (and excellent) Drood by Dan Simmons and I was sadly unable to read Oliver Twist. I’m hoping to be able to still read it sometime this year during the Victorian Challenge.

March is Robert Louis Stevenson month for the Victorian Challenge 2012. You can post any Victorian related item you like this month, but I am going to focus on Robert Louis Stevenson and you are allowed to focus with me! We will hopefully have a guest blog post on the Robert Louis Stevenson through the month also to celebrate. Please post your March reviews below in Mr. Linky (and not on the January or February link-up). If you haven’t signed up for the challenge yet, go to this sign-up link.

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish writer born in 1850. He became a Victorian celebrity for publishing such works as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Treasure Island, and Kidnapped. Stevenson grew up a sickly child that used his imagination to compose adventures stories even at a young age. As an adult, although his constitution was weak, Stevenson traveled around the world and used these travels as inspiration for his works. He died at the age of 44 in Samoa.

The only Robert Louis Stevenson work I’ve read is The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and it has been some time since I’ve read it. I’ve already listened to an audiobook version and need to type of the review. I’m currently listening to Treasure Island and greatly enjoying it. I’ve got Kidnapped on my pile of books and hopefully I’m able to get to it this month. Do you plan on reading any Stevenson this month? If so, what works of Robert Louis Stevenson interest you?

I look forward to reading your reviews this month!

Please post the name of your blog followed by the item you reviewed. For example, Laura's Reviews (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde).

Interview with Deborah Hopkinson, author of A Boy Called Dickens

I am excited to have author  Deborah Hopkinson on Laura's Reviews today to help honor Charles Dickens by talking about her new book, A Boy Called Dickens.  And without further ado  . . . our interview. 

LAG:  What inspired you to write historical fiction books for children?

DH: I love history and remember as a girl that I had hard time finding books on women in history. So I began with historical fiction about women that intrigued me – astronomer Maria Mitchell, Fannie Merritt Farmer, and Jubilee singer Ella Sheppard Moore, to name a few. And then the more I wrote the more I became immersed in history.

LAG: Why did you choose Charles Dickens for your subject on your latest book?

DH: I loved reading Dickens as a child. I think I was probably only ten or eleven when I stumbled on Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol and David Copperfield that I’ve had forever. I probably read them long before I was actually ready for the material. But that’s one great thing about Dickens – you can read and enjoy his work on many levels.

I’ve just started listening to Great Expectations on audio and I understand there is a new adaptation coming to PBS in April.

LAG: Did you find out any new and interesting facts about Dickens in your research?

DH: I knew Dickens had worked in a blacking factory as a boy, but what fascinated me most in researching this book was realizing how that experience haunted him throughout his life. He never told his children about it but kept it a secret.

LAG:  What is your favorite Charles Dickens novel?

DH:  It’s a tossup between Great Expectations and David Copperfield. I may have to back and read them all to make a decision!

How do you take the life of a real person and tell the story in a way that sparks an interest in the mind of a child? I know – complicated question!

A Boy Called Dickens is definitely historical fiction. I tell young people when I do school visits that whenever we put words in someone’s mouth that they didn’t say, we are writing fiction, even if it is close to the truth or based on fact. What I try to do, though, is not necessarily write a biography but to tell a story that illuminates something important in the real person’s life.

In the case of Dickens, we can see that his childhood experiences had a profound influence on his life and work. Kids may not be ready to read Little Dorrit yet, but maybe someday when they do, they will recall this story and it will provide context and richness for their later reading.

LAG:  What are you currently working on?

DH:  I have two books coming out this year, TITANIC: Voices from the Disaster and Annie and Helen, and I’m also working on a middle grade novel based on Dr. John Snow and the cholera epidemic of 1854

For more information about my books and historical thinking, I hope readers will visit my website: http://www.deborahhopkinson.com/.

LAG: Thank-you for the great interview Deborah Hopkinson!

Dickens Masterpiece Spring 2012 Preview

As we wrap up our month long celebration of Charles Dickens, we still have much to look forward to in 2012, the bicentennial year of Dickens’ birth.  Masterpiece is bringing out two new adaptations of Dickens’ work, Great Expectations on April 1^st and 8^th and The Mystery of Edwin Drood on April 15^th.  I’ve really enjoyed the Masterpiece Dickens over the past few years, especially Bleak House and Little Dorrit. Let’s take a quick look at these new adaptations . . .

Great Expectations

The description of the mini-series on Masterpiece’s website is as follows:

“An orphan boy meets an escaped convict, a crazed rich woman, a bewitching girl, and grows up to have great expectations of wealth from a mysterious patron, on Great Expectations, Charles Dickens' remarkable tale of rags to riches to self-knowledge, starring Gillian Anderson (The X-Files, Bleak House), David Suchet (Hercule Poirot), Ray Winstone, and Douglas Booth.

Anderson appears as one of Dickens' most haunting creations: Miss Havisham, a bride-to-be who was jilted at the altar years before. Newcomer Booth stars as Pip, the promising young man who is snared in Miss Havisham's lair.


Great Expectations airs during the bicentennial of Dickens' birth and marks the fifteenth Masterpiece adaptation of the great novelist's works."

 

Watch Great Expectations Preview on PBS. See more from Masterpiece.

Whenever I think of Great Expectations in cinema, I think of the rather sad modern day adaptation in the 1990’s starring Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow.  Luckily, from the preview on Masterpiece’s website (above) , it looks like this adaptation will be much more faithful to the novel.  What do you think of the preview?  I am officially intrigued although I think the music doesn’t really go with the preview at all and I think that Gillian Anderson makes a much younger and much more beautiful Miss Havisham than I ever envisioned while reading the novel.  She was an excellent Lady Dedlock in Bleak House and I am intrigued to see what new depths she brings to Miss Havisham.

Great Expectation already premiered on BBC in Great Britain in December.  I’ve read some of the reviews, and it appears that it was a critical success.  The only negative point I kept reading was that Douglas Booth, the actor who plays a grown up Pip, is too beautiful to be Pip.  Pip in the novel is always pining after Estelle and the reviewers think this this version, it should be the other way around.  I don’t have a problem having a handsome hero to gaze at . . . what about you?  I am excited to see this new version!

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

The Mystery of Edwin Drood was Charles Dickens’ last unfinished novel, with only half being completed before his death.  I haven’t read it or ever watched a version of it so it will be all new to me.  Unfortunately Masterpiece does not have a summary or preview up of this movie yet.  It did air on BBC in Great Britain in January with an original ending written by Gwyneth Hughes (see a great interview here about her writing process ).  I did find a preview trailer from the BBC on YouTube. ).

What are your thoughts?  I thought the trailer was very exciting and can’t wait to watch it.  Dickens knows how to go dark, but this looks like Dickens was going in a much darker direction in his last novel. Opium addiction, murder, mystery, and love – it all sounds like a very intriguing story.

Reviews call it a “thriller (and a) story of human passions and fatal weaknesses,” “not to be missed,” and “thrilling!”  It sounds like another must see Masterpiece movie and I can’t wait to watch it. 

I will post full reviews after watching both of these adaptations in April.  Which one are you more excited to see?  What are your thoughts?  What Dickens novel do you think deserves a new adaptation?

Dickens in Brief, a Biography from Gina Dalfonzo of Dickensblog

Today is Charles Dickens 200th birthday.  To join in the celebration, we have a wonderful guest blog about Charles Dickens today from Gina Dalfonzo, the editor of Dickensblog.


 In 1824, a 12-year-old boy was taken from school and sent to work in a blacking warehouse to help support his impoverished family.


Most people who know anything about Charles Dickens know that fact. It’s taught to students almost as soon as they’re taught his name. What we sometimes forget that during his lifetime, almost no one knew it. Dickens could never think of that time without feelings of grief and shame—feelings so strong that he is said to have told nobody but his good friend John Forster.

It wasn’t just the menial labor, the frequent hunger, the social stigma, or the time spent away from his family, though all of those did affect him. Worse than all of them were the breaking off his education, the fear that he would never be able to resume it, and the dismay that no one in his family seemed to realize what this meant to him.

In an autobiographical fragment that was published only after his death, Dickens wrote, “The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more; cannot be written.” When he was finally able to leave the warehouse, his mother argued that he should keep working. His father overruled her, but Dickens wrote, “I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back.”

The scars of that time were with him for the rest of his life. They could not hold him back from becoming a brilliant and successful writer. They could not even turn him into a figure of gloom and doom; as Forster wrote, “He never . . . lost his precious gift of animal spirits, or his native capacity for humorous enjoyment.” But the deep sense of betrayal and bitterness haunted him, manifesting itself in his later relationships and his work.

But if that were all there were to Dickens, he would not have been the Dickens we love. Many people have experienced betrayal and bitterness, but few have let those feelings inspire them the way that he did. With the energy and enthusiasm of five men, he championed the poor and needy whom he understood so well. No mere celebrity content to dabble in good works, Dickens spent countless hours raising funds and organizing charitable endeavors, and above all creating the immortal characters—Oliver Twist, Smike, Amy Dorrit, David Copperfield, Jenny Wren, and so many more—whose fictional struggles showed readers a world that many of them had never known existed. Few other writers have done so much to move hearts and change minds. Biographer Simon Callow writes, “Having experienced the lower depths, he never ceased, till the day he died, to commit himself, both in his work and in his life, to trying to right the wrongs inflicted by society, above all, perhaps by giving the dispossessed a voice.”

Forster adds, “They were not his clients whose cause he pleaded with such pathos and humour, and on whose side he got the laughter and tears of all the world, but in some sort his very self.” He fought for them as he wished someone would have fought for the lonely child he had been. He could have let that old anger and sorrow poison his mind and turn him against the rest of humanity, as some of us might have done. Instead, from his wounded heart flowed generosity and compassion that would literally change the world.

Gina Dalfonzo is editor of Dickensblog.

What the Dickens! - February Link-up for the Victorian Challenge 2012

 February is Dickens month for the Victorian Challenge 2012. You can post any Victorian related item you like this month, but I am going to focus on Charles Dickens and you are allowed to focus with me! We will hopefully have a couple of guest blog posts on the Charles Dickens through the month also to celebrate. Please post your February reviews below in Mr. Linky (and not on the January link-up). If you haven’t signed up for the challenge yet, go to this sign-up link.

January was a great month celebrating the Bronte sisters. I loved reading your reviews that were Bronte related and not Bronte related. We had 31 posts in the month of January, and two guest blogs. One guest blog was a brief biography of the Bronte sisters from Bronteblog and the other was a guest blog from author Syrie James discussing writing about Charlotte Bronte’s love life. They were both great and I thought they enhanced our discussion of the Brontes!

Enough about the Brontes, February is a celebration of Charles Dickens. Dickens is considered the father of Victorian literature. It is appropriate that we celebrate his this month as the world celebrates the 200th anniversary of his birth on February 7th. Charles Dickens had a very interesting life himself as he went from a poor boy working in a blacking factory to a famous author. He worked hard and published 19 completed novels, and one partially completed novel, numerous short stories, non-fiction, and plays. His works are iconic and include A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, etc. They have been adapted more times than one can count into screen, TV, feature film, radio, and audiobook productions. His characters have become part of our culture (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, etc.), and he popularized the term Merry Christmas. He worked tirelessly in his life for social reform and these views often made their ways into this novel. He is an author well worth celebrating.

To celebrate Charles Dickens this month, I am going to read Oliver Twist for the first time, and I’m also going to read Dickens as a fictional character in Drood by Dan Simmons. I’m going to write previews for the new Masterpiece Theatre productions of Great Expectations and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and I will also hopefully watch one old production of a Dickens novel. I really want to listen to an audio version of Great Expectations, but there is only one digital copy in the state of Wisconsin and I’m still a few people back. I’ll probably be listening to it in a few months!

I look forward to reading your reviews this month! Feel free to post how you plan to celebrate Dickens this month.

Please post the name of your blog followed by the item you reviewed. For example, Laura's Reviews (A Tale of Two Cities).

Writing Charlotte Bronte's Love Story an interview with author Syrie James

Syrie James, hailed by Los Angeles Magazine as "The queen of 19-century re-imaginings," is the bestselling author of The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë (Great Group Read, Women's National Book Association; Audie Romance Award, 2011); The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen (Best First Novel 2008, Library Journal); and the critically acclaimed Nocturne and Dracula, My Love. Translation rights for Syrie's books have been sold in sixteen languages. An admitted Anglophile, Syrie loves all things 19th century. She lives in Los Angeles and is a member of the Writer's Guild of America.

What inspired you to write The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë?

I have always adored Jane Eyre. I felt compelled to know and understand the woman who wrote that remarkable book, which is still so beloved all over the world more than 160 years after it was first published.

As I researched Charlotte's life, I was astonished to discover how many parts of the novel were inspired by her own experiences. I was also captivated by the engrossing saga of Charlotte's family.

Charlotte lived in Victorian England in a tiny village in the wilds of Yorkshire. Her brother became an alcoholic and a drug addict. Her father, a clergyman, was going blind. Her sisters Emily and Anne were also very talented writers. All three sisters, despite the difficulties of their circumstances, became published authors at the same time. Emily's novel Wuthering Heights is considered one of the greatest masterpieces ever written in the English language, and Jane Eyre is required reading in many high schools, and has been filmed 27 times. I can't think of any other family in history who've achieved a similar literary feat, and I wanted to explore that and show how it happened.



Add to that the true story of Charlotte's romance! Her father's curate, the tall, dark, and handsome Irishman Arthur Bell Nicholls, lived next door to the Brontës for more than seven years, and carried a silent torch for Charlotte all that time, before he had the nerve to propose. Charlotte disliked him for many years, but her feelings eventually changed, and she grew to love him. I knew that would make a fabulous story—and it had never been told!

How did you do your research?

First, I poured over countless Brontë biographies. I read all their poetry, their published novels, the juvenilia, and Charlotte's voluminous personal correspondence. I studied the art of the Brontës. (Quite remarkable!) I read everything I could find about the life of Arthur Bell Nicholls. Then I went to Haworth, England. The stone buildings in the village's narrow main street still look very much as they did in Charlotte's day.

I made an extended visit to the Brontë Parsonage Museum, which has been preserved to reflect the way it looked when the Brontës lived there, and is furnished with many of their possessions.

What a thrill it was to "haunt" the rooms and lanes where Charlotte and Emily and Anne actually lived and walked, and to stroll through that gloomy graveyard in the pouring rain! Even more thrilling was my visit to the Brontë library, where I was allowed to don protective gloves and read a selection of original letters and manuscripts penned by Charlotte and other members of the Brontë family.

While in Yorkshire, I was also granted a private tour of the former Roe Head School (where Charlotte was a student and later a teacher), which still actively functions as a private school. The main building, inside and out, has not changed much since Charlotte Brontë's time—and the legend of a mysterious attic dweller, the Ghost of Roe Head, still lives!

View photos from my Brontë Tour here.

You mentioned seeing the Brontë's art work during your research. Can you describe it?

Their works are incredibly detailed portraits of women and animals, landscapes, and depictions of nature. Some are pencil sketches; others are beautiful watercolors. Although they did draw from life, many of Charlotte's works of art were copies of other pictures and engravings, which she painstakingly executed dot by dot.

All three sisters were talented artists, Emily perhaps the most accomplished of them all. Branwell was trained to paint in oils and hoped to make a living as a portrait artist, but he did not have the necessary talent or drive to make a success of it. To see all of their art in one terrific volume, check out "The Art of the Brontës" by Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars.

Which books by and about the Brontës do you recommend?

You'll find a list of my favorite books on the Recommended Reading page on my website.

Tell us about the awards your Brontë novel has won.

I’m thrilled that the Women’s National Book Association named The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë a Great Group Read in 2009. They select only a few titles each year, on the basis of their appeal to book clubs and reading groups, choosing books they feel “are bound to open up lively conversations about a host of timely and provocative topics, from the intimate dynamics of family and personal relationships to major cultural and world issues.”

I’m also proud and humbled to announce that the audio book won the prestigious 2011 Audie award in the romance category—another huge honor, since it’s the equivalent of the Emmys and the Oscars, in the audio book world. Recorded Books and narrator Bianca Amato did a wonderful job dramatizing the novel, incorporating dozens of characters and a multitude of accents.

Learn more about The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë.

Read selected correspondence of Charlotte Brontë.

Read selected poetry of the Brontes.

View images of The Brontë Family.

Thank you for having me on your blog today! To learn more about me and all of my books, please visit me at at syriejames.com. I hope you’ll follow me on facebook and twitter, and feel free to email me or leave a message in my guest book. In closing, I’m excited to announce that my new book, Forbidden, which I co-wrote with my son Ryan, is due out Jan. 24. It’s not Victorian—but I hope you’ll love it anyway.

January Post Link-Up for the Victorian Challenge 2012

 Happy New Year! It’s hard to believe it is 2012 already. For the month of January, post the link to your Victorian review below in Mr. Linky.  This link-up is for all January reviews for the Victorian Challenge, not just Bronte reviews.  If you haven’t signed up for the challenge yet, go to this sign-up link.

January is Bronte month. You can post any Victorian related item you like this month, but I am going to focus on the Bronte sisters and you are allowed to focus with me! We will hopefully have a couple of guest blog posts on the Bronte sisters through the month also to celebrate the Bronte sisters.

The Bronte sisters were three very gifted sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte that lived in Haworth, Yorkshire, England during the Victorian Age. Their early life was marred by the tragic passing of their mother and of their elder sisters when they were children. Raised by their father the reverend Patrick Bronte and their aunt Elizabeth, they along with their brother Branwell, allowed their active imaginations to take flight and create wonderful juvenilia. As adults they became published with a book of poetry and then wrote wonderful novels. Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre, Villette, The Professor, and Shirley, while Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, and Anne wrote Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Tragically all three sisters died young.

I was looking over the Brontes’ collected works and realized that while I have read all of their novels, I have not read any of their poems. I hope to rectify that matter this month.

For great reading/viewing/audio ideas related to the Brontes, check out this post for the Bronte Challenge 2010 and all of the great reviews from that challenge at this post.

I look forward to reading your reviews this month!

Please post the name of your blog followed by the item you reviewed.  For example, Laura's Reviews (Jane Eyre).

Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley (Review and GIVEAWAY!)

I am a fan of the Penguin Lives series. I own a copy of Jane Austen by Carol Shields and was more than happy to be asked to review Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley (and James Joyce by Edna O'Brien). The Penguin Lives series is a set of books where famous current authors examine the lives of famous past authors. This leads to insightful reads that give you the highlights of the authors’ lives and works, without becoming tedious lengthy tomes. Jane Smiley is the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Thousand Acres (which I read by in the 1990’s long before this blog).


I love Charles Dickens and have enjoyed reading several of his novels in the past and also watching countless screen and stage productions of his works. Smiley presents Dickens as the father of Victorian literature (and who can argue that point?) and the most famous English author besides Shakespeare (ahem, Jane Austen?). “Nevertheless, between December 1, 1833, when his first piece ran in the Monthly Magazine, and November 9, 1838 when Oliver Twist was published in three volumes, Charles Dickens had become the most important literary figure of his day, the first Victorian novelist.” She writes the book from a great point of view, the point of Charles Dickens as he becomes an author with details of his traumatic childhood past only becoming apparent as he grew older and started to explore his past in his writing. Smiley also explores each of his novels; the plot, the process in writing the novel, and the critical and popular reception of the novel. From The Pickwick Papers to the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood, it was fascinating.

Charles Dickens was an incredibly gifted artist with a life that seemed to be a stuff of legends, or one of his novels (which parts of it were included in many of his novels). This book gave me a good overall view of the man, but also included many tidbits that I didn’t know. I didn’t realize that Dickens was also an amateur actor. While he didn’t become a famous actor as a young man, he used his acting abilities to entertain his friends and also to create the characters in his novels. I found his process to be fascinating. His children reported in later years that he would speak in strange voices in front of a mirror and then would rush back to his desk and furiously write. Later in life, he used his acting abilities to his advantage and had reading tours for the last ten or fifteen years of his life where he would read and perform passages from his books on stage. What I wouldn’t give to have been in an audience listening to Charles Dickens read from A Christmas Carol. As Smiley states, “That appropriating, mimicking, and delighting in the plentiful varieties of the English speech was one of Dicken’s signal traits, all of his acquaintances agreed upon, and he was perfectly alive to how speech and characteristic action revealed character.”

Dickens love life was also fascinating. He had a four year “obsession” with his first love Maria Beadnell, but was unable to marry her due to opposition from her family. Hilariously when he met her in later years, he found her to be fat and talkative and therefore created an annoying character in her image in Little Dorrit. He then shortly thereafter married Catherine Hogarth. This marriage was an unhappy one that also produced ten children. He seems to have liked Catherine’s sisters rather than her. Catherine’s sisters Mary and Georgina lived with them at various points in their marriage to help with their children. Some of my favorite passages in this book were where author Jane Smiley let her thoughts be known on how Dickens treated his wife Catherine. One such passage is as follows. “Catherine was pregnant again, with the Dickenses’ eight child, sixth son. As Frederick W. Dupree notes, ‘To his more and more open dismay, she continued to bear him children at brief intervals. . . ‘ The modern reader must wonder how he expected her to stop bearing these children, but nineteenth century sources don’t engage substantively with the harder dilemmas of reproductive rights and choices.” After separating from his wife in 1858, Charles Dickens had a long term relationship with actress Ellen Ternan until his death. There seems to be some debate on whether they were lovers or not . . . I tend to think they were.

I was also fascinated by Charles Dickens philanthropy. In 1839, Dickens met Angela Burdett-Coutts, a wealthy heiress. Together they worked on projects to benefit the needy. As Dickens had been a poor boy with his father in debtors’ prison, working in a blacking factory, he uniquely understood the problems. Unlike other authors of his era, Dickens was a self-made rich man that had lived on the other side. He was also a great walker and liked to walk around the depths of London, seeing the other side of life. He brought his social message into his novels. Oliver Twist explored the underworld of London for a poor boy, Bleak House explored the broken legal system in Britain, Little Dorrit explored the world of debtor’s prison, etc. Dickens pointed out situations that needed to be fixed and that perhaps people in the other classes at that time were not even aware. It makes for a fascinating portrayal of British Victorian society when one reads them our modern perspective. No one was above Dickens critique or use as characters in his novels including friends.

Overall, I found Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley to be a fascinating, succinct portrayal of Dickens life and works. I recommend it to all who would love to learn more about this famous, beloved author, but don’t want to read an in-depth, lengthy analysis.

Interested in Victorian authors? I just posted the sign-up for a Victorian Challenge 2012. As I read this book, I realized that Charles Dickens 200th birthday is in February 2012. Therefore in February, we will focus our challenge on Charles Dickens. I’m going to read Oliver Twist as I must admit I have never read it!

Giveaway Details

Penguin books has graciously offered a giveaway of one copy of Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley and one copy of James Joyce by Edna O'Brien.

If you would like to win both of this books please leave a comment about what intrigues you about the the books, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, or this review of Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley.

As part of your comment, you must include an email address. If I can't find a way to contact you I will draw another winner.

For an additional entry, blog about this giveaway or post it on your sidebar. Provide a link to this post in your comment.

I will be using random.org (or a monte carlo simulation in excel) to pick the winners from the comments.

This contest is only open to US and Canadian residents (Sorry!).

No P.O. Boxes.

The deadline for entry is midnight, Friday December 30th.

Good luck!