"Elizabeth Gaskell" by Jenny Uglow

A biography of the Victorian novelist and biographer whose work includes Mary Barton (1848), Cranford (1851 - 3), North and South (1853 - 4), and The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857).

It's a hugely detailed biography. You learn a lot about her family (and it sometimes strays into side anecdotes about her connections) and an exhausting amount about the holidays she went on repeatedly (her husband's congregation "muttered that the minister’s wife took an uncommon number of holidays”; Ch 26) usually abroad with her kids but without her husband; he often went on solitary walking tours as soon as she returned). Each of the novels is also carefully described and the links between her life and the plot demonstrated. As a scholarly tome it is therefore a magnificent resource ... but I found it rather too detail-heavy to be an enjoyable read. Nevertheless, I shall hang onto it and as I read her novels I shall refer to it; I am sure that for this it shall prove useful.

Selected quotes:

• “One thing is pretty clear, Women, must give up living an artist’s life, if home duties are to be paramount. It is different with men, whose home duties are so small a part of their life.” (Ch 2)
• “Everyone has a multiple life to some degree and each self has its own story, the narratives flowing together, separate yet overlapping, like threads in a weave. Elizabeth Gaskell’s life and writing were such a woven cloth, the surface highly patterned and brightly coloured, but the web on the underside darker, subdued and tangled." (Ch 5)
• “From the beginning Gaskell’s stance was both radical and feminist, and she continued all her life to make use of these Gothic conventions to link the cruel repression of wives and daughters to the pressure of history and the patriarchal power of the aristocracy, in contrast to the tenderness of women” (Ch 6)
• “Gaskell believed that much of the harshness of society could be overcome if men would only free the feminine side of their nature.” (Ch 6)
• “Again and again she shows characters progressing from guilt, misery or self-obsession, through love (or sympathetic identification with another) to positive involvement with the whole community.” (Ch 7)
• “Within her fiction lies are a major cause of psychic crises. Often these untruths are not wilful inventions, but ‘white lies’ forced on people to cover up the truth” (Ch 12)
• “The early stages establish the milieu, the characters and their way of life until at some central point narrative itself takes over. From that point on ‘truth’ is displayed not in realism or analysis but in the symbolic workings of the plot.” (Ch 12)
• “Gaskell refuses to accept that the common is necessarily commonplace.” (Ch 24)
• “She could be stubborn, prejudiced, overwhelming and erratic, but people forgave her because she was so clearly involved.” (Ch 28)

October 2025

First published in 2010

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Shakespeare in Company" by Bart Van Es

What made Shakespeare different from and better than the pack of other playwrights of his age?

This book suggests that the key moment came in 1594 when, after some promising plays, he became a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. He was almost unique in being, at the same time, an actor, a playwright and a sharer in the profits of what was a stable company, soon to become one of only two official acting companies in London. At this point he began to write plays which focused on the relationships between different characters, using the personalities of the other members of his company as models. From this point on he eschewed collaboration (the standard practice among other playwrights) until 1608 when the theatres were closed due to plague. By the time they reopened, Shakespeare had left off acting and moved back to Stratford and his later work is more influenced by other playwrights, especially those with whom he began to collaborate, than his fellow actors. 

It's a compelling argument, no where more convincing than when Van Es considers the company member who provided the comedy lead. Until 1599 this was Will Kemp, a clown, famous for his physical ability and his jigs. Shakespeare wrote the parts of Bottom in a Midsummer Night's Dream, Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, and possibly Falstaff in Henry IV (parts 1 and 2) and The Merry Wives of Windsor. After 1599 the comic character changes completely. Robert Armin, replacing Kemp, was a 'fool' in the old jester tradition. His portrayal of Touchstone in As You Like It signalled a change to a much more reflective humour which, via Feste in Twelfth Night, Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, and Lavatch in All's Well That End's Well, culminated in the Fool in King Lear.

The book also helped me understand why Shakespeare should have been so willing to collaborate in his later plays - Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the lost Cardenio - with John Fletcher. Shakespeare was interested by Fletcher's development of dramatic art, perhaps especially because Fletcher was experienced in writing for indoor spaces (and the Blackfriars Theatre was now in use). Fletcher's 'The Shepherdess' seems to have been a source for both The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. “Ultimately, what the connection with Fletcher amounts to is the embrace of conscious literary artifice.” (Ch 13)

It's also very interesting on Senecan revenge tragedy. 

Selected quotes:

• “Shakespeare's early drama is often spectacularly imitative and as a result his personal voice is much less distinct.” (Ch 1)
• “The phenomenon of the attached poetic playwright (writing for only one company) was initiated by Shakespeare.” (Ch 4)
• “Very likely the role of Starveling was taken by John Sincler, a hired man of the Chamberlain’s company, who was famously emaciated.” (Ch 4)
• “The boys’ theatre had something of a modern arthouse culture” (Ch 10)

An intriguing theory backed up by a convincing argument in a very readable book.

June 2025; 311 pages

Published by the Oxford University Press in 2013

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Shakespeare" by Bill Bryson

This might be a short, lightweight and very readable biography of the Bard but its 'evidence first' approach debunks a number of myths.

For example, the book considers whether Shakespeare spent his lost years in a Roman Catholic household in Lancashire and finds no evidence for it. It comprehensively debunks the theories that the plays were written by Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford and lists the considerable evidence that they were written by ... William Shakespeare. Though it does show that he lifted some of his material from his sources. 

I also learned that the Curtain Theatre had no curtains.

A perfect introductory biography to this great playwright.

Selected quotes:

• “Even the most careful biographers sometimes take a supposition ... and convert it within a page or two to some-[page break]thing like a certainty.” (Ch 1)
• “We know more about Shakespeare then about almost any other dramatist of his age.” (Ch 1)
• “A standard part of a teacher's training ... was how to give a flogging.” (Ch 2)
• "Vegetables were eaten mostly by those who could afford nothing better.” (Ch 3)
• “For foreigners English ale was an acquired taste even then ... it was ‘cloudy like horse’s urine’.” (Ch 3)
• “Shakespeare was a wonderful teller of stories so long as someone else had told them first.” (Ch 5)

May 2025; 195 pages

First published in 2007 by HarperPress

My updated paperback edition was issued by William Collins in 2016

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Ivy: the Life of I. Compton-Burnett" by Hilary Spurling

Ivy Compton-Burnett wrote short, heavily-mannered novels. Their settings are traditional, often revolving around an upper-middle-class family in a big house, with servants. But her style was revolutionary. An early reviewer (Raymond Mortimer in the New Statesman in  1935) said: “At first sight her work strikes you as clumsy and heavy-fisted; her figures, though solid, are not what is called ‘life-like’, and she composes her books on highly defined and artificial designs. In fact, she is open to all the reproaches laid upon the founders of post-impressionism.” Natalie Sarraute (author of Tropismes and one of the pioneers of nouveau roman) ranked her with Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka. She is almost completely forgotten today.

She was born as the eldest child from the second marriage of her father, an extraordinary man who rose from humble beginnings to become England's leading homoeopathic doctor. She had five surviving half-siblings and five full-siblings; not one of the children had children of their own. She herself died an unmarried virgin (her books show an early tolerance of homosexuality but there is no evidence that she herself was a lesbian). She was educated in Hove and in Bedford before attending university at Royal Holloway College. Her first novel Dolores showed the influence of George Eliot and Victorian writers, then the First World War intervened, bringing the break up of her family home (which Ivy had ruled like a tyrant after the death of her mother), the death of favourite brother and the death by suicide of her two youngest sisters. She set up home with another woman, Margaret Jourdain, "a published poet and prose poet, an editor and essayist, translator and disciple of Baudelaire and the symbolists, as well as a regular reviewer for the literary weeklies.” who specialised in books about the decorative arts. Then, in 1925, she published Pastors and Masters and her new style was born. Over the next forty years she wrote another eighteen books. She died a Dame and widely revered by other writers such as L P Hartley (author of The Go-Between), Rosamund Lehmann (Invitation to the Waltz), Elizabeth Bowen (The Heat of the Day) and Elizabeth Taylor (Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont).  

This biography gives a real flavour of her life and places it squarely in the context of her childhood; her work is referred to wherever possible (which means that the books sometimes appear in non-chronological order). There are a lot of characters (Ivy's ten siblings, Margaret's nine - and none of them reproduced either - not to mention friends, other relations, and other writers, and I sometimes had to make notes to keep track of them all. But the book seems to manage the trick of being exhaustive while not exhausting, comprehensive while not over-detailed, thorough and yet readable. I doubt it will be read by anyone who is not one of ICB's small and dwindling number of fans, but the effort is more than worthwhile.

Selected quotes:

• “Ivy seems to have been a [page break] resolutely reticent small girl, learning early that principle of concealment which was afterwards invariably central to her theory of survival.” (Ch 2)
• "Ignorance ... enables the insensitive safely and with a good conscience to practise all forms of meanness.” (Ch 3)
• “We weren't allowed bicycles in case we will run over, we weren't allowed to swim in case we drowned, we weren't allowed to ride in case we had a fall.” (Ch 5)
• “Margaret herself sided emphatically with the spinsters in Ivy's books who are apt to reply to any suggestion that marriage might mean a fuller life: ‘ I don't want the things it would be full of’.” (Ch 11)
• "Reading ‘Elders and Betters’ was like sucking a lemon ... she often felt inclined to hurl the lemon to the far end of the room but was aware that she would have to get up and pick it up again.” (Ch 14)

October 2024; 545 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

ICB Bibliography

• Dolores (1911)
• Pastors and Masters (1925)
• Brothers and Sisters (1929)
• Men and Wives (1931)
• More Women Than Men (1933)
• A House and Its Head (1935)
• Daughters and Sons (1937)
• A Family and a Fortune (1939)
• Parents and Children (1941)
• Elders and Betters (1944)
• Manservant and Maidservant (1947)
• Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949)
• Darkness and Day (1951)
• The Present and the Past (1953)
• Mother and Son (1955)
• A Father and His Fate (1957)
• A Heritage and Its History (1959)
• The Mighty and Their Fall (1961)
• A God and His Gifts (1963)
• The Last and the First (posthumous, 1971)

"Orwell: The Authorised Biography" by Michael Shelden

 A biography, authorised by the literary executors, of Eric Blair who, under the pen name of George Orwell wrote, among other works:

• Animal Farm
• 1984
• Down and Out in Paris and London
• The Road to Wigan Pier
• Homage to Catalonia

Eric Blair was born in Bengal where his father was involved in selling opium under the auspices of the Indian Civil Service, an administrator for the British Raj. He went to a prep school in Eastbourne and then Eton College; he then joined the British Empire as a policeman in Burma, hated working for imperialism, and embarked on a career as a novelist and journalist for the political left wing. To further these goals he became a tramp in London and a dishwasher in Paris, he joined the republican army to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and lived in a cheap lodging house in Wigan. He adopted a baby, ran a village store in remote Hertfordshire, and lived on the Scottish island of Jura 25 miles from the nearest shop. This enormously readable biography not only chronicles the remarkable life of this unusual individual but also gives an insight into his work, both fiction and journalism. 

As with many biographies of this sort, some of the delight is in encountering other people were touched by the life of the principal. Thus, Orwell knew Cyril Connolly both at Eastbourne and Eton and in later life. He was at Eton with Steven Runciman who became an expert in the history of Constantinople. As a young man, Orwell worked as a private tutor to, among others, Richard Peters who became Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of London, one of my alma maters. His second wife had been the lover of Lucian Freud. I love this sort of thing: within seven steps I can link myself to Sigmund Freud ...

Selected quotes:

• "St Cyprian's appears to have been a prison camp cunningly disguised as a top-notch, expensive preparatory school." (Ch 2)
• "He regards the loss of self-respect as a fate worse than poverty. In his eyes beggars are contemptible only if they come to share society's contempt for them." (Ch 9)
• "It is clearly past any hope of reform when the empire-builders are reduced to fighting over who has the right to kick the butler - completely ignoring the question of whether anyone should have that right in the first place." (Ch 10)
• "What Orwell is describing is ... the use of a dual perspective to bring into intimate contact two normally separate worlds." (Ch 10)
• "'Every book is a failure', he remarked in later years, but as soon as one 'failure' was complete, he could not wait to go on to write the next, always unsatisfied, always in doubt about his talent but always intent on doing his work better." (Ch 10)
• "A shilling was deducted from the man's pay whenever a fellow miner was killed - the money was contributed to a fund for the widow - but this deduction, or 'stoppage' occurred with such grim regularity that the company used a rubber stamp marked 'Death stoppage' to make the notation on the pay checks." (Ch 12)
• "The poor in Marrakech ... are, of course, all too visible, with their rags and outstretched hands, their physical afflictions, their corpses. But Orwell knows that these conditions exist because the colonial powers who could improve them have chosen not to see them." (Ch 15)
• "The one serious defect in the novel [Coming Up For Air] is Orwell's attempt to be the voice of his narrator-protagonist. He does not make a convincing middle-aged, overweight, suburban-dwelling, low-brow insurance salesman." (Ch 16)
• "Orwell finds numerous examples in Dickens's work of significant flaws - the cloying sentimentality, the over-reliance on character types, the superficial understanding of commercial and industrial work, the hopelessly unrealistic endings, the avoidance of genuine tragedy." (Ch 16)
• "Connolly wrote a short piece about a love affair between a young man and a woman in a totalitarian state headed by 'Our Leader', whose face looks down on people from neon signs high above the streets. The young man is arrested for treason, tortured by officials from the Censor's Department and forced into approving his death sentence." (Ch 17)
• "For most writers the use of slang or other informal expressions creates dangerous pitfalls, tempting them to be too casual in the construction of sentences." (Ch 18)
• "There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin." (Ch 18)
• "The philistines are determined to deny the independence of artistic vision, while it defenders are just as determined to exalt it beyond the reach of criticism." (Ch 20) Orwell wanted to be able to defend an artist's art while still admitting that the artist themselves might be an obnoxious specimen of humanity.
• "He wanted to establish just the right tone for the novel, and he wanted to show in the very style of his own prose how much would be lost in a future world dominated by the impoverished vocabulary of Newspeak." (Ch 22)
• "There must be time for wandering among old churchyards and making the perfect cup of tea and balancing caterpillars on a stick and falling in love. All these things are derided as sentimental and trivial by intellectuals ... but they are the things which form the real texture of a life." (Ch 22)

That rare biography which is at once comprehensive, and easy-to-read and offers a good insight into its subject. May 2024; 489 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"William Shakespeare: his life and work" by Anthony Holden

 

A competent biography of the celebrated playwright. Much of the details I already knew. What this book adds is a (slightly speculative) suggestion that Shakespeare was a closet-Catholic in his youth, having lived in a Catholic household in Lancashire during the 'lost years' when he was young. I also hugely enjoyed the very start of chapter one in which Holden roundly trashes the "usually snobbish attempts" to deny that Shakespeare was the author of the plays via conspiracy theories that must assume that Ben Jonson and Robert Greene and Will Kemp and King James I all lied when naming Shakespeare as a playwright/actor/shareholder. 

While one can always quibble with anybody about the chronology of the plays (eg the BBC recently put Titus Andronicus first, as a collaboration with George Peele, while Holden gives primacy to Henry VI), this book is a useful reference for sources; it is both scholarly and well written.

A useful addition to the canon. Other works about Shakespeare reviewed in this blog can be found on this page.

November 2023; 328 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Rebecca West: A Modern Sibyl" by Carl Rollyson

This is a biography of the journalist and novelist Rebecca West. It's one of those biographies that seeks to chronicle every aspect of the subject's life, and it is a literary biography that carefully describes each book she wrote. As a fellow novelist, what really interests me about a writer is not whom they have sex with or where they lived but about how they worked, what they saw as 'good' and 'bad' writing, their literary influences, and how (and why) their art matured as they grew older. This book manages this to a certain extent (more than many others) but I was a little overwhelmed by all the rest of the stories. Though some were fun.

My overall impression of Cicely Fairfield who named herself 'Rebecca West' after a feisty Ibsen heroine is that I wouldn't have liked her very much. She was likened by her niece to a firework: great fun but rather dangerous. This was a woman who took no hostages. She had forthright opinions and was able to express them in pithy and often unforgettable prose but I doubt she was ever very charitable. She believed (and I suspect she took pleasure in the notion) that she rendered some of her lovers impotent. Her relationship with her son (whom she packed off to boarding school when he was three) showed minimal understanding, little kindness and a lot of mutual anger. And yet this is the woman who wrote The Return of the Soldier, a novel that has compassion at its very heart (though not, perhaps, for Kitty). 

One characteristic which is shared, I imagine, with many novelists, is that “Rebecca could not tell a story without exaggerating, or as some would have it, lying.” (Rebecca West: a Portrait)

Her childhood was the classic late Victorian one of genteel poverty. Her father abandoned the family when she was eight or nine and died when she was thirteen after which her mother typed theses for a living but managed to put three girls through school (though Rebecca was clearly a challenging student) although they subsisted on a “dreary diet of bread and butter, porridge and eggs and milk.” 

Politically she was a suffragette and a very early feminist. But her iconoclastic approach meant that she was often regarded as a rather renegade socialist. She believed from its start that the Soviet Union would prove authoritarian and she considered pacificism naive. “Do you believe that you are going to abolish Cancer if you get 100,000 people to sign a pledge that they do not intend to have Cancer?” (Ch 18) Neither view endeared her to the comrades.

She is perhaps best known for her affair with the much older H G Wells which resulted (on the day that Britain joined the First World War) in an illegitimate son who later became the novelist Anthony West. Although HG was a notorious adulterer (at the funeral of one of his mistresses, "Rebecca is supposed to have turned to [another of his mistresses] Odette and remarked, ‘Well, I guess we can all move one up’.”), she seems to have made much of the running and they seemed to have been in love for ten years, even though he never left his wife. She also had affairs with, among many others, Max Beaverbrook and Charlie Chaplin. In  her eighties she responded to Warren Beatty asking her about her sex life by telling him: "I have some time free on Thursday afternoons."

Her husband was an (apparently financially incompetent) banker who had numerous affairs and was, in later life, a really bad driver. 

She travelled in pre-WW2 Yugoslavia; perhaps her best book is a thinly fictionalised account of her travels there. During WW2 she hosted Yugoslav exiles and refugees at her farmhouse. Following that war she covered the Nuremberg trials and wrote a book analysing the nature of treason when covering the controversial trial of Law Haw Haw.

In later life she repeatedly fell out with her son and other members of her family, and with her friends, and with her staff. Given that she was born in the nineteenth century, it was wonderful to discover that she enjoyed watching Star Trek and that she had to be evacuated because she lived next door to the Iranian Embassy when it was occupied by terrorists. She was born before powered air flight, before commercial radio broadcasts and before television. Some lives experience so much change. 

There was much to enjoy in this biography but there was too much detail. I didn't need to hear about every visit she made to her son and his family. I would have preferred a better focused, broader brush approach.

Selected quotes: 

• “She provided vivid portraits of the defendants such as Goering, whose soft, feminine, and sometimes humorous qualities reminded Rebecca of a madam in a brothel.” (Ch 25)
• “Henry thought of himself as a gentleman farmer and liked to give guests the benefit of his agricultural knowledge, which in fact was negligible.” (Ch 34)
• “She was against censorship, but she objected to literature that had no moral standard” (Ch 34)
• “Dr. Stephan Ward, she concluded, represented a society that used women as commodities. Look at the way he had taken home a prostitute simply because he had spotted her standing next to a cigarette machine, Rebecca emphasized, ‘two machines standing side by side, waiting for custom’.” (Ch 34)
• “For her, dialogue, much more than description, revealed character. In her Sunday Telegraph reviews she chided novelists such as Iris Murdoch for talking too much about their characters rather than letting them talk.” (Ch 36)
• “She calmed herself by watching television, finding a ‘nice idiotic’ episode of Star Trek” (Ch 39)
• “On 30 April 1980, at about eleven a.m., April Edwards happened to look out of Rebecca’s big picture windows, which had a view of the back of the Iranian embassy. In the garden, a man was lying on his stomach with a gun in his hand.” (Ch 41)

October 2023

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Dracula Secrets" by Neil R Storey

 This book is subtitled "Jack the Ripper and the darkest sources of Bram Stoker".

It's a strange mixture of biography of Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, from his early days at Trinity College Dublin to his long employment as the Actor Manager for Henry Irving and the London Lyceum Theatre. It touches on Stoker's friend, the author Hall Caine, who was hugely popular, rivalling Dickens, in late Victorian England and to whom Dracula is dedicated. It then details the career of quack American 'doctor' Francis Tumblety, who was a great friend (and possibly homosexual lover) of Hall Caine. Finally, we learn about the Whitechapel murders committed by Jack the Ripper.

The author's thesis is that Tumblety was the Ripper and that he confided in Hall Caine, this then becoming known by Stoker. The evidence for this is that Tumblety was suspected by the Met (but that he broke bail and fled to America) and that there were persistent rumours about Tumblety. This is supported by the fact that Hall Caine wrote a story in which an American confessed to a murder and the fact the the Special (Irish) Branch of Scotland Yard were interested in Tumblety who may have had associations with the Fenians, an Irish revolutionary group (some Scotland Yard detectives thought the Ripper crimes to be the work of a secret society). But a lot of the evidence is given as conjecture and insinuation:

• Tumblety "had a seeming mania for the company of young men" (Ch 9) so therefore he must have been homosexual. His feelings toward women was said to be violently denunciatory (Ch 10). 
• Bram Stoker died of a condition associated with syphilis and his wife (by whom he had only one son early in the marriage) didn't appear to suffer from the condition (Ch 10) which implies that he was homosexual. This is reinforced by the fact that Stoker's wife's only previous boyfriend had been Oscar Wilde (Ch 9)
• Tumblety sent telegrams from Piccadilly which was known to be a place where homosexual men picked up rent boys AND is a place where Jonathan Harker spots the Count in Dracula. (Ch 9)
• Tumblety was arrested in New York in June 1889 for soliciting young lads. (Ch 9)
• Two "imitation rings" were found in his effects after Tumblety died ... and two brass rings were taken from the body of Annie Chapman, a Ripper victim. (Ch 10)
• In Dracula, the count stores coffins in an address of Chicksands Street ... which is in Whitechapel (Ch 9)
• "Could this have been the voice of a murderer?" (Ch 9)
• "Could Caine's story have been influenced by an American doctor?" (Ch 9)
• "A man who had almost certainly been his homosexual lover" (Ch 9)
• "Is it possible that Caine and Tumblety could have met during the period of the Ripper crimes?" (Ch 9)

Some of the evidence contradicts itself, and this seems ignored by the author. For example, he quotes a letter from Chief Inspector Littlechild who headed Special Branch during the Ripper murders who says that Tumblety was a person of interest but "he was not known as a sadist (which the murderer unquestionably was)" (Ch 8) He quotes testimony at length from a man who claimed Tumblety had a collection of the pickled insides of women and later admits that the writer was "a perjurer and a fabricator of stories ... but ... her was not a pathological liar" (Ch 10). Another testimony claims that Tumblety recruited a young man as an amanuensis "as he personally was most illiterate" and later says that Tumblety sent many letters to this young man (Ch 9); he can't have been illiterate and a prolific letter-writer. 

To sum up, there is more rhetoric than evidence presented. 

• Nevertheless, there is a lot of fascinating information, especially for the ghoulish: 
• After Dante Gabriel Rossetti's model, muse and wife Elizabeth Siddal died he buried with her some love poems; he later regretted this and had her disinterred so he could publish them. His agent "conniver and blackmailer" Charles Augustus Howell oversaw the disinterment and, after Rosetti's own death, was found with his throat slit and a ten shilling coin in his mouth "a final payment for a slanderer". (Ch 9)
• Caine was a great friend of Rossetti and was with him at his death in Westcliff on Sea.
• Dracula was originally set in Styria in south-eastern Austria which was also where Le Fanu's Carmilla was set. (Ch 9)
• Stoker and his wife and son were the models for a cartoon by George du Maurier who wrote Trilby in 1894 which starred Svengali, the evil mesmerist. (Ch 9)
• In 1885 a Russian ship, the Dimitry, ran aground at Whitby; this was presumably the model for the 'Demeter from Valna' which carried Dracula to land (in the shape of a black dog) at Whitby. (Ch 9)
• Bram Stoker admired Christine Nilsson, a swedish operatic soprano; "it has been suggested Gaston Leroux based his character Christine Daae in Phantom of the Opera (1910) on her". (Ch 9)
• Pre-Vampire literature includes the German poem Lenore, about a horse ride with Death, and Irish legends of the Dearg-dul (red blood sucker) (Ch 1) not to mention the work of Sheridan Le Fanu (Ch 2)
• Stoker knew Oscar Wilde at Trinity College (Ch 2)

Much of interest, but the author fails to make his case.

November 2022; 252 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"George Eliot" by Jenny Uglow

Although biographically arranged, and giving details of Eliot's life, this is more of a literary criticism of Eliot's works written from a predominantly feminist perspective. I therefore found it most interesting when it dealt with one of the novels I have read (Middlemarch, The Mill on the Floss, Adam Bede, Silas Marner) and somewhat obscure when dealing with a book I have yet to read. 

Selected quotes:

• “Evangelical teaching often linked two ideas, which one can trace in Eliot's fiction - that women were the more sensitive, emotional sex and that their ‘natural’ maternal Instincts were inseparably linked to an ethic of self-renunciation.” (Ch 1)
• “The still lingering mistake, that an unintelligible dialect is a guarantee for ingenuousness, and that slouching shoulders indicate an upright disposition.” (Ch 3)
• “She took a male pseudonym ... to avoid being caught in a net of critical prescriptions and sanctions - no one laid down rules about ‘men's novels’.” (Ch 5)
• “It is important to notice that Eliot does not wish to banish the Madonna altogether, she merely demands that she be balanced by the old women scraping carrots.” (Ch 6)
• "The law of consequences in fact increases personal responsibility, for our actions can set off a chain of reactions as inexorable as those described by a law of physics, and this chain stretches far beyond our own lives because society is a complex interlinked body and not a random collection of individuals.” (Ch 11)
• “We feel the current of great events running through the novel like the main stream of a river, but what we experience are the eddies near the bank on which we are placed as readers.” (Ch 12)
• “Marian became increasingly irritated by the arrogance of the English upper classes, so evident in the growing concentration on Empire. Her dismay was fostered ... by her long-standing championship of European culture.” (Ch 13)
• “how can it be, when space and time make the individual as insignificant as a dot on a page, that a personal event like an unhappy marriage can be so overwhelming as to blot out the sun?” (Ch 13)
• “Gambling ... is one way ... that people feel they can fling aside the overt rules which govern their existence.” (Ch 13)
• “The impulse to surrender ... so destructive when turned inwards, is closely akin to the artist’s abnegation of self.” (Ch 13)

Other biographies of George Eliot reviewed in this blog:

George Eliot: A Life by Rosemary Ashton

April 2022; 305 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God