The Little Professor

My Year in Books

Favorite fiction: Jon Clinch, The General and Julia; Amy Crider, Kells; Liam Davison, The White Woman; John Ehle, The Land Breakers; Percival Everett, James; Fiona Kidman, The Captive Wife; Karen Powell, Fifteen Wild Decembers; Ann Schlee, Rhine Journey.

What is this I have just read, the sequel: Brendan Connell, Cannibals of West Papua.  

Novel least like what I was expecting: Rachel Cantor, Half-Life of a Stolen Sister.  

Novel with the best unreliable narrator: Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time.  

I admit that I did not anticipate this plot twist: Hannah Kent, Devotion.  

Most (unintentionally?) unappealing protagonist of a trilogy: Rain in Gregory Maguire's Another Day series.

Detective novel with most implausible stunt by the main character: Ian Rankin, A Song for the Dark Times.  

Detective novelist who appears to have developed Doyle/Christie Syndrome: Ian Rankin (albeit in regards to supporting character Malcolm Fox).

Most lugubrious detective series, ongoing: John Banville, The Lock-Up.

Most metafictional detective novel: Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook.  

Horror author I'm enjoying at the moment: Nathan Ballingrud.  

Most brutal Victorian historical novel: Emily Lawless, Maelcho.  

Best novel reread for class: Charles Dickens, Bleak House.  

Victorian religious novel title most likely to cause confusion in the 21st century: W. J. Conybeare, Perversion.  

Most "I'm beginning to think this author may be confused" experience while reading a Victorian religious novel: F. W. Robinson, High Church.  

Excerpt from a Victorian religious novel most likely to make students go "???!!!!": the "Story on the Sixth Commandment" from Mrs. Sherwood, History of the Fairchild Family (the one with the rotting corpse).

Victorian novel eliciting the most "This novel is a great candidate for distant reading.  As in, why am I not 100 miles distant from this novel" response from me: Lucas Malet, The History of Sir Richard Calmady.  

Moment of greatest not-altogether-scholarly exasperation: discovering that a novella by Malet was a loose sequel to Richard Calmady.  

Most "well, that was convenient" death in a early twentieth-century religious novel: Josephine Ward, The Light Behind.  

Best antiquarian acquisition: Anne Carus Wilson (wife of William, a.k.a. Mr. Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre), Children's Stories in Children's Words. (Most copies of this book have vanished.)

Monograph I'm really excited to read next year: Joseph McQueen, Liturgy, Ritual, and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature.  

Saltiest monograph: M. Wynn Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit.  

My Year in Books

Favorite historical fiction: William Golding, The Spire; Benjamin Myers, Beastings; Benjamin Myers, Cuddy; Kate Atkinson, Shrines of Gaiety; Fred D'Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts; Hernan Diaz, In the Distance.  

Favorite neo-Victorian mashup: Adam Roberts, The Death of Sir Martin Marprelate.

Favorite political allegory: Raphaela Edelbauer (trans. Jen Calleja), The Liquid Land.  

Favorite biofiction: Karen Powell, Fifteen Wild Decembers.  

Only religious memoir with an autopsy report included?: William Carus Wilson, Memoir of a Beloved and Long-Afflicted Sister.

Best horror-cum-social satire: Joan Samson, The Auctioneer.  

Novel eliciting the most "wait, what did I just read" reaction: Brendan Connell, The Translation of Father Torturo.

Victorian ghost stories I'm always happy to reread: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, "At Chrighton Abbey"; Elizabeth Gaskell, "The Old Nurse's Story."

Most Gothic biography: Daphne du Maurier, The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte.   

Favorite little-known psychological horror novel: Frank Baker, The Twisted Tree.   

Trend that I hope is coming to a close: Sherlock Holmes mashed up with Lovecraft.  

Mystery series I thought couldn't get any more lugubrious, and yet, it did: John Banville's Quirke (no longer published under the Benjamin Black pseudonym?).

Novels with endings that made me say "...really?!": Maggie O'Farrell, The Marriage Portrait; Elizabeth Hand, A Haunting on the Hill.  

Most unusual horror collection: Brian Evenson, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell.

Favorite horror anthology: Joyce Carol Oates, ed., A Darker Shade of Noir.  

Most competent long poem by Branwell Bronte?: "Sir Henry Tunstall."

Most competent Victorian religious novelist: Emma Jane Worboise.  

Most cheerful Victorian religious novel: J. W. Keyworth,  Willie's Secret. 

Best friend (well, arguably) of a famous novelist with the worst handwriting: Ellen Nussey.  

Victorian clergyman-diarist least willing to take a stand on anything: Henry Nussey.  You would think that the man could at least have an opinion about witnessing people speaking in tongues, but apparently not.  

Grimmest experience reading nineteenth-century correspondence: a tie between Thomas J. Wise making off with chunks of Ellen Nussey's collection of Charlotte Bronte's letters and his buddy Clement Shorter making off with (just about all of) Arthur Bell Nicholls' collection of Charlotte Bronte's everything else.   

Most grudging antiquarian purchase: a volume of William Carus Wilson's sermons.  

Most aggravating experience teaching with e-texts: a website I had been using for years suddenly vanished without a trace.  

There is no excuse for a POD book to cost this much: Margaret Smith, ed., The Letters of Charlotte Bronte: Volume Three.  

A Victorian religious novelist sells a copyright, 1870

Here's an interesting document that just came into my possession: it's a memorandum between Emily Sarah Holt and the publisher John F. Shaw for the sale of copyright to her novel Sister Rose:

The witnesses are Holt's brother James Maden Holt, MP and his fiancee, Anna Haworth.  Holt sold the copyright for forty-two pounds.

One of the problems with writing the history of nineteenth-century religious fiction from the nuts-and-bolts angle--copyrights, royalties, correspondence with publishers, recruiting authors, in-house readers, etc.--is that virtually all of the publishers' archives have simply vanished.  This is true even for still-extant publishers like the Religious Tract Society (now Lutterworth), where only partial records are available, and Burns and Oates (now Sheed and Ward), where the backfile survives but apparently not anything else.  It's quite possible that some archives are still hanging about in attics or on top of wardrobes!  This is the first time I have come across anything from John F. Shaw, a publisher with a large trade in relatively inexpensive Evangelical prize books.  

In 1870, Holt would have been at the beginning of her novel-writing career.  She had published a work of historical biography in 1861, Memoirs of Royal Ladies (2 vols.), with Hurst and Blackett, but the book was not well-received--not least because such collective biographies were regarded as an overworked genre by that point.  However, after regrouping, she had a good reception for Mistress Margery: A Tale of the Lollards (Shaw, 1868).  Holt was therefore not an unknown quantity, but not an established bestseller, either.  For comparative purposes, one of the Religious Tract Society's most popular novelists, Hesba Stretton, had up until the mid-1860s been receiving "between 30 guineas and £50 for single-volume stories," [1] which suggests that for this type of publisher and this type of book, £42 would not have been outrageously low.  It would be interesting to see what Holt was able to command a decade later.  

[1] Elaine Lomax, The Writings of Hesba Stretton: Reclaiming the Outcast (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 74.  

My Year in Books

Favorite historical novels: Naivo, Beyond the Rice Fields; Mirandi Riwoe, Stone Sky Gold Mountain; Julie Janson, Benevolence; Stevie Davies, Awakening; Rose Tremain, Lily: A Tale of Revenge.

Favorite genre anthologies: Jess Walter, ed., The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022; Mark Morris, ed., Close to Midnight.

Favorite single-author short story genre collection: Lisa Tuttle, The Dead Hours of Night.

Favorite genre deconstructions: John Darnielle, Devil House (true crime); J. W. Ocker, Twelve Nights at Rotter House (haunted house).

Favorite horror novel: Alison Rumfitt, Tell Me I'm Worthless. 

Author whose willingness to make himself look terrible in fiction never ceases to amaze: Anthony Horowitz's Hawthorne series.

Guaranteed to be the least-interesting villain in any neo-Victorian novel: Jack the Ripper.

Series detective with the most unconvincing ongoing career: Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus.

Somewhat puzzling genre development: multiple haunted-house novels that were just not...scary? (Not even in a "protagonist forced to plumb the depths of their misbegotten psyche" way.)

Biography with the most overblown title: John Lock and W. T. Dixon, A Man of Sorrow: The Life, Letters, and Times of the Reverend Patrick Bronte,  1777-1861.

Favorite biography: Michael Ledger-Lomas, Queen Victoria: This Thorny Crown.

After owning this monograph for nearly three decades, I finally have a reason to cite it: Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook.

Favorite book reread for class: Henry James, The Turn of the Screw.

Most antiquarian book purchase: a Religious Tract Society sammelband, featuring tracts published between 1785-90.  

 

Howl! It's the annual Halloween Horror post...Christmas edition?!

Well, technically,  the Christmas Annual edition! As all good Victorianists know, the proper season for ghost stories was Christmas, so this year, I bring ghost stories published in Victorian periodicals' Christmas numbers.

• Anon., "Catherine's Quest" (Tinsley's Magazine, 1868).  A young woman has a very detailed dream about the intrigues (and murders) committed by her ancestors.  Also, there's a chest with human remains.  
• ---, "Experiences of Farthing Lodge" (Chambers' Journal, 1864).  Renters discover that on the fifteenth of each month, they share their lodgings with...something else.  
• Charles Collins, "No. 3 Branch Line.  The Compensation House" (All the Year Round, 1866).  A man has a very strange aversion to mirrors.
• W. W. Fenn, "The Steel Mirror: A Christmas Dream" (Routledge's Christmas Annual, 1867).  Prophetic mirrors are always aggravating, especially when somebody misreads the prophecy.  
• Eliza Lynn Linton, "Christmas Eve in Beach House" (Routledge's Christmas Annual, 1870).  An artist's wife has a very bad feeling about one of the locals.  Scandalous revelations eventually ensue.  This annual also includes a comic (and not well-executed) story about a young clerk obsessed with his employer's money, with what one presumes are ultimately fatal results, and another one about a tyrannical ship's captain who gets his comeuppance.
• ---, "The Legend of Lady House" (Routledge's Christmas Annual, 1869).  Women with dubious pasts, poisoning, curses, etc.  
• W. E. Norris, "The Specter of Strathannan" (Unwin's, 1887).  Apparently, a ghost appears to anyone who has terrible deeds upon their conscience.  Or does it?
• John Oxenford,  "His Umbrella" (All the Year Round, 1862).  A gentleman finds himself stuck with an aggravatingly persistent umbrella.
• Robert Reece,  "The Ghost in the Green Room" (Routledge's Christmas Annual, 1880).  The ghost of a failed actor decides it's finally time to get onstage.  

My (Second) Pandemic Year in Books

(Like rather a lot of other people, or so Twitter tells me, I found myself unable to read for anything except work for much of 2021.  More recently, I've found myself getting fully back into the swing of things.)

Best postcolonial rewrite of Adam and Eve: Michael Crummey, The Innocents.  

Best historical novels: Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet; Mudrooroo, Master of the Ghost Dreaming.

Best postapocalyptic novel: Paul Kingsnorth, Alexandria.  

Neo-Victorian fiction will be immensely improved by forgetting this personage ever existed: Jack the Ripper.  

"Well, that's a plot twist," I said, dubiously: Christian Klaver, The Classfied Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula.

Sherlock Holmes novel that unintentionally makes a good case for the current Mrs. Watson divorcing the Doctor: Nicholas Meyer, The Return of the Pharoah: From the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.

Perhaps we are exhausting this mine of pastiches: Sherlock Holmes.  

Novelist most willing to make himself look incompetent in fiction: Anthony Horowitz, A Line to Kill.  

Most interesting tribute anthology: When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson.

Best horror anthology: The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, Volume One.  

Most epic schlimazels in the history of horror?: the protagonists of Gretchen Felker-Martin, Ego Homini Lupus.  

Creepiest use of medical terminology: Michael Blumlein, "Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report" (in Ellen Datlow, Body Shocks).

Most disturbing revenge tale: Kaaron Warren, "A Positive" (ditto).

Favorite monograph sent for review: Josephine McDonagh, Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815-1876.

Favorite monographs on literature and religion: Christopher Stokes, Romantic Prayer: Reinventing the Poetics of Devotion, 1773-1832; Christopher D. Phillips, The Hymnal: A Reading History. 

Favorite historical monographs: Joseph Hardwick, An Anglican British World: The Church of England and the Expansion of the Settler Empire, c. 1790-1860; Rachel Wheeler, To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and MIssionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast.

Academic publisher whose business model I continue not to understand: Palgrave Macmillan.    

Finally, I found a copy of this: Rachel McCrindell, The Convent; A Narrative, Founded on Fact.  

Physically smallest book purchased this year: Old Jessie, The Hindoo Mother (a Methodist tract).

Most underrated short story by a Victorian woman writer?: Geraldine Jewsbury, "Agnes Lee."

Best mildly irate Victorian response to Jane Eyre: Margaret Oliphant, "The Story of a Wedding-Tour."

Least-enjoyable epic-length nineteenth-century poem: Charlotte Elizabeth, Osric.  

Every time I teach it, I am again convinced that this is Mary Elizabeth Braddon's best short story: "At Chrighton Abbey."

Victorian ghost stories of a sort that tend not to be anthologized: Mrs. Molesworth, The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction.  

Modernist novel with the worst TV adaptation: Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier. 

 

 

Hark! It's this year's installment of Hellacious and Horrific Happenings for Halloween! Academia Edition

This blog arises from the dead for its annual cavalcade of horror stories.  This year, we feature...haunted professors, students, and academics of all stripes, somewhat loosely construed.  OK, very loosely construed.  In a number of cases, the horror is also somewhat loosely construed...

• "The Harvard College Ghost" (Ghost Stories: Collected with a Particular View to Counteract the Vulgar Beliefs in Ghost and Apparitions, 1846).  A prank goes off script.  
• "The College Ghost.  A Legend of Old South Middle" (Yale Literary Magazine, 1856).  A young man is visited by a ghastly vision that actually turns out to be a pretty terrible pun on this edition of Horace.
• S. Baring-Gouid, "The Brunswick Ghost" (Cassell's Family Magazine, 1887).  The ghost of an academic with some unfinished business comes back looking for help.
• J. Edmund V. Cooke, "The Hypnotized Ghost" (Overland Monthly, 1893).  A hypnotist finds himself controlling his the ghost of a dead man.
• M. R. Gilkeson, "Hobgoblins" (Oliver Optic's Magazine, 1873).  For children.  A German professor is invited out to help investigate the mystery of some ghostly sounds.  
• Henry Hill, "Professor Falkenstein's Ghost Story" (Godey's Magazine, 1878).  Professor Falkenstein narrates a story about making a deal with a musical ghost, only for there to be an unexpected twist.
• [Mary Ann Hoare], "The Ghost-Raiser" (Household Words, 1852).  A skeptical student faces off against the horror raised by a fellow traveler.  Er, sort of.
• M. R. James, "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad."  A professor ignores one of the most important rules in horror fiction: never take a vacation.  
• Augustus Jessopp, "An Antiquarian's Ghost Story" (Lantern, 1977; first published in 1880).  An antiquarian doing some research has a visitor.  And that's pretty much it.
• J. S. Le Fanu, "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street" (Dublin University Magazine, 1851).  Two medical students discover that they're sharing their rooms with an unpleasant resident.
• Bram Stoker, "The Judge's House" (1891).  In a tip of the hat to Le Fanu, a student rents a house and, again, discovers that he's sharing his rooms with an unpleasant resident.
• [Walter Thornbury], "How Professor Gaster Lectured a Ghost" (All the Year Round, 1862).  After eating rather too much at dinner, Professor Gaster is surprised by the company of two chatty skeletons.  He out-chats them, however.  (In some versions, "Professor Gaster" is "Professor Pepsine.")

My (Pandemic) Year in Books

This turned out to be a really bad year for reading, what with pandemics, morphing into a department chair several months earlier than anticipated, and, er, various other sources of stress.  But still--

If I have no access to a research library to do this project, I'd better buckle down and do some investing: Yes, I buy many books, but I don't buy books with $200 pricetags.  Or, at least, I didn't until I picked up the first two volumes of Oxford's edition of Charlotte Bronte's letters.

Favorite monographs: Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire; Christopher D. Phillips, The Hymnal: A Reading History.

Object lesson in why it can be dangerous to have too many shelves: I appear to have misshelved my copy of Patrick Bronte's correspondence.  After several weeks of looking for it, I gave up and bought another copy.  I'm sure I'll find the first copy at some point.

Number of books purchased twice because I neglected to check my LibraryThing catalog first: Three.

A fine novel, but don't read it if you are already feeling gloomy: Stefan Hertmans, The Convert.

Most revolting moment in a Gothic novel: the slug in Elspeth Barker's O Caledonia.  (I am not giving details.)

Best historical novel to inadvertently subvert itself: Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & The Light.  (My theory: the novel's increasingly diffuse narrative structure reflects Cromwell's own loss of control over the "story" he had earlier been able to tell the king...except that still leaves us with an increasingly diffuse narrative structure, which, well.)

Best novels reread for class: Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go.

Number of books currently vanished into the USPS somewhere: Five, including a book that has been holed up at the Rochester distribution center for *checks notes* seventeen days.

A trend that has, one hopes, come to a halt: Sherlock Holmes vs. Cthulhu mashups.  

Favorite horror (horroresque?) novel: Andrew Michael Hurley, Devil's Day.

Book most resembling a Norton Anthology in its proportions: Andrew Sharp, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: The Life and Opinions of Samuel Marsden in England and the Antipodes, 1765-1838.

Monograph sent to me for review that also clarified something I was trying to formulate: Clara Dawson, Victorian Poetry and the Culture of Evaluation.

Now this book is back in print: Nikolai Leskov, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which I had wanted to teach last year--when it wasn't available.

Neo-Victorian series with the most varied types of filth: Mick Finlay's Arrowood.  Yes, the Rules do call for "Dirty and Damp" environs, but this series makes me want to scrub down my iPad afterwards.

Most antiquarian purchase: The Village in an Uproar; or, the Thresher's Visit to the Missionary Meeting in London, 1814.

Well, that was annoying: The Great Library Flood of 2020 from earlier in December, which took out a chunk of my floor--but, to make matters worse, took out the chunk of my floor underneath the bookshelves containing the nineteenth-century books, which is not actually convenient if you are a Victorianist.  (The books are all stacked up in an adjoining room.)

 

 

Help! It's Halloween Horror Once Again! This Year: Syllabus Edition

Yes, I disappeared off the face of the planet, but not into any haunted houses (if my own house is haunted, it hasn't let on).  Nevertheless, I have returned, zombie-like, with this year's Halloween reading list--namely, the Gothic and horror stories on the syllabus for the nineteenth-century short fiction course I'm teaching this semester.  (I should note that these are not "Gothic greatest hits," but "Gothic suiting other themes in this course, which is not primarily about the Gothic.")

• Mary Shelley, "The Mortal Immortal": Shelley's self-parody of Frankenstein, featuring jealousy, alchemy, incompetent scientific assistants, and potion-related errors.
• Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson, "Ethelred and Lidania": Gothic chapbook whose main plot line appears to owe something to Jephthah's vow (Judges 11:30-40). Involves what I guess are supposed to be Druids, and features a rather annoying deus ex machina.
• ---, "Oakcliffe Hall, or the Fatal Effects of Feudal Quarrels": another Gothic chapbook set during the reign of Henry VIII.  One of those stories in which what turns out to be the Big Problem could have been solved quickly had someone, you know, spoken up.
• David Lyndsay, "The Bridal Ornaments: A Legend of Thuringia": in order to win his beloved, a knight needs to retrieve some lost jewels.  The initial manifestation of the spirits seems to owe a lot to the falling helmet in The Castle of Otranto.  Also an example of the Gothic adage that it's a good idea to make sure that your bridegroom is a) alive and/or b) human prior to marrying him.
• Elizabeth Gaskell, "The Old Nurse's Story": probably Gaskell's best-known tale of the supernatural, featuring a haunted house and a classic creepy little girl ghost.  As always in Victorian ghost stories, it's the servants who know what's up.
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon, "At Chrighton Abbey": Braddon takes a subtle dig at Jane Eyre in this ghost story, in which the rather mundane haunting takes second place to the narrator's repressed jealousy and desire.  
• J. S. Le Fanu, "Schalken the Painter": Another example of the dead bridegroom trope, probably inherited from Gottfried Burger.  
• ---, "Carmilla": One of the nineteenth century's most famous vampires.  
• W. H. Ainsworth, "The Spectre-Bride": Look, when your boyfriend makes you swear a vow like that, you should probably be...worried, maybe?
• Rudyard Kipling, "The Phantom 'Rickshaw": a decidedly unpleasant man's adulterous dalliance ends in the woman's death.  And then, as you might expect, she comes back...
• Edith Nesbit, "From the Dead": a self-centered man reacts badly when he discovers his wife tricked him (with the best of intentions).  Things go downhill rapidly from there.
• Henry James, "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes": sisterly jealousy persists beyond the grave.
• Oscar Wilde, "The Canterville Ghost": Wilde good-naturedly shreds the entire fabric of the nineteenth-century ghost story.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jane Eyre (RNT)

Yes, still here, being department chair from my house.  

The Royal National Theatre is one of many arts organizations uploading streaming content, and given that I'm teaching a "revisions of Jane Eyre" seminar this semester, I was intrigued to see that their Jane Eyre (a collaboration with the Bristol Old Vic) was one of the plays on the agenda.  In terms of plot, the adaptation sticks closely to the original text, although there are some striking thematic deviations (and the occasional omission) that I'll discuss below.  All of the action takes place on a single abstract and geometrical set, mounted by ramps and ladders, and the musical accompaniment ranges from traditional to twentieth century (the careful listener will hear Rochester's courtship song floating by).  The costumes tend to the sparse, with the crimson-gowned Bertha Mason the best-dressed of all. This is not, in other words, a "period piece," but rather an explicitly modernized resetting of the novel that has recursively adopted some later critiques of it--for example, by making Bertha Mason into the play's Greek Chorus and casting an Afro-Caribbean actress in the role, and by validating Jane's anger instead of demanding that she moderate it.  (This Jane yells quite a bit.)  

There are two key revisions to the original that I'd like to discuss.  The first--and who can be shocked, given the blog you're reading--is the adaptation's attempt to secularize the novel.  Bronte's Jane Eyre certainly criticizes hypocrites (Brocklehurst, Mrs. Reed) and Calvinists (St. John Rivers), along with wannabe Catholics (Eliza Reed), but it's still an emphatically Christian novel: Jane-the-retrospective-writer criticizes Phase One of her passion for Rochester not just because it's mistaken, but, more importantly, because it's actually sinful ("I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol" [ch. 24]); similarly, Mr. Rochester needs to undergo a full conversion experience before he can become a suitable romantic partner.  Here, Jane's faith seems much more ambiguous and much less operational.  The play abrogates nearly all of Jane's moral jousting with Rochester, thereby erasing most of their key differences when it comes to the meaning of conscience.  Without those discussions, it's harder to see why both Jane's refusal to be Rochester's mistress and her willingness to flout convention by going to India as St. John's sister, not his wife, emerge from exactly the same principle.  Although Helen Burns seems comforted by her faith, the play mostly associates Christianity with abuse (Brocklehurst) and repression (St. John); Jane's grim outburst that God is a "loving tyrant," during her talk with a (strangely middle-aged?) Diana Rivers, is not really moderated by anything else.   Very noticeably, Mr. Rochester undergoes no conversion experience at all, and finishes the play with all limbs intact instead of experiencing Bronte's blunt-force Biblical symbolism; the character spends a good chunk of the play being gruff and kind of a jerk (although, oddly, nowhere near as manipulative as the original), but is apparently not in need of a redemption arc.  Even his marriage proposal is nowhere near as obnoxious, and unaccompanied by divine symbolism in the form of blasted trees.

Secularizing the text, though, is a common choice.  More unusual is the decision to strip Jane of her inheritance--and, for that matter, of the rest of her family, as she isn't related to the Riverses here.  (I suspect someone got a little unhappy about the whole "cousin proposing marriage" thing.) It's genuinely difficult to figure out just how far the politics of this move extend, since while Jane Eyre is set entirely prior to Britain's emancipation of slaves in the Caribbean, the adaptation's adult action is set afterwards (we know this because Jane reads from Dickens' Pickwick Papers in Act II).  While the casting of Bertha Mason points directly to the origins of Rochester's money (a sugar plantation) and, indirectly, Jane's (her uncle was a wine merchant in Madeira), the adaptation doesn't actually do anything with the point.  For it to register, viewers have to understand the novel's chronology (anecdotally, most readers think the book is set at the time Bronte wrote it) and remember, or even know, when Pickwick was published (which, doubtful).  So I think we have to assume that the choice sticks at the personal level, in which Jane maintains her agency by never entering into the more fairy-tale-esque habits of the original novel's plot.  There is no deus ex machina to reward her with the portable property necessary to hold her own against Rochester's wealth; instead, Jane does it entirely on her own gumption.  At the same time, stripping her of all connection to the (shrunken) Rivers family also means erasing her longing for relations and relating.  In the novel, the three Rivers siblings parallel and compensate for Jane's other cousins, the abusive Reeds.  But in the play, there will be no additional family outside of the one that Jane and Rochester make for themselves.  One gets the sense that nobody quite knew what to do with the Rivers family or the denouement, as this is the weakest (and hastily concluded) chunk of the play; St. John never really works as Rochester's counterpart, and the missing inheritance dissipates much of the force of Jane's time with them.  

The Incredible Disappearing Lecture Notes

My lecture notes have disappeared.

By which I mean: my older notes (from, say, a decade or so ago and more) tend to be extremely full.  They lay out all my projected comments, often in complete sentences--in other words, the notes are intended to be read.  As I've stuck around, though, I have stopped reading notes; instead, the notes are clusters of page numbers, with brief comments on what I want to highlight, arranged according to projected discussion topic.  I know what I want to say and where I want to go, but I've found that I prefer to lecture in collaborative mode--working through the text with the students--and writing out notes in full tends to preclude the flexibility that requires.  For poetry, I have extensive marginal notes and move through the text that way.  

This is not a prescriptive strategy ("what you must do to engage with students").  It's not something I would have been comfortable with at all at the beginning of my career, but rather something I arrived at over the course of two decades.  Other colleagues prefer to outline, or prepare more extensive notes, or rely on more elaborate discussion protocols.  Every approach has its uses and pitfalls (try doing discussion on a day when no student has completed the reading...); there's nothing to do but experiment and, perhaps, change over time.  Which I suppose is another way of saying that the overuse of imperatives in pedagogical discussion is not much help.  

Semester Report: Fall 2019

What sound do I hear? The sound of readers wondering where on earth I went, I imagine.  The physical "where" has to do with House the Trilogy, which had various, uh, issues that left me without furniture until (checks notes) mid-October and without unpacked books until (checks notes again) now.  As in, I finished unpacking them on Tuesday (proper shelving has now commenced).  The mental "where" followed on from the physical one, as I was admittedly rather depressed for a good chunk of the semester--and also really, really behind.  Who would possibly have thought that finishing articles on time with no access to your library might be...hard? Impossible, even?  In any event, I decided that while I could justify tweeting while I had articles overdue, I most certainly could not justify blogging.  

*sigh* Anyway.

Here are the ongoing adventures of a full professor at a regional comprehensive college in Western New York:

Teaching:

• I taught two courses (I have a course release for administrative reasons; see below), one a seminar on early Gothic and the other Honors Composition.  The seminar was an updated version of an earlier course, while composition was, as always, entirely new.  

Service:

• This is my final year as associate chair (the associate chair's position runs concurrently with the chair's, and the chair decided not to come back for another term).  There may be a further adventure on the horizon, however...
• I served on an ad hoc committee for promotion to full professor.
• I was on the graduate committee.

Scholarship:

• I completed two commissioned articles, one on women writers and Victorian Unitarianism (awaiting editorial corrections) and one on the novel and religion for a Cambridge Companion.
• I sent back the proofs on an article that may annoy some historians.  It is, appropriately enough, appearing in a history journal.
• I completed two book reviews.  
• I delivered a paper at NAVSA.  
• I signed a book contract.  

 

 

In which I check in

Life has been interesting! Also, I am behind on an article, and as I had to request an extension, I felt guilty about doing much in the way of blogging.  Nevertheless, a couple of things have happened:

1) I'm writing a book about...Charlotte Bronte! An author of whom people have actually heard! This is a momentous occasion that may never occur again, so mark the date.  (Religion, however, is still involved.  Religion is actually the point.)  In any event, the book is under contract for OUP's "Spiritual Lives" series, with a manuscript delivery date of 2024.  

2) I purchased a house with my parents, so I have been dealing with putting my current house on the market, packing up (I move next month), and handling contractors.  Needless to say, this has been eating a lot of my spare time since about March.  The new house is a Victorian mansion--

BLOG READERS: Oh, she's speaking figuratively--

--No, I mean, it's an actual 7200 sq ft Victorian mansion from 1850--

BLOG READERS: What the--

--With, um, parlors, cool decorative ceilings, lots of mahogany--

BLOG READERS: Are you even kidding me--

--OK, so we just had to install a third furnace--

BLOG READERS: Please describe your thought processes--

--It's...just a really cool house, OK? (Also, the twentieth-century section of the house is suitable for long-term parental stays, which was the point.). The twentieth-century addition has to be completely redone, but the original house, most of which will be given over to yours truly, just needs cosmetics (floor restoration, painting) and some electrical updating.  

I am now officially banned from ever complaining about a lack of space for books.

Main staircase drama (I'll need to replace the runner once all the upstairs painting is finished):

One of the neat things about the house is that many of the original details have been preserved, like the doorknobs:

Nineteenth-century glassed-in bookcases in the second parlor:

If nothing else, I will now have 19th-c. vibes to help me while I write.

This Last Few Weeks' Acquisitions

• Frederika MacDonald, Nathaniel Vaughan: Priest and Man (Asa K. Butts, 1874).  US reprint of novel about an Anglican priest suffering from increasing religious doubt.  
• Mrs. J. Sadlier, trans., Ten Stories from the French of Balleydier (Sadlier, 1866).  Catholic didactic tales for children.
• Marly; or, a Planter's Life in Jamaica, ed. Karina Williamson (Macmillan Caribbean, 2005).  Scholarly edition of an anonymous pro-slavery novel, following the experiences of a young man trying to regain his property.  First published in 1828.
• Varley O'Connor, The Welsh Fasting Girl (Bellevue, 2019).  Historical novel about an American journalist investigating Sarah Jacobs.
• Matthew Plampin, Mrs. Whistler (Borough, 2019).  Historical novel about Maud Franklin during Whistler's lawsuit against John Ruskin.  
• Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Riverhead, 2019).  First installment in a fantasy trilogy about a man's quest for a mysterious child, and its repercussions.  
• David Ceri Jones, Boyd Stanley Schlenther, Eryn Mant White, The Elect Methodists: Calvinistic Methodism in England and Wales, 1735-1811 (University of Wales, 2016).  Studies the branch of Methodism associated with George Whitefield and its influence. 
• Todd Webb, Transatlantic Methodists: British Wesleyanism and the Formation of an Evangelical Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ontario and Quebec (McGill-Queen's, 2013).  Complex international (and interpenetrating) relationships between the British and Canadian Methodist churches.
• Mary Hilton, Women and the Shaping of the Nation's Young: Education and Public Doctrine in Britain 1750-1850 (Ashgate, 2007).  How domestic pedagogy in particular was linked to the nation's moral, political, and spiritual health.
• Valerie Grosvenor Myer, Charlotte Bronte: Truculent Spirit (Barnes and Noble, 1987).  Literary study with emphasis on intellectual and religious influences.  
• Joshua King and Winter Jade Werner, eds., Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion: Literary, Historical, and Religious Studies in Dialogue (Ohio, 2019). Expanded papers based on a conference at Baylor in 2015.  (I'm in here.)
• Allan Hepburn, ed., Troubled Legacies: Narrative and Inheritance (Toronto, 2007).  Essays analyzing the inheritance trope in relationship to religion, the Gothic, national identity, gender, etc.  
• Sarah Graham, ed., A History of the Bildungsroman (Cambridge, 2019).  Essay collection covering the bildungsroman from its beginnings to the present.  (I'm reviewing this for Choice.)

On first looking into sixteen years of blog archives

Some months back, I began to think about moving the blog over to Wordpress, where it would become part of a professional site independent of my college homepage.  I soon rethought my thinking, as it were, because the blog has accrued a few scholarly citations over the years (in large part thanks to "Rules for Writing Neo-Victorian Novels"), and it would inconvenience a number of other people if their footnotes were to suddenly go--to use an advanced term--kaflooey.  However, although I decided to leave the blog in its current spot, I also decided that it was time to give the archives a severe going-over.  I've always been upfront about considering blog posts to be the equivalent of rough drafts and works-in-process, and one of the things that a writer eventually has to do with a rough draft is edit it.  In the end, after making multiple backups of the entire blog, I deleted about nine hundred posts--

OUTRAGED READER: Nine hundred posts!!! You monster!!!

--which leaves about twenty-six hundred posts still up.

OUTRAGED READER: ...ah.

In a nutshell, this is what I learned from rereading sixteen years of my blog:

1) Early academic blogging was Twitter.  There was no pre-Twitter Eden of Profound Academic Prose, from which we fell into Superficial Tweets after eating the apple from the Tree of Social Media.  Beyond the endless listicles, memes, pets, and YouTube video links, there were a lot of conversations across blogs that were delivered in posts that, in retrospect, sure look tweet-length.  Twitter helped do in academic blogging because most academic blogs (this one included) lost most of their material.  Moreover, academics have other outlets for longform writing, like Medium.  

2) A lot of urgent kerfuffles proved ephemeral.  I came across blog posts on Some Issues of Great Import and...couldn't remember why on earth I wrote them.  Nobody reads these posts (trust me, I can check my stats).  Nobody else remembers these people or these topics.  

3) The links, they have rotted.  So many dead links.  So many.  We're talking posts that are the equivalent of the walking dead.

4) While you could make a case that individual posts might belong in a tenure file, you couldn't do the same for the whole blog.  Out of everything I've written on this blog, there are perhaps two or three posts that have had a real academic afterlife.  But again, even my most serious posts are still nothing more than rough drafts, nowhere near publication-worthy.  They're just rough drafts that happen to be out in public.

So what did I delete?

1) Memes, listicles, and "linking about" posts (the last because of #3).  

2) Just about everything that was the length of a tweet, including almost all of the "news" posts (we don't need to know about a then-new and probably now non-existent web resource twelve years on).

3) Video links.

These first three categories accounted for the bulk of my deletions.  Then:

4) Anything I felt was superficial (e.g., book or film posts that, in retrospect, didn't say much of anything), irrelevant (parodies that had lost their targets, discussions of classroom technologies no longer in use, the umpteenth complaint about long-gone Chronicle of Higher Education columns, etc.), incomprehensible (to me!), or just bad.

What did I keep?

1) Just about everything under "books" and "religion" in the archive stuck around.

2) There are some now-dated posts that I decided might still be useful to younger scholars because they discussed research as a process--problems you encounter, questions that get raised as you go along, practical issues, and so on.  I also kept a number of older posts about issues in the profession that I think are still germane beyond their original occasion.  

3) I kept the year-end reading roundups, because people seem to enjoy them, and, despite the dud links, the Halloween posts (it's often possible to find the titles elsewhere).

4) The parodies that still make sense.

5) I've fallen behind on the acquisitions posts, but I've been told that people find them helpful, so I kept the category.  

6) It's the Internet, so the cats aren't going anywhere.