This Week's Acquisitions

• Elizabeth Rundle Charles, Conquering and to Conquer/The Diary of Brother Bartholomew (Dodd & Mead, n.d.). A twofer: an Early Church novel cast as a memoir and a fictional diary by a medieval monk. More on Charles at the Cyberhymnal.

• "H. G.," True to Her Faith: A Story of Persecuting Times (Gall & Inglis, [1895]). Historical novel about the travails of the Huguenots in the seventeenth century.

• John Dunlop, ed., Memories of Gospel Triumphs Among the Jews During the Victorian Era (Gall & Inglis, 1894). Extensive collection of sermons, biographies, letters, sketches, etc. celebrating the work of the various British missions to the Jews. Enormously useful if you want to discuss nineteenth-century attitudes to Judaism.

• Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love (Anchor, 2000). Parallel-plot historical novel set in 1900 and the present. A young woman explores the relationship between her great-grandparents, an English expatriate and an Egyptian nationalist.

• Thomas M. Disch and Charles Naylor, Neighboring Lives: A Novel (Johns Hopkins, 1991). Thomas Carlyle and neighbors in mid-19th c. Chelsea.

• Alec Vidler, The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church (Gordon, 1976). Classic study of the Roman Catholic Modernist movement (c. 1890-1910), originally published in 1934.

• Peter Morton, The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860-1900 (Allen & Unwin, 1984). Darwinism, degeneration, etc.

• Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood, rev. ed. (Penguin, 1967). Reprint of a survey first published in 1957.

• Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (Routledge, 1984). One of Hutcheon's earlier critical studies, devoted to self-reflexive fiction and its effect on the reading process.

• Lois Parkinson Zamora, The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas (Cambridge, 1997). A comparative study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century North & South American historical fiction.

Comments

[Ian Thompson]

'True to her Faith' is not a novel. It is a true story of a young girls life during the French persecution of the Huguenots. There are some minor compressions to make the story flow but the author's foreword makes it clear that this is essentially a true story