This Week's Acquisitions

Well, actually, it's this month's acquisitions...

• Emma Leslie, Dearer than Life: A Story of the Times of Wyclif (RTS). Historical novel set in the fourteenth century--Lollards, etc. It seems that the RTS had a late-Victorian series of explicitly anti-Catholic historical fiction for children ("For Faith and Freedom"), of which this is one. Leslie published into the early twentieth century.

• Anne Manning, Cherry and Violet: A Tale of the Great Plague (Dodd, 1866). Autobiographical novel about the plague of 1665.

• Emma Jane Worboise, St. Beetha's; Or, the Heiress of Arne (Clarke). Low Church didactic novel about a young girl's trials and travails.

• Louis Bayard, Mr. Timothy (HarperCollins, 2003). Revisionist twist on A Christmas Carol, from the perspective of a grown-up Tiny Tim.

• Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time, First, Second, Third and Fourth Movements (Chicago, 1995). All twelve volumes of Powell's famous roman-fleuve about the shattering transformations of first interwar and then post-WWII England, told through the partly autobiographical figure of novelist Nicholas Jenkins.

• Patrick McGrath, Asylum (Vintage, 1997). "New Gothic." Wife of psychiatrist meets madman, falls in love with same. Bad things happen, says the inimical narrator.

• ---, Dr. Haggard's Disease (Vintage, 1993). Another New Gothic. A doctor with a severe morphine addiction meets up with the son of the woman with whom he had an abortive (and on his part, dangerously over-romanticized) affair.

• Charles Sauvestre, On the Knee of the Church (Macintosh, 1869). Translation of a French anti-Catholic work on convent schools.

• Justin Fulton, How to Win Romanists (Pauline Propaganda, 1898). A Baptist's guide for converting Catholics to Protestantism. It really can't have worked very well...

• Robert Bridges, The Selected Letters of Robert Bridges, ed. Donald E. Stanford (Delaware, 1983). The late-Victorian author, perhaps most familiar today for publishing Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetry.

• George Moore, George Moore in Transition: Letters to T. Fisher Unwin and Lena Milman, 1894-1910, ed. Helmut E. Gerber (Wayne, 1968). Letters written during a period of sea-change in Moore's sense of himself as an artist.

• Josephine McDonagh, Child Murder and British Culture, 1720-1900 (Cambridge, 2003). How representations of child murder worked in literary, cultural and political contexts.

• Eve Tavor Bannet, The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Johns Hopkins, 2000). Proposes a new historical model for eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century feminist thinking and its effects on fiction.

• Simon Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism (Cambridge, 2002). Debates over the educational, cultural, aesthetic and political purposes of Greek, stretching from Erasmus to the early twentieth century.

• John A. Phillips, The Great Reform Bill in the Boroughs: English Electoral Behaviour, 1818-1841 (Clarendon, 1992). How the Reform Act transformed the nature of popular politics.

• Rainer Liedtke, Jewish Welfare in Hamburg and Manchester, c. 1850-1914 (Clarendon, 1998). Comparative study of the welfare infrastructure in Jewish communities.

• Peter Hinchcliff, God and History: Aspects of British Theology 1875-1914 (Clarendon, 1992). The interrelationship of new developments in theology and historiography.

• C. Y. Ferdinand, Benjamin Collins and the Provincial Newspaper Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Clarendon, 1997). The business of managing and marketing newspapers.

• Lorna Martens, The Diary Novel (Cambridge, 1985). Comparative study of English and European diary fiction from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.