This Week's Acquisitions

• E[lizabeth] H[ely] Walshe, The Foster-Brothers of Doon: A Tale of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 (RTS, n.d.). An evangelical novel with a decidedly negative take on 1798. The short-lived Walshe (1835-69) is probably best known for From Dawn to Dark in Italy, which was reprinted through the early twentieth century.

• Emma Marshall, Kensington Palace in the Days of Queen Mary II (Seeley, 1895). A slightly revisionist take on the queen and her court.

• Emma Leslie, At the "Sign of the Golden Fleece" (RTS, [1900]). In the foreground: translating the Bible into English, featuring William Tyndale. In the background: machinations at Henry VIII's court, featuring Cardinal Wolsey, the King, Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn.

• Mrs. F. [Theresa Cornwallis] West, For the Sake of a Crown: A Tale of the Netherlands (RTS). Probably the 1903 reprint of the 1889 original. One of the novels in the Religious Tract Society's "For Faith and Freedom" series.

• Ella Hepworth Dixon, The Story of a Modern Woman, ed. Steve Farmer (Broadview, 2004). Reprint of Dixon's 1894 "New Woman" novel.

• "Olive Pratt Rayner" (Grant Allen), The Type-Writer Girl, ed. Clarissa J. Suranyi (Broadview, 2004). Another New Woman novel, this time from 1897. Allen is best known as the author of The Woman Who Did. (This edition doesn't include the usual supplementary texts found in Broadview reprints, by-the-by.)

• Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (Picador, 2004). Novel about history, race and the arts in America, from the 1930s to the 1960s.

• John Ernest, Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861 (North Carolina, 2003). Early African-American "counterhistory." (This one looks really interesting.)

• Cristina Della Coletta, Plotting the Past: Metamorphoses of Historical Narrative in Modern Italian Fiction (Purdue, 1996). Manzoni, di Lampedusa, Morante and Eco. (Another book for my survey of contemporary scholarship on historical fiction.)