The Little Professor

Duly (foot)noted

1.  At Crooked Timber, Henry's post on an article I can't read is now spinning off into a more general discussion of who cites what when and why.  Since I just spent this afternoon looking, once again, at Book Two's footnotes, and noting that I probably should cite a few more people here and there (although there's nothing I can do about this at present...), this is a question near and dear to my heart.  The greatest amount of juggling, I think, occurs in what one of Henry's commenters calls "string citations"--those long, long, long lists of everyone who has trod the stony paths of whatever happens to be your current argument.  If, for example, I have two people who have already made claim X, should I cite a third who says the exact same thing? Four people? What about five?  Having cited five, what's the likelihood that the editor will then ask me to reduce the list to...one? 

(And, of course, sometimes you just forget to include someone in your string. Until a peer reviewer says, "um, where's so-and-so?") 

Another poster hints at the problem of articles published in the "wrong" journal, but this is an issue that goes beyond academic politics.  If the article is in a "strange" place (e.g., a historical journal that rarely publishes on literary topics), then nobody will expect to look for it there; more to the point, it may not be indexed by the usual suspects.  For example, Kevin L. Morris' articles on Catholic and anti-Catholic literature, published in Recusant History, aren't indexed in MLA.  Nor, for that matter, does MLA magically index everything, as I know all too well: look up "Grace Aguilar" in the MLA index, and my own article fails to appear.  (This was even more of a problem in the early phases of digitizing the MLA bibliography, when you had to check the early hardcopy volumes after searching the CD.)  Similarly, a book from the "wrong" publisher may be overlooked for any number of innocent reasons, ranging from lack of publicity to, again, any given scholar's assumption that nobody in their right mind would publish Book X with Publisher Y.   (Or, contrariwise, that Publisher Y would normally keep its distance from Book X.)  From a scholarly POV, one of the handiest things about Google Books, Amazon's Search Inside the Book, Project Muse, and JSTOR is that you can search for content that escapes the clutches of the main bibliographies.

2.  D. G. Myers' call for literary history elicited several queries from one commenter, R.T., including this one: "Do some (or even many) literary scholars avoid new territory because there is so little in the way of secondary sources which they can use (either through contrast or comparison) to further their own arguments?"  To a great extent, though, the lack of secondary sources is an illusion.  The world is not exactly overflowing with articles or books on religious historical fiction, although there are a few, but writing about such fiction requires you to read a lot of other things: history of religion; theory of the historical novel; studies of nineteenth-century historiography; studies of canonical novelists writing about religious topics; studies of the period your authors are writing about; etc.  The same would be true if I were writing about twenty-first century apocalyptic fiction. 

I should also note that a great deal of pioneering work on non-canonical authors was done in the first half of the twentieth century, both in dissertations and otherwise.  (Women writers, Victorian periodicals, genre studies...) Writing about non-canonical authors used to be a conventional approach to a dissertation, thanks to the Germanic model of doctoral research--what one of my professors at UCI called the "Turks in the English Renaissance" approach to dissertating (i.e., find every instance of a Turk in the English Renaissance, then explicate function of same). 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Jane Gardam, Old Filth (Europa, 2006).  Life and (miserable) times of an antiquated English barrister.  (Borders)
• Karen O'Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2009).  Why writing about women became an important part of eighteenth-century social theory.  I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)

An excursion into Victorian Protestant poetry: "Heart of Oak"

I've mentioned this collection once in passing, but thought that it might be interesting to some (two? three?) readers to vary my usual round of Victorian controversial fiction with a bout of Victorian controversial poetry.  "Heart of Oak," while breaking zero new ground in terms of its tirade against the nebulous "priesthood" ("Not that again," I groaned on first reading), at least has ambitions to be a serious poem.  (For unapologetically and unambitiously awful Protestant poetry, I direct you to James Augustus Page's Protestant Ballads.  You have been warned.)   Thirty-Six Nonconformist Sonnets (1846) was published by the pseudonymous "Young Englander," and my Victorianist readers may be struck by the unexpected juxtaposition of "Young England" sentiments with (unindentified) Nonconformism.  As one Victorian reviewer noted, a Nonconformist Young Englander was an unusual find.  While the collection received some breathless praise on its first and only appearance in volume form, it excited rather more exasperation than enthusiasm.  The sonnets, which don't form any kind of ordered sequence, are united by their anti-Catholic and anti-Tractarian sentiments; they range in subject matter from martyrdom  to Maynooth, with most of the poems having some sort of immediate topical reference. 

As sonnets go, this one is fairly odd.  It's an Italian sonnet in straightforward iambic pentameter, but the sestet doesn't introduce any variant on the CD or CDE rhyme; instead, the sestet simply continues the octave's ABBA rhyme scheme, so that the final lines (AB) seem to interrupt the poem's forward progress.  Instead of marking the transition from octave to sestet with the traditional change in rhyme, the poet shifts from enjambed to endstopped lines.  Notably, the poet sections off the final two lines, emphasizing their role in the poem with paralleled alliteration (arm'd array/solid stuff).  It's as though he wanted a couplet at the end, but swerved.

The poem's title alludes to the famous song by David Garrick, and  this "Heart of Oak" appropriates Garrick's militarism and nationalism in a distinctly Protestant key.  The rhetorical question that opens the sonnet, "Are we not English?" (1), virtually ends the poem before it begins: it posits that Catholicism (and, by extension, Tractarianism) is fundamentally un-English, and therefore incompatible with both English government and English sentiments.  Although this is an entirely unoriginal position in anti-Catholic polemic, and not just of the Victorian variety, the rest of the collection actually qualifies it; after all, one of the tensions driving these sonnets is Catholicism's and/or Tractarianism's appeal to the English minds which "naturally" resist it.  (Given the broad sweep of "priesthood," the Nonconformist poet is probably including the CofE in his denunciation.) This and the next rhetorical question, which seem to make the rest of the sonnet entirely unnecessary ("and a good thing, too," I can hear some readers saying), suggest that the English may need to remind themselves of their natural immunity to all forms of sacerdotalism.  Englishness ought to be "enough" (1), and yet, at the present time, it looks as though it isn't.   How to distinguish between Englishness and that deadly "priesthood" (3)?

In the sentence that occupies the next five and one-half lines, the poet suggests at least part of the answer.  His representation of the priesthood is, again, entirely unoriginal, dwelling on the harsh and heartless nature of priestly power.  Priests resist sympathy, repelling the onlooker (that "sternly rough/Unbending mien" [6-7]) instead of inviting personal communion; the impenetrable exterior cloaks a potentially blasphemous violence, directed against "Christ's heritage"(8) itself.  But the poet arrests the priests at speech.  They declare their place in the apostolic succession, and snarl at those who refuse to acknowledge their rightful role (e.g., Nonconformists), yet they only "ready stand" (7) to act against "Christ's heritage," and they would "blast it if they may" (8).  The pretensions of this priestly speech, hinted at in the somewhat contorted syntax of these lines, are all-encompassing.  This, however, is where Englishness makes its grand entrance.

At the opening of the sestet, the poet stops referring to the priests as "they" and, instead, apostrophizes them as "ye."  He thus brings them into the poem, as it were, calling them into direct conflict with the unified "we" (English Protestants) instead of describing them to that "we."  The assonance ("vainly"/"wait"/"day" [9]) duns it into the priesthood's head that the English will allow them to proceed no further than empty words.  In contrast to priestly language, the poet introduces (in smoothly paralleled clauses) the threat of "swords" and "shields" (11), both of which are prepared now.  Moreover, the poem is coyly ambiguous about just how metaphorical those swords and shields are: are Protestants going to wield the sword and shield of the Scriptures against Popery, or are they going to rise up and engage in a little smiting--in line with "Heart of Oak"? The taunt in the closing lines not only dares the priests to do something, but also answers the rhetorical questions with which the poem began: it declares instead of asks.  The English (or, at least, the poet) have found their confidence.  And the AB rhyme at the end, separated from the rest of the sestet by the period, itself declares the irreconcilable differences between the priesthood and the English. 

The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë

We are once again in the midst of a minor spurt of Brontë-inspired fiction.  Syrie James' The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë (2009) purports to be Charlotte's "lost" retrospective journal, mostly penned while she thinks over  Arthur Bell Nicholls' marriage proposal.  While there are some flashbacks, the narrative deals primarily with the period after 1845, when Nicholls arrive, and ends (after, of course, the necessary setbacks) with Charlotte and Arthur enjoying a blissful marriage and lots of passionate sex.

James first biofiction was about Jane Austen, and the structure of Charlotte's narrative seems suspiciously indebted to Pride and Prejudice--only with Charlotte adopting some of Mr. Darcy's traits.  (One wonders how the real CB, whose reaction to Austen was rather equivocal, would respond.)  Arthur arrives, makes a bad impression on account of his sexism and religious views, and makes an even worse impression when Charlotte hears that he has Led On an Innocent Maid Because of Her Money.  "He is the worst kind of degenerate, to my way of thinking," Bridget Malone tells Charlotte, "for he was clearly only after me for my money" (136).   Charlotte, already laboring under the belief that Arthur called her an "ugly old maid" (45)--he didn't--immediately takes Bridget's bait, even though she barely knows the woman.  (After all, if Charlotte weren't quite so thick-skulled, the book couldn't be marketed as a romance.)  On his part, Arthur believes that women are inferior; to make matters worse, he appears to have some vaguely-defined but Very Nasty religious views, denominated "Puseyite," which lead him to do all sorts of heartless things--like refuse to preach at the funeral of an unbaptized infant.  (For some reason, the novel never really gets around to explaining what Arthur believes.) By the end of the novel, however, Arthur assures Charlotte that he'll leave her own faith alone, will "honour and respect" (383) the faith of her friends, and, needless to say, will always let her "give free vent to [her] own opinions" (383).  Putting to one side an unfortunate moment of Inadvertent Eavesdropping, leading to Temporary Bad Feelings, Charlotte ends the novel rewarded with an egalitarian marriage.  And, of course, hot sex (albeit chastely-rendered hot sex--this is a Victorian novelist, after all). 

Pamela Regis observes that in contemporary genre narratives, "[t]he novel chronicles the heroine's taming of the dangerous hero or her healing of the injured hero, or both," and sometimes vice-versa.¹ Arthur is hardly "dangerous," but James sticks close to genre expectations: while Charlotte needs to be disabused of her residual anti-Irish sentiments and her misconceptions about Arthur's behavior, Arthur needs to acquire twenty-first century egalitarian beliefs about gender, not to mention a healthy dose of ecumenicism.  Pride and Prejudice meets feminism meets polite notions about religious tolerance, in other words.  To make this work, the narrative needs to skate over inconvenient obstacles in Charlotte's character, like her posthumous mythmaking about Emily and Anne, the contemporary objections to her account of William Carus Wilson, or the reason that a here-unnamed Harriet Martineau walloped Villette.  James' Charlotte writes off the criticism as a personal betrayal by people who "seemed to be reviewing my life as they saw it reflected in the novel, rather than the novel itself" (354); there's no mention of Martineau's objection to the novel's pervasive anti-Catholicism. While the novel certainly chronicles some of Charlotte's own issues, like her longstanding obsession with Constantin Heger, it simultaneously makes her a complete person before Arthur (in the sense that her prejudices are, by and large, more personal than ideological, and easily removed when ideological) and in need of Arthur to achieve closure ("every Jane, I believe, deserves her Rochester--does she not?" [3]).  The result is very much a "you can have it all" type of arrangement, complete with Arthur encouraging Charlotte to return to writing (not while having hot sex, needless to say, but presumably between bouts of it).

Writing first-person novels about novelists is not necessarily a good idea, and like Clare Boylan's Emma Brown, The Secret Diaries... suffers badly in comparison to CB's own prose.  All of the characters speak in oddly pedantic and cliched sentences, sometimes at the worst possible moments.  When Branwell humiliates Charlotte by implying that she has had a relationship with Heger, Emily decides to engage in some serious literary criticism: " [...] You have been writing about your time in Brussels, but it is only a surface image, with none of its depths.  You invested more emotion in your description of the scenery upon William's arrival in Belgium, than you did in a single scene between him and Frances.  We feel nothing for your professor and his dull little lady, because you are afraid to let us feel" (159).  The juxtaposition of Branwell's insult and Emily's rather unpenetrating disquisition is unintentionally hilarious.  So too is Patrick Brontë's tin-eared reaction to Branwell waving around a pistol: "Son, have you got my gun?" (229)  James is not yet able to create distinctive voices for her characters, and she chooses not to emulate CB's complex manipulations of parallelism, polysyndeton, and so on.  The result is a certain flatness of tone, entirely out of keeping with CB's fiction. 

But what's odd about this novel, aside from the superimposed romance format, is the totally inaccurate title: there's nothing "secret" about anything Charlotte tells us.  James explains in the "Q&A" at the end that "[t]he novel is based almost entirely on fact" (n.p.), which is, in a sense, what's wrong with it.   Either Charlotte deals out carefully-measured infodumps, or she turns out to have experiences lifted straight from her fiction (in the novel's terms, that she transcribed for her fiction).  Although an outraged Emily demands "'What is experience to imagination?'" (268), all of CB's fiction turns out to be lifted directly from life--not just incidentally, but exactly.  Readers will spend much of their time playing spot-the-novel.  James is hardly alone in susbcribing to the transcription theory of authorship, in which authors appear to cut-and-paste their novels together out of their own adventures, but the result undermines the power of CB's originality.               

¹ Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia, PA: U of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 206.

In the mood

DAD THE EMERITUS HISTORIAN OF GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT: Is that a good book?
ME: No.
DAD: So...you're going to write about it.

I've sometimes quipped that a good subtitle for this blog would be "I Read These Things So You Don't Have To." However, I've found, oddly enough, that even though I can usually retain my equanimity while reading subpar Victorian fiction--usually--it's much more difficult to do so while reading subpar contemporary fiction.  The stylistic and cultural differences, I think, make it easier to switch into pure academic mode when I work with Victorian fiction: because I'm already distanced from the text, even as someone who specializes in the period, I can distract myself from...infelicities...by thinking about genre conventions, the author's distinct stylistic quirks, whatever religious quarrel is on display, and so forth.  Even if the book is inept, it's not our inept.  By contrast, it takes more conscious effort to estrange myself from a book published in 2009.  In the case of pop neo-Victorian fiction, the effort partly derives from the novels not being strange enough--e.g., the heroine seems to be a twenty-first century Mary Sue in crinolines, or something equally egregious.  

Nineteenth-century ancestor

Just today, my mother managed to get a photograph of my great-great-grandmother, Chaia Esther Finkelstein (1862-95), which had been preserved in a group of photos belonging to my great-aunt and uncle.  The full photo is of Chaia with two unidentified women; they may also be relatives.  There's no date, but we're guessing that the photo was taken sometime in the 1880s (or even 1870s), possibly in Poland. 

In case you're wondering, the family resemblance is very pronounced.

A recent entry in the "Most Incoherent Top 100 List" sweepstakes

A family friend pointed me to Newsweek's Top 100 Books, which is a mashup of several different Top 100 lists.  The results are utterly bizarre:

• War and Peace clocks in at number one, making it (apparently) "the best book ever written."  Poor Shakespeare, though, is stuck at 49-52.  My line of work is a virtual wasteland: no Dickens, no Thackeray, no Bronte sisters, no Romantic or Victorian poets.  Eighteenth-century England is reduced to Swift (no Defoe, no Richardson, no Pope).
• I gather that poetry is anathema to those who compile Top 100 lists.  There's Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Whitman, and Shakespeare...and that's it.  
• So is drama, unless your name is Bill Shakespeare.
• Apparently, people who compile Top 100 lists also don't read anything that isn't part of "Western Civilization" (except for Chinua Achebe and Chairman Mao).  If we're just sticking to recognizable classics, where's The Tale of Genji? The Ramayana? The Mahabharata? One Thousand and One Nights?
• I count over seventy books published in the twentieth century.  That seems a trifle...foreshortened.
• No Don Quixote?!
• Bizarre assortment of Great Literature, Pop Bestsellers, and Random Political Works, with the occasional nod to Religion. 
• I see only fifteen books originally published in some language other than English.  (Including the Bible.)  Even as a Greatest Hits of Western Civilization (Plus Achebe and Mao), this is weird.
• One could go on.  "Debating" this list seems impossible--on what terms could you possibly debate it, given that the mashup has no obvious relation to logic, taste, literary-intellectual history, or any other organizational principle?   I can point out all the bonkers omissions (and inclusions, for that matter), but that's not the same thing as debating...

Exploring

Like Dr. Crazy, I'm contemplating a new book...or, rather, two new books.  (Book Two is currently in the "under consideration" phase of its existence, so it will be several weeks before I know exactly what needs revision/reconfiguration/addition/subtraction/redaction.)  I've jokingly described these two projects to Mom the Retired School Administrator as "Expensive Book" and "Cheap Book."  Expensive Book, which owes its origin to some of the research I did for Book Two, will require me to seek out new archives and new libraries, to boldly go...oh, forget it.  Actually, it will require me to go back to the UK, among other places (e.g., Notre Dame, Harry Ransom Center, etc.).  Because Expensive Book will be, obviously, expensive, it's going to be a long time percolating.  Cheap Book, by contrast, is going to be neo-Victorian rather than Victorian--yes, I plan to enter the twentieth century! (Even the twenty-first, perhaps.)  And...I may even be writing about [looks around, whispers] novels other people want to read.  Voluntarily.  (Don't worry--Expensive Book will be more my usual style.) Finally, Cheap Book will be about reasonably affordable and available fiction, as opposed to nearly non-existent fiction.

These projects will be different enough--one is literary history, the other more straightforward literary criticism--that doing both at once will either be provoking or infuriating.  (Or some combination of the two.) I'm going to approach them as I approached Book Two: by working first on a series of exploratory articles that will help me identify what works and what doesn't, what leads to a dead-end and what takes me to some startling conclusions.  I like beginning with something very vaguely defined, which allows me to be challenged by the novels, as it were.  In any event, I know that I want to spend this year working on three things: an article that began life as a demoted, then deleted, chapter in Book Two (fine as a stand-alone article, but made no sense anywhere in the book); an article related to Expensive Book that I've been researching for a couple of years; and an article related to Cheap Book.  Obviously, though, the Return of Book Two takes precedence, so the reach-vs.-grasp issue applies.

Courting Shadows

The easiest way of introducing Stannard, the unreliable narrator of Jem Poster's neo-Victorian novel Courting Shadows, is by analogy.   Take Mr. Lockwood from Wuthering Heights (including his simultaneous obsession with/fear of sexual desire), strip him of all his comic overtones, and make him the sole narrator.  There you have Stannard, quite possibly the most oppressively unpleasant narrator I've encountered in some time.  Whether or not Poster had Lockwood in mind is open to question, although his class snobbery, inability to "read" people, and protracted illness are all very Lockwoodian.  When we first meet Stannard, an architect who is renovating a village's ancient, rotting church, he is in the process of causing an ugly accident that renders one worker permanently ill.  This event sets the scene for what follows: Stannard unearths a coffin (and promptly busts it open), tries to conceal the evidence (and fails), destroys the suspiciously erotic imagery carved on a pew (much to the pastor's horror), and so on down the line.  Later, in the grips of his illness, he destroys a suspiciously erotic medieval painting (the reader will note a trend).   Worst of all, he simultaneously courts and repulses Ann Rosewell, a local village girl; their final moments together precipitate his mental collapse, and may or may not have far uglier consequences. 

Like many neo-Victorian novels, Courting Shadows dwells on the oppressiveness of a monstrous masculinity, simultaneously given to bouts of erotic rage and to fearing the female body's allure.  Although Stannard's behavior is clearly not sui generis, we see only hints of its origin in his domineering father, whom Stannard associates with "the stinging words, the slaps and cuffs, the irrepressible tears of a helpless and bewildered child" (200).  What little we see and hear of the elder Stannard amounts to a stereotypical evil Victorian patriarch, who manipulates his son and subjugates his wife.  Our Stannard is determinedly affectless as well as faithless.  When Banks, the pastor, asks him to assist Jeffords--the man injured as a result of Stannard's haste--Stannard sourly observes, "I might quite reasonably have challenged his melodramatic analysis of Jefford's predicament or taken issue with the offensive suggestion that such assistance as I might be prepared to offer could be viewed as a form of expiation" (53).  The language here is typical: Stannard resists any appeal to empathy or emotion as sheer excess, takes frequent refuge in slightly pedantic phrasing, insists on heightened notions of genteel propriety, and, above all, consistently refuses to acknowledge cause and effect when it comes to his own actions.  At the same time, Stannard's cool, detached narrative voice is couched in retrospect, produced (as we eventually discover) at a moment of crushing psychological crisis.  His unreliability derives less from his representation of events, except at the end, than from his attempt to "ice over" the evidence of his own emotional and sexual volatility.  (In that sense, Stannard is very close to Robert Edric's Charles Weightman, the chilly narrator of another neo-Victorian novel, Gathering the Water.)

The novel links Stannard's demolition job on the church, which runs roughshod over tradition, architecture, and art, to his total lack of sympathy.  When Stannard unearths the coffin, Banks warns him that "[t]he emotion is perhaps the essential fact, far more important than mere historical detail" (63), and Banks' affective attachment to the church and all it contains sharply contradicts Stannard's brutality.  Stannard cannot and will not imagine himself into another's place, a very Victorian sign of villainy.  Symptomatically, Stannard never appears to have an overall vision for the church; he focuses on isolated details of imminent collapse, rather than on the church as a sacred space or as a locus for community.   For Stannard, the church neither contains nor embodies anything in particular.   His lack of sympathy in the present, then, extends to his lack of sympathy for the past: he cannot appreciate the medieval remnants in the church, like the woman carved on the pew, as anything but "barbarous iconography" (72), signs of "the flesh" (73) best expunged from human consciousness.  (Ironically, this is one of the few moments in which Stannard actually invokes "sympathy" [72], only to be informed that Banks can't understand what he's going on about.)  Stannard's reaction to this carving, as well as to the sexual imagery in the doom painting, both sexualizes and feminizes the past itself, transforming history into an erotic, uncontrolled free-for-all that must be beaten down, tamed, and finally erased.   Not coincidentally, Stannard's own past, save for momentary traces of paternal violence, is almost entirely absent from this narrative.  Stannard seeks to eradicate the church's past much as he eradicates his own, "empowering" himself in the process; similarly, he violates the church's integrity much as he violates that of Ann Rosewell, the young (and perhaps sexually experienced) woman who arouses his desire.  Not surprisingly, where Banks early on describes a youthful vision that awakened him to the futility of chasing after facts, Stannard's own "vision" at the end frees him from history altogether: "What if the structures we inherit are fundamentally flawed or debased beyond redemption? Why should we take upon ourselves the burden of restoring what was never good and can never be made so?--a decaying patchwork of stone, wood and plaster, a world of damage and disease" (261). 

The blatantly self-serving nature of this vision, unlike those experienced by Banks and Jeffords, frees Stannard from thinking about his responsibility to Ann.   When he first spots her, Stannard believes that Ann must be one of the local gentlewomen; nevertheless, when he actually speaks to her for the first time, "[h]er gaucheness, and indeed her sheer lack of breeding, astonished me" (46).  Their encounters, which finally culminate in muddy outdoors sex, continue this push-and-pull of class-based disgust and heavily-romanticized desire.  When Ann writes to him, he is struck by both her poor cursive and, less predictably, by the "propriety" (101) of her letter.  He simultaneously yearns for and fears the signs of her eroticism (now, in a conventional move, linked to class as well as to the "barbarous" past).  An evening assignation sparks, again, his fear of her body (at first,  he reacts badly to being touched) and his lust, climaxing in a moment that, significantly, he finds himself unable to represent with any exactitude (117).  This narrative breakdown, which occurs again when they have sex (156) and, once more, when he assaults her (267), casts sexuality as a kind of unnameable threat to the self.  The problem with the erotic imagery in the church, then, is not that it arouses feelings that belong to the past (although Stannard insists that it does), but that those feelings reside in the present, within Stannard himself.  Stannard's story registers the distortions involved when he tries to repress those sentiments--which nevertheless burst forth in physical and emotional violence. 

Stannard's sexual monstrosity is Gothic in its strength, as well as its reach.  Despite Stannard's various frustrations and even humiliations, no other character manages to stop him when he is bent on destruction.  Banks, for example, is supposedly the novel's example of "healthy" masculinity, both deeply sympathetic to others and cheerfully open to the eroticism within his church, but he spends the entire novel being totally ineffective.  The cultured Mr. Redbourne, who lives in a manor house redolent of Gothic decay, is also a frustrated, isolated gay man, whose charities to the local youths apparently do nothing to help them--and, we are led to believe, come with strings attached.  (Stannard's utter lunkheadedness about Redbourne's sexuality is the closest the novel comes to humor.)  The locals try to protect Ann Rosewell and each other from Stannard, but fail.  For that matter, Ann Rosewell's mother may or may not be violently abusive in her own right.  The novel's only glimpses of hope come in fragmentary visions--a woman moved by a fallen horse's plight (193-94), a momentary sighting of "the eloquent geometry of love" embodied in an apparently intimate family (277).  But these sights do nothing to ameliorate Stannard's anti-social violence.  Sympathy may be what holds this novel's society together, but it proves to be a frail defense. 

New Pre-Raphaelite site

The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has digitized its collection of Pre-Raphaelite art.  Users have the option of developing their own online "collections," which could be useful in a classroom context.  (Check under "resources" to see some mini online course packs.)