The Little Professor

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.  

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.  

 

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. 

 

 

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.)

 

 

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.)

This Month's Acquisitions

(Some books appeared while I was on the other side of the country.)

• M. H., From Cottage to Castle; Or, Faithful in Little.  A Tale Founded on Fact (Nimmo, 1883).  The experiences of a young Scottish girl and her sister as they face various trials in the wake of their parents' deaths.  (eBay)
• Florence E. Burch, Led by a Little Child, or the Blind Basket-Maker (RTS, n.d.).  A little girl helps restore the faith of a man who lost his eyesight during a lightning strike.  (eBay)
• Christine Alexander, ed., An Edition of the Early Writings of Charlotte Bronte, Volume II: The Rise of Angria, 1833-1835; Part 2: 1834-1835 (Basil Blackwell, 1991).  Collection of Angria tales beginning with High Life in Verdopolis.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Ottessa Moshfegh, McGlue: A Novella (Penguin, 2014).  In the mid-nineteenth century, a man wakes up and tries to remember if he just killed someone.  (Lift Bridge)
• Bryan Furuness, ed., My Name was Never Frankenstein: And Other Classic Adventure Tales Remixed (Indiana, 2019).  Anthology of mashed-up and otherwise revised stories featuring famous literary characters.  (Lift Bridge)
• Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne, eds., Charlotte Bronte: Legacies and Afterlives (Manchester, 2017).  Ways in which both Bronte's life and her fiction have been dramatized, idolized, and reworked.  (Amazon)
• Ian Haywood, Romanticism and Caricature (Cambridge, 2013).  Analyzes a series of specific caricatures by Cruikshank, Gillray, Heath and Grant, and Rowlandson, looking at their implications for thinking about political debate in the early nineteenth century.  (Amazon)
• Jessica Fay, Wordsworth's Monastic Inheritance: Poetry, Place, and the Sense of Community (Oxford, 2018).  Examines the importance of monastic ruins, Spenserian aesthetics, the pastoral, etc. for Wordsworth's representations of local community.  (Amazon)
• Alison Milbank, God & the Gothic: Religion, Romance, and Reality in the English Literary Tradition (Oxford, 2018).  Argues that the Gothic is deeply rooted in post-Reformation theological questions.  (Amazon)
• Tim Allender, Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1820-1932 (Manchester, 2016).  Examines how ideas about gender altered in different contexts across India, including in education, missionary work, medicine, etc. (Amazon)
• Christopher Wakeling, Chapels of England: Buildings of Protestant Nonconformity (Historic England, 2017).  An architectural history of Nonconformist chapels between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.  (Amazon)
• Ethan Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Princeton, 2018).  A history of what it meant to "believe," including the new crisis of defining belief post-Reformation.  (Amazon)
• Susan O'Brien, Leaving God for God: The Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul in Britain, 1847-2017 (Longman, 2017).  The history of a religious community, both in and of itself and as a way of thinking about Catholic history more generally.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Ruth Compton Brouwer, New Women for God: Canadian Presbyterian Women and India Missions, 1876-1914 (Toronto, 1990).  Studies how missionary work intersected with questions of early feminism and imperial politics.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• David Fitzpatrick, Descendancy: Irish Protestant Histories since 1795 (Cambridge, 2014). Studies Protestant narratives about their sense of growing marginality, focusing on the role of the Orange Order.  (Amazon)
• Diane Langmore, Missionary Lives: Papua, 1874-1914 (Hawaii, 1989).  The personal experiences of missionaries to Papua, New Guinea (both Catholic and Protestant), including their relationships with indigenous people, domestic lives, educations, and so forth.  (Amazon [secondhand])

 

My Year in Books

• Favorite fiction: Kate Atkinson, Transcription; Richard Beard, Lazarus is Dead; Hamish Clayton, Wulf; Barbara Hanrahan, The Albatross Muff; Jeannette Ng, Under the Pendulum Sun; Caryl Phillips, A View of the Empire at Sunset; Adam Roberts, The Black Prince.
• Favorite historical mystery: Elizabeth Haynes, The Murder of Harriet Monckton.
• Detective with most eye-watering dress sense: Richard Jepherson in Kim Newman’s The Man from the Diogenes Club. 
• Weirdest take on Christianity: Robert Shearman, “Pumpkin Kids.”
• There are unpleasant boarding schools and then there are…whatever this is: Colin Winnette,  The Job of the Wasp.
• Novel that made me want to yell “Why on earth would you ever keep doing this?!” over and over again, which is pretty awkward when you’re on a plane to the UK: Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.
• Novel reread for the first time since I was about ten: Louisa May Alcott, Little Women.
• Best novels reread for class: Laura Fish, Strange Music; Caryl Phillips, Cambridge; Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier.
• Most fun novel to teach: Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier. 
• Now I’m seeing it everywhere: The result of teaching a Pilgrim’s Progress course. 
• Actually Dickensian neo-Victorian novel: Stephen Jarvis, Death and Mr. Pickwick.
• Most unusual bildungsroman: Lorna Gibb, A Ghost’s Story.
• Best unintentional demonstration that nineteenth-century economists were not necessarily brilliant novelists: Robert Torrens. 
• Discovery resulting in a moment of existential despair: Turning up far too many Victorian epic poems about the Crusades.  (It has occurred to me that I should really do some writing about Victorian religious poetry.  However…)
• What is this I just read: A Christian with Two Wives.
• There are times one suspects the author lacks inspiration: The first name of the Lady Macbeth equivalent in Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth is…Lady. 
• Most unusual Sherlock Holmes pastiche: Gordon Alpine, Holmes Untangled.
• Funniest Sherlock Holmes pastiche: G. S. Denning’s ongoing Warlock Holmes series.  OK, the humor is broad, but I laughed anyway.
• Sherlock Holmes mashup trend that is not perhaps entirely necessary: Do we need two different series in which Holmes gets mixed up with the Cthulhu mythos?
• Sherlock Holmes anthology that best created the fiction of a singular voice: Christopher Sequeira, ed., Sherlock Holmes: The Australian Casebook.
• Most wearisome ongoing Neo-Victorian trend: Given the number of Jack the Ripper copycats wandering through nineteenth-century London, it’s amazing that England made it into the twentieth century with most of its female population intact. 
• Monograph finally discounted enough for me to purchase it: The third volume of Michael Watts’ study of Nonconformity in Britain. 
• Most antiquarian purchases: Barbara Hofland’s The Blind Farmer and His Children and a first edition of Grace Kennedy’s Father Clement, both 1823; Elizabeth Sandham, Providential Care, a Tale Founded on Fact, 1825.     
• The duplication blues: Yet again, I somehow managed to purchase books I already owned. 

This Last Three Weeks' Acquisitions

• Margaret Oliphant, Caleb Field: A Tale of the Puritans (Harper and Brothers, 1851).  Historical novel about the persecution of the Puritans, set around the time of the Great Plague.  (eBay)
• Meir Goldschmidt, Jacob Bendixen, the Jew, trans. and adapt. Mary Howitt, 3 vols. (Colburn, 1851).  A young Jewish man tries to construct an identity for himself, with little success.  First published in 1845.  (eBay)
• Elizabeth Sandham, Providential Care: A Tale, Founded on Facts (Harvey and Darton, 1825).  Two poor children find help and live happily ever after.  (eBay)
• Sylvain Marechal, The Woman Priest, trans. Sheila Delany (University of Alberta, 2016).  Translation of Marechal's 1801 novella about a young woman who decides that the best way to join the priest she loves is to become one herself.  (Amazon)
• Gerald Murnane, Stream System: The Collected Short Fiction of Gerald Murname (FSG, 2018).  Short stories by the Australian novelist.  (Lift Bridge)
• Laurie R. King and Leslie Klinger, eds., For the Sake of the Game: Stories Inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon (Pegasus, 2018).  Includes both straight Holmes pastiches and more loose responses (including Holmes and Watson as...insects).  (Amazon)
• Jonathan Dent, Sinister Histories: Gothic Novels and Representations of the Past, from Horace Walpole to Mary Wollstonecraft (Manchester, 2016).  Argues that eighteenth-century Gothic fiction transformed contemporary historiography in its construction of terrifying pasts.  (Amazon)
• Justin A. Sider, Parting Words: Victorian Poetry and Public Address (Virginia, 2018).  Analyzes the valedictory mode in Victorian poetry.  I'm reviewing this for Choice.  (Review copy)
• Colin Jager, Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age (Penn, 2015).  Emergence of different forms of "the secular" in the early nineteenth century.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Jonathan Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford, 2005).  Studies the literary-political implications of the expanding notion of "enthusiasm" during the early nineteenth century (religious, radical, etc.).  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Sebastian Lecourt, Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, & the Secular Imagination (Oxford, 2018).  Analyzes the Victorian racialization of religious identity (e.g., Eliot, Arnold).  (Amazon)
• David Young, F. D. Maurice and Unitarianism (Clarendon, 1992).  Examines the influence of Unitarian thinking on the Broad Church theologian F. D. Maurice.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters, Volume III: The Crisis and Conscience of Nonconformity (Oxford, 2015). Conclusion of Watts' trilogy about the history of Nonconformist belief in Britain, focusing this time on its transformations during the Victorian period.  (Amazon)

This Last Two Weeks' Acquisitions

• Barbara Hofland, The Blind Farmer and His Children, 3rd ed. (Harris and Son, 1823).  A tenant farmer with cataracts experiences various hardships brought on by the inexperienced new landowner.  (eBay)
• ---, Alicia and Her Aunt; Or, Think Before You Speak (Nelson, n.d.).  The effects of bad behavior on one's siblings, among other things.  (eBay)
• Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind (Grove, 2018).  A priest in 15th-century England tries to solve the problem of a man's mysterious death.  (Amazon)
• Rowan Strong, Victorian Christianity & Emigrant Voyages to British Colonies, c. 1840-1914 (Oxford, 2017).  Preaching to emigrants, onboard religious practices, religion and various social classes/denominations, etc.  (Amazon)
• Kathryn Gleadle, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emerence of the Women's Rights Movement, 1831-51 (St. Martin's, 1995).  Suffrage, marriage rights, other aspects of feminist activism.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Helen Boyles, Romanticism and Methodism: The Problem of Religious Enthusiasm (Routledge, 2017).  Analyzes the ongoing anxieties about extreme emotional and spiritual experience in both theology and Romantic poetry.  (Amazon [secondhand])

This Last Two Weeks' Acquisitions

• C. A. Jones, adapt., Only a Girl: The Story of a Quiet Life.  A Tale of Brittany (Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., c. 1894).  A young orphan girl forced into a life of servitude eventually receives a reward, of a sort.  (eBay)
• Emile Erckmann and Louis Alexandre Chatrian, The Invisible Eye: Tales of Terror by Erckmann-Chatrian, ed. Hugh Lamb (Collins, 2018).  Anthologizes the horror stories by this once-famous writing team, now usually remembered as historical novelists.  (Amazon)
• Ian Wedde, Symmes Hole (Penguin, 1987).  Parallel-plot historical novel set in 1820s and 1980s New Zealand, featuring two men in search of their own identity.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Emma Mason, Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (Oxford, 2018).  Spiritual biography analyzing Rossetti's work in the light of ecotheology.  I'm reviewing this for the Journal of Religion and the Arts.  (Review copy)
• Timothy Larsen, George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles: Incarnation, Doubt and Reenchantment (IVP, 2018).  Reprints Larsen's Hansen Lectures on MacDonald's fiction as an attempt to "counteract skepticism and to herald instead the reality of the miraculous," along with the various responses to the lectures.  (Free copy)
• Jackie C. Horne, History and the Construction of the Child in Early British Children's Literature (Ashgate, 2011).  Historical fiction, representations of children in history, writing history for children, etc.  (Amazon)
• Andrew King, The London Journal, 1845-83: Periodicals, Production and Gender (Ashgate, 2004).  Uses the London Journal as a case study in periodical writing, reading, and publishing during the Victorian period.  (Amazon)
• Rebecca Davies, Written Maternal Authority and Eighteenth-Century Education in Britain: Educating by the Book (Ashgate, 2014).  Analyzes different ways of representing the mother as teacher within the home (and their wider implications for women's writing) from Richardson to Austen.  (Amazon)
• Jean Fernandez, Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy (Routledge, 2010).  Representations of servants, story-telling, and reading in both fiction and autobiography.  (Amazon)