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Baby farming in George Moore’s ‘Esther Waters’ (1894)
A baby's body is recovered from a river.By the 1890s, the growing social conscience of the Victorians had led to the figure of the baby farmer crystallising into a figure both fearsome and criminal in...
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Other Shades of Grey: Star Crossed Lovers and Passion Restrained
The difficulty of writing romance novels today is that the social, religious or moral barriers that once provided tests for lovers to overcome in order to prove their love are often no longer in place...
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Cursed Fountains? The Bride of Lammermoor and Brideshead Revisited
A view from the fountain of Castle Howard I recently visited Castle Howard in Yorkshire. For those of you who haven’t been, it’s definitely worth going. Beautiful grounds, well-informed staff, and a...
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Is Shylock a victim or a villain?
Weighted down by millions of lost souls and eternally scarred bodies, Shylock’s humanity and his persecution is a given for so many modern readers of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Actually, I...
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What’s in a Name? The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
This blog post is from a student on my Star-Crossed Lovers Continuing Education course: I find myself fascinated by the way the names given to the characters in The Age of Innocence mirror their...
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Seeing Liverpool through Herman Melville’s Eyes: Google Earth Map of...
Salthouse Docks, by Atkinson Grimshaw Most people have experienced entering a foreign city for the first time– it’s those first moments when your senses are most perceptive. Struck by the new sights...
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Waterstone’s Classics: A Chance to Dip into Literature on your Lunch Hour
Waterstone’s Liverpool One organizes a series of free lunch hour talks on Wednesdays from 1-2 pm. It’s a great chance to dip into a work you’ve always been curious about or to learn more about a novel...
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Redburn and the 9/11 Memorial: Melville’s words still ring true
A few weeks ago, while I was visiting the US (on a Liverpool-London-Detroit-New York-London- Liverpool journey), I reread Herman Melville‘s Redburn in preparation for my class this autumn, Writers in...
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