Another January, another new term! I’ve got two classes this term of two quite different kinds. The first is our second-year survey course British Literature After 1800, so its aim is to cover a broad sweep of territory; the other is a combined Honours and graduate seminar on George Eliot, a rare opportunity to zoom in on a single writer—a privilege rarely accorded, in our program anyway, to anyone besides Shakespeare!
I led off the survey class today with what I called “explanations and excuses”: I talked in general terms about the traditional model of the historical survey in literature programs; I gave a potted overview of what the standard story of “British Literature After 1800” would have been, moving from the Romantics through the Victorians to the Modernists and beyond; then I raised some questions about oversimplification, inclusion, periodization, and ‘the canon’; and then I made some arguments in favour of nonetheless looking at things in chronological order, at least some of the time. (Showing my age, I used the example provided by David Lodge in Small World of the student who claims he is doing his thesis on the influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare, much to the delight of the hip deconstructionists around him.) Because, if only for my own sake, I like to have some sense of unifying themes beyond chronology, I explained that one thing we would be talking about across the course was what our various authors thought literature was for or should or could do, and I quoted some statements they had made about this, from Shelley’s “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” to Ishiguro saying “I like to highlight some aspect of being human. I’m not really trying to say, so don’t do this, or do that. I’m saying, this is how it feels to me.” And that, besides a bit of logistical stuff about requirements and schedules and getting the books, was that! Friday we get going more specifically with Wordsworth.
Something that was very much on my mind as I prepared for this particular class meeting was the last time I taught this course, which was the winter term of 2020. In early March of that term, we were all sent home; my notes leading up to what turned out to be our last day in person have a number of references to contingency plans, but none of them (none of us) anticipated the scale of disruption. It came on so quickly, too, as my notes remind me. We were part way through our work on Woolf’s Three Guineas on our final day; quite literally the last thing I wrote on the whiteboard was “burn it all down.” I got quite emotional many times while revising the course materials for this year’s version: that term stands out so vividly in my mind as “the before time,” before COVID, which is also, for me, before Owen died. We were still essentially in lockdown, after all, when he died in 2021; we had only just been able to start coming together as a family again. I don’t usually have a lot of emotional investment in my course materials, but it was unexpectedly difficult revisiting these and thinking of how much has changed. Tearing up over PowerPoint slides: it seemed absurd even as it happened, but it did. That said, because of COVID I ended up cutting The Remains of the Day from the syllabus in 2020, and given that it is in my personal top 10, that I rarely have the opportunity to assign relatively contemporary fiction, and that I am running out of years to assign anything at all, I am stoked about being able to read through it with my class this term. If only it didn’t feel so timely!
I am also super stoked about getting to spend the whole term reading and talking about George Eliot with a cluster of our best students—not just our brightest but honestly, I know most of these students from other classes and they are some of the nicest and keenest and most engaged and curious people you could hope to work with. I felt so much good will from them today as we did our ice-breaker (nothing too “cringe,” just everyone’s names and anything they wanted to share about their previous experience, or lack of experience, with George Eliot). I hope their positive attitude survives Felix Holt, not to mention Daniel Deronda! Knowing that a number of them had read Adam Bede and/or Middlemarch with me in other recent courses, I left both of these off the reading list for this one. Middlemarch especially feels like a gap, but on the other hand, I don’t think I could have realistically asked them to read both Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda in the same term (unless I didn’t assign anything else), and Daniel Deronda is pretty great. I had quite a debate with myself about Felix Holt vs Romola: just for myself, I would have preferred to reread Romola, but I’ve taught Felix Holt in undergraduate courses before and it is actually pretty accessible. Sure, Felix is so wooden he makes Adam Bede look lively and nuanced, but, speaking of timely, a book about the pitfalls of democracy when the population is not (ahem) maybe sufficiently wise to make good choices seems on point. Along with those two, we will be reading “Janet’s Repentance,” The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner. I’m already a bit worried that it’s going to be too much reading . . .
The last time I taught this class was 2015, and then it was a graduate seminar only. I had stepped back a bit from teaching in our graduate program: we get at most one seminar a year, and my favourite classes to teach have always been our 4th-year or honours seminars, so I made them my priority. OK, that’s not entirely truthful: I had also felt increasingly uncomfortable with graduate teaching, both because of my own loss of faith in aspects of academic research and publication (amply documented here over the years) and because it seemed so clear that an academic path was not a viable option for our graduate students and I wasn’t sure what else we were really doing. These reservations made me much happier focusing on undergraduate teaching, though I missed graduate students themselves: we get such lovely ones! Now we mingle undergraduate and graduate students in some of our seminars, which was the model for last year’s Victorian Women Writers seminar—which I thought went really well. (There was at least one student who disagreed, judging from the evaluations, but you can’t please everyone!) I have high hopes for this seminar as a result, which includes a number of the same students, at both levels.
It is a crazy time in the world and has been a pretty difficult time at work as well, with budget cuts and government interference and all kinds of discouraging internal administrative moves. I have never felt so strongly that I might actually be getting tired of the whole thing, that retirement, scary as it is to me for other reasons, might be welcome just so I don’t have to deal with all this nonsense—the persistent devaluing of the work we do, and the degradation of the conditions in which we nonetheless strive to do it well. I have to say, though, that one day back in the classroom with students has made a difference: I don’t exactly like “the job” at the moment, but I really like the work, the part I think of as the real work. The question will be whether the changes and complications and cuts make it impossible for me to do that work, or to do it well, or just start to outweigh the value I find in it.
Believe it or not, I’ve been posting here about my teaching since 2007. At that point I had already been at Dalhousie for 12 years. These posts are a record, then, of almost two decades in a 30-year teaching career (more if you count the teaching I did as a graduate student). In their own idiosyncratic way, they tell quite a history themselves, including the rise and decline of academic blogging, the (thankfully burst) MOOC bubble, the Great Online Pivot of the COVID years, the encroachment of generative AI (may that bubble burst soon). Through it all, my colleagues and I have just kept on showing up to class. It is common, even among academic administrators, to champion “innovation” as a good in itself and to chastise people or systems that continue to work in more or less the same way. The substance of what we do as English professors changes constantly: we are not asking the same questions or bringing the same methods to bear on the texts we study and teach as professors were 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. But it is not a bad thing that our pedagogy stays true to some essential practices and values. I wish more people with decision-making powers would acknowledge that sometimes things stay the same because they work. Today I sat with students around a table and talked. I have tried all kinds of things over the years (again, as amply documented here!) from class wikis to Pecha kucha presentations; I have used PowerPoint and recorded videos and done letter exchanges instead of essays and on and on. After all this time I am convinced that there is no better pedagogy for the kind of learning I believe in for my students than sitting around a table and talking. Second best (still pretty good!) is leading a robust discussion from the front of the room. That kind of teaching can’t be monetized, surveilled, or sold to tech moguls, though, so nobody gets excited about it—except those of us in the room. We are fighting to be able to keep on doing it. If you care about it yourself, vote for politicians who don’t dismiss it because it doesn’t clearly serve “government priorities.”
2025 was a less chaotic year for me—literally and psychologically—than 2024. I wish I could say that this meant I read more and better, but instead both my memory and my records show that it was a pretty uneven reading year, with a lot of slumps. The summer especially, which used to be a rich reading season for me, had almost no highlights: the best books I read in 2025 were at the very beginning and the very end of the year.
Connie Willis’s 
The best non-fiction I read was Claire Cameron’s memoir 
A near miss: 
And on that faintly elegiac note I will add that I reread 
I have still not deciphered the mystery of the hare. She remains the elusive, indefinable core that explains, perhaps, why we humans have projected so many of our fears and desires onto the species, investing hares with supernatural powers from the most evil to the most inviting, confirming our tendency to either worship or demonise those things we struggle to understand. The hare lends itself as a symbol of the transience of life and its fleeting glory, and our dependence on nature and our careless destruction of it. But in the hare’s—and nature’s—endless capacity for renewal, we can find hope. If it is possible, as William Blake would have it, ‘to see a world in a grain of sand’, then perhaps we can see all nature in a hare: its simplicity and intricacy, fragility and glory, transience and beauty.
It is not an idyll: lovely as Dalton’s descriptions of the fields and woods are, the hare’s world is still that of nature “red in tooth and claw,” full of hazards and threats, violence and death, hawks and stoats and foxes. The worst carnage, however, is wrought not by nature but by man’s machinery. One day a pair of huge tractors harvest potatoes from the field next door. When they are finished, Dalton walks the furrows and finds them (in a scene worthy of Thomas Hardy) littered with dead or injured hares:
One reason Raising Hare resonated with me is that over the past six months, since Freddie came to live with me, I have been experiencing on a small scale some of the same adjustments to my own sense of time and priorities. Living close to the hare helps Dalton better understand people’s bonds with their pets:
There is more to life than great chess. Okay, great chess is still a part of life, and it can be a very big part, very intense, satisfying, and pleasant to dwell on in the mind’s eye: but nonetheless, life contains many things. Life itself, he thinks, every moment of life, is as precious and beautiful as any game of chess every played, if only you knew how to live.
Like Rooney’s other novels Intermezzo takes people’s intimacies and relationships and feelings very seriously. It is a novel on a small scale, about two brothers muddling through some deeply felt but inadequately processed grief for their recently dead father while also muddling through their romantic entanglements, Ivan with an older woman, Margaret; Peter with a younger woman, Naomi, as well as his ex-fiancee Sylvia. I wasn’t always interested enough in Peter to care about his struggles, though that might have been the fault of the awkward style of his sections (Manov: “more Yoda than Joyce”—ouch!), or maybe it was due to my own greater sympathy, just instinctively, for Ivan’s story. Compared to Beautiful World, Intermezzo seemed less expansive, not in length but in reach. It didn’t convince me that the problems of these particular little people amounted to more than a hill of beans—and yet something felt true about its preoccupation with their problems, which really just reflects their own preoccupation with their own problems. We do, mostly, live like that, right? Even those of us who in some sense are committed to “the life of the mind” spend most of our time immersed in the petty and personal.
Now that I had barely anything left, I could sit in peace on the bench and watch the stars dancing against the black firmament. I had got as far from myself as it is possible for a human being to get, and I realized that this state couldn’t last if I wanted to stay alive. I sometimes thought I would never fully understand what had come over me in the Alm. But I realized that everything I had thought and done until then, or almost everything, had been nothing but a poor imitation. I had copied the thoughts and actions of other people . . . There was nothing, after all, to distract me and occupy my mind, no books, no conversation, no music, nothing. Since my childhood I had forgotten how to see things with my own eyes, and I had forgotten that the world had once been young, untouched, and very beautiful and terrible. I couldn’t find my way back there, since I was no longer a child and no longer capable of experiencing things as a child, but loneliness led me, in moments free of memory and consciousness, to see the great brilliance of life again.
In her extreme solitude, with no prospect of ever reconnecting with another human being, the narrator faces the world with no insulation between herself and everything else, from the vastness of the landscape to the equal vastness of these existential questions. Sometimes, of course, she is too worn out from the digging and scything and hiking and chopping and hunting to think about them, or about much of anything, but at other times she thinks back on her life before (or is it outside?) the wall, on “the woman I once was” and on the people she once knew:
It’s no paradise she is living in now, and all this time to think is a curse as well as a blessing, bringing bitter grief as well as epiphanies. Who even is she, anyway, with nobody else to be present for? In one particularly striking scene she sees her own reflection and wonders what her face is for now, if she even needs it any more. Her narrative, which she calls a “report,” is her one act of resistance against her own erasure: perhaps, when she is gone, it at least will persist.
It is a wonder that a poem, let alone an unread poem, could have such a vigorous life in the culture–and its story still had decades to run before the present day. In the late twenty-first century, even as wars broke out in the Pacific (China against South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines and others), vanished poem and vanished opportunities coalesced into a numinous passion for what could not be had, a sweet nostalgia that did not need a resolution . . . The Corona was more beautiful for not being known. Like the play of light and shadow on the walls of Plato’s cave, it presented to posterity the pure form, the ideal of all poetry.
The second half of the novel offers a first-hand account of the poem’s origins, including backstory on all the figures in the poet’s life that Tom has obsessed over throughout his career. It is more conventional, high concept only in its relationship to the futuristic framing. It’s well done, though predictable and occasionally (I thought) a bit too contrived in some of its details. When I reached its rather pat ending, I found myself wondering if I had missed something that would be apparent on a re-reading of the whole novel: I think of how the early parts of Atonement, for example, vibrate with new meaning once you have read to the end, including not just the metafictional twist but also the way Briony’s fictionalization turns out to have incorporated advice you later learn she got from readers and editors. Tom’s version of the story is, I think it’s fair to say, an idealization, a kind of wishful thinking, a story that fits the evidence he has together to suit his vision of the people and events. It is inaccurate, not just because his information is copious but incomplete, but because what he wants to do (as Dorothea Brooke would put it, to reconstruct a past world, with a view to the highest purposes of truth!) is always already impossible. OK, I get it! I got that before I read the ‘real’ version—which is also, of course, inevitably partial, perhaps dubiously reliable. But do we learn something more specific about Tom’s version, are there specific things he gets wrong, or (to consider another possibility) is there evidence he mentions that undermines the version that makes up the novel’s second half? I didn’t notice any such clever moments, but there’s a lot I didn’t notice about Atonement on my first reading.
Engine 721 doesn’t take it personally. She is made of wood and metal, and her temperament is stoic. Besides, she recognizes something kindred in Mado Pelletier’s iron conviction and unstoppable momentum. The bomber believes the world men have made is terrible, and so it is. Nor can the train deny that there is a certain beauty in the idea of burning, since she runs on flame herself.
That lunch bucket is an explosion waiting to happen. Its unstable elements sing out their longing so loudly, the train can hear them like a battle cry. All the force of combustion that makes the express the fastest vehicle on earth, this device has harnessed for instant havoc. It can take every part of an object, and every cell in the human body, and fire them in different directions.
So, for now, on we go.
Since the railway disaster Emma Donoghue recreates in The Paris Express is a documented historical event, I think a spoiler alert is not really called for. That said, I did not already know what actually happened, and I suspect Donoghue is counting on our not knowing, which is what kind of spoiled the novel for me. If you knew that THE BOMB DOES NOT GO OFF and NOBODY ON THE TRAIN DIES, the sense of impending doom that she does such a good job of building up would reveal itself immediately as shameless manipulation, which it turns out it is.
The Paris Express is not a bad novel. Donoghue is too adept for that. Given how it ends, though, I don’t really see the point of it. It’s just people on a train. She does a good job imagining them all for us (and if you like this sort of thing, there’s a long note at the end telling you who is real and which bits are made up). I got pretty invested in some of them, especially in the young anarchist who spends the whole trip clutching her homemade bomb, hoping there will be a big enough wig on the train to make detonating it the kind of political statement she aspires to. As the train raced along from stop to stop and the passengers met and mingled and shared quiet moments and lustful interludes and ate lunch and gave birth, there seemed to be a lot of potential ways their interactions could pay off. But even without climactic revelations or epiphanies (maybe assisting in a delivery would change Mado’s mind about blowing everyone up, for instance), there was power in the dramatic irony, this motley assemblage of different people all unknowingly hurtling towards disaster.
BUT THEY ALL WALK AWAY FROM IT. Geez. I mean, that’s nice for them (and rough for the one person who does actually die in the accident), but what that leaves us with is a whole bunch of people on a train. A series of character sketches, vignettes. It’s so deflating!
Also, she personifies the train. It makes some sense: apparently trains, like ships, are “she” to those who make them go. I like the idea that the train is a symbol: destructive technology, human ingenuity pushing too hard against the natural world, something like that. But the minute you say “You wonder how a train can read her passengers’ minds?” you’ve lost me. Keep it a metaphor, don’t over-literalize it, don’t tell me “she savours their memories and jokes, their doubts and rages, the way a worm tastes the earth.” Let us think for ourselves why a train might be antipathetic to something else that matters; let us experience the passengers’ humanity as something in tension with it.
I’ve read quite a few of Donoghue’s novels. I thought The Wonder (which I reviewed for the TLS) was really good, and Haven (which I reviewed for Canadian Notes and Queries) was too. I think she’s a good enough novelist that I wish she would write fewer novels—something I realize 
I made my way to the end of Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy without ever deciding if I was enjoying it or not. Enjoying might be the wrong word in any case: it’s not really a fun or pleasant story, and Ditlevsen herself does not come across as likeable, so what’s to enjoy? The better question is whether I was appreciating or admiring it, or interested in it. I am undecided on these questions as well. And yet her account of her childhood, youth, and “dependency” (meaning addiction) did exert a kind of pull on me, enough that I persisted to the end. One of the rewards, as I mentioned before, is coming across passages that hit hard. Some samples:
I also finished Miriam Toews’s A Truce That Is Not Peace, which is not really a memoir, I suppose, but I’m not sure what else to call it. It is about her life and about writing and about the death by suicide of her father and her sister—which is to say, it is about the same subjects as most of her other books, which is sort of the point, as it is written in response to a question she cannot clearly answer: “Why do you write?”
I’ve been meaning to catch up on my recent reading for weeks now: it has been a month since I wrote up 
—which is not a bad description of how I decided to read the book. I don’t think I want to read anything else by Modiano, though. For a better-informed commentary, read 
How I hate the word “relatable,” which is so often a shorthand for “like me and thus likeable,” which in turn is both a shallow standard for merit and a lazy way to react to a character. And yet sometimes it’s irresistible as a way to capture the surprise of finding out that someone who otherwise seems so different, elusive, iconic, really can be in some small way just like me—a writer of genius, for example, who reacts to invitations by worrying that she has nothing nice to wear and doesn’t look very good in what she does have. Yes, the period of Woolf’s diary I am reading is one of great intellectual and artistic flourishing, and this makes it all the more touching as well as oddly endearing that she frets so much about “powder & paint, shoes & stockings.” “My own lack of beauty depresses me today,” she writes on March 3, 1926;
No sooner is she feeling more at ease, even easy, about how she looks, then stupid Clive Bell has to go and ruin everything:
Novel Readings 