This term is the first one since I began posting about ‘this week in my classes’ in 2007 that I haven’t posted at all about my classes. What’s up with that, you might wonder? Well, more likely you hadn’t noticed or wondered, but I’ve certainly been aware of it and pondering what, if anything, to do about it.

There is at least one very dull pragmatic reason why I haven’t been blogging very often, about anything: along with my chronic shoulder pain, which (despite my best efforts to address it through ergonomic adjustments and to improve it through physiotherapy) persists and is notably exacerbated by computer use, particularly lots of mousing, I have also developed lower back pain that is also clearly related to sitting at my desk. I am working on solutions for this, but in the meantime I have been trying to spend less time at my computer. That said, one of the odd features of my back pain is that it gets better when I’m very absorbed in something. To me, this suggests that posture and ergonomics are only part of the picture and that stress may be another part of it. Often, for me, it’s precisely blogging that has this distracting effect—mysteriously (ha!) it doesn’t work out that way when I’m grading online exams or wrangling Brightspace settings. So there are definitely other factors at play in my blogging slump.

It certainly isn’t anything to do with this term’s classes. At least from my perspective, both of them—Mystery & Detective Fiction and The Victorian ‘Woman Question’—have gone very well. Of course there have been the occasional sessions that dragged a bit, and we had an unusually high number of snow days that created a lot of logistical headaches, but in general discussion was both substantive and lively. I continue to try to wean myself from my lecture notes. This gets easier and easier in the mystery class, as I am pretty confident now both about how I want to frame the course and readings in terms of ‘big picture’ issues and about the specific readings. (I mix in new options quite regularly, because for various reasons I have been teaching the course basically every year for ages, so this definitely keeps it fresh and interesting for me: I just finished reading Dorothy B. Hughes’s The Expendable Man and I’m 90% certain I’m putting it on the reading list for next year, for one!) The ‘woman question’ class is a seminar, so I don’t lecture there anyway; I so looked forward to our class meetings all term, both because the readings are all favorites of mine and because we always had such good conversations about them. The only slight exception was with the excerpts from Aurora Leigh, from which I learned both that assigning excerpts is a bad idea (something I already believed but overrode, for practical reasons)—when it comes to long texts, do or do not, there is no try!—and that narrative poetry is hard, or at least it takes a different kind of preparation and attention than fiction, and that if I’m going to assign any of Aurora Leigh I need to take that into account.

Anyway, it’s true that these are courses I have taught and thus blogged about with some regularity, but that doesn’t usually stop me from reporting back and reflecting on how things are going. To the contrary, really, as I still believe what I said after my first year of blogging about my teaching, which is that

taking this extra step each week not only helped me identify the purpose, or, if writing retrospectively, the result of each class, but it made each week more interesting by giving me an opportunity to make connections or articulate puzzles or just express pleasure and appreciation in ways that went beyond what I had time for in class

I have become a better teacher because I kept this up: I learned so much from it, about myself, about teaching, and also about the subjects I teach, from writing to contemporary fiction.

So what’s my problem this term? I think it is rooted in my uncertainty about how to address some big changes that have taken place in my personal life. When I wrote up my year-end post for Novel Readings in December, I remarked that the last months of 2023 were particularly frantic, “about which more, perhaps, some other time,” I said then. Novel Readings has never been—or at least has never been intended as—a really confessional or intimate blog, though over the years I have certainly written about some personal things. The most personal it got was in the immediate aftermath of Owen’s death: I felt compelled, in ways I still can’t really understand, to write about it, maybe because finding words for what had happened and what I was feeling seemed essential to coping with it, to giving that experience a shape that I could live with. (I have since read a lot about the importance to trauma recovery of developing a “bearable narrative,” which seems on point, if not altogether sufficient to what I was and often still am seeking when I try to find words to express my grief.) I was always very conscious, though, that I didn’t have the right to speak for other people or to violate other people’s privacy, including Owen’s, in those posts. In a more general way, I would say that the value of Novel Readings to me, and also of all social media, lies in its authenticity: I don’t have to reveal everything about myself and my life, but what I do talk about should (I believe) honestly reflect who I am and what is going on with me, if only so that any interactions I have with other people are similarly authentic and thus meaningful. Yes, we all “curate” our social media presence—and a blog is essentially long-form social media, right?—but then, we do the same IRL, picking and choosing what we share, and the relationships that matter the most are the ones in which we are most fully ourselves.

In my current circumstances, this principle, if that’s what it is, runs up against the principle that I shouldn’t talk about other people’s business here: it feels wrong not to acknowledge that my life has changed significantly, but I have felt—rightly, I think—constrained from going into any detail that might cross the line, which has also meant I have felt constrained from talking about some of my recent reading as frankly and completely as I would have liked to, because I couldn’t address how something like, say, Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful resonates, or doesn’t, with my new circumstances—which, in a nutshell, are that my husband and I separated shortly before Christmas and I have since moved into my own apartment. The first part of this term, then, was a chaotic combination of “downsizing” (and what a euphemism that is for the hard physical and emotional labor of clearing out a house you’ve lived in for over 20 years!), packing, and moving, all while also, of course, carrying on with my classes and other work. Even setting aside the inhibitions I felt about breaking this news or integrating it into any reflections on my reading and teaching, no wonder I didn’t have much time or energy for ‘extras’ like blogging, right?

Obviously I have reached a point at which it seems fine and reasonable to say what has been going on, though I don’t expect I will ever consider Novel Readings an appropriate place to talk about how or why things have unfolded in this way, or even how I feel about it all! That’s nobody’s business but ours, by which I mean mine and my (truly excellent) therapist’s. 😉 Seriously, though, I do believe we bring our whole selves to our reading, so what I want to work on is how to acknowledge how my new reality sometimes does affect my engagement with books. I can say already that nothing about Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce, which I just read for my book club, seems relevant or resonant at all in that way (though I did enjoy it on its own terms)—though there were moments in The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith that definitely struck a chord.

Sorry if this seems like a long way around to nothing in particular. Writing is thinking, or so those of us for whom words really matter usually believe, and I guess I needed to figure some things out—while also (I hope) breaking the habit of not writing here as fully and frankly as I can. With the term now wrapping up, I am looking forward to turning my attention back to some larger projects I was making decent headway on last summer, before things went . . . the way they went! And I am planning to get back into the blogging habit, because I enjoy it and it is good for me in so many ways, including but not exclusively as a writer. A new chair, some exercise classes, and perhaps (sigh) more physiotherapy will hopefully resolve the physical obstacles, leaving only the psychological ones to be overcome. In the meantime, I still have exams and final essays coming in, so if Novel Readings stays a bit quiet for a while, that will be why.

October was a terrible reading month for me. I didn’t even start many books, much less finish them. A last minute push (and, I’ll admit, a bit of fed-up skimming) got me to the end of Kate Atkinson’s Shrines of Gaiety, which I had acquired precisely because I figured that, whatever gripes I have had in the past with her logic or narrative trickery, I could trust Atkinson to tell a story that would carry me along out of my slump. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen: Shrines just never clicked for me. Its overly elaborate plot is delivered piecemeal, with lots of chronological jumping around; although there are a lot of well-conceived characters, none of them came to life for me, at least not enough to provide any momentum; and the ending is beyond bad — the last several pages read as if Atkinson got tired of the whole project and just transcribed everything that was left in her notebooks. YMMV, of course: the novel has gotten a lot of glowing reviews, and many readers on Twitter replied to my grumpy report about it saying they’d enjoyed it just fine.

The only other (new) novel I finished in October was Flynn Berry’s Northern Spy. It’s a thriller, well paced and plotted and with a bit of intricate moral dancing around questions about how far it is right to go, for your family, for a cause, or for your conscience. I’m not rushing out to buy Berry’s other novels, but if I saw one at the library I’d definitely pick it up.

I’ve been reading steadily for my classes, of course. In Women and Detective Fiction we’ve finished Dorothy B. Hughes’s In A Lonely Place and now also P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman; tomorrow we have our first discussion of Sue Grafton’s A is for Alibi.  Rereading Grafton today I appreciated the light-heartedness of it. I mean, obviously as it’s a murder mystery there’s a grim aspect to it, and at times it is very serious indeed, but Grafton has a sense of humor about the genre and is clearly having fun up-ending its tropes. My experience in previous years is that students find her revisions more dated than they do Sara Paretsky’s; there’s usually a certain impatience with Kinsey’s “I’m not a girly-girl” shtick. I admit, I relate to it, perhaps because my own early introduction to feminism was by way of Free to be You and Me and not being allowed to have Barbie dolls. I do think V. I. Warshawski is a more interesting character and Paretsky overall is more thoughtful about the politics of her novels. I also got pretty tired of Grafton’s series well before the end of the alphabet (she only got as far as Y). But A is for Alibi is brisk and smart and has plenty of unexpected twists, which I hope will help keep the students’ attention.

In 19th-Century Fiction we have been working on Middlemarch for a couple of weeks. I wish I could say it is going well. I don’t think it’s going badly exactly, but honestly this term I don’t really know. Attendance is just appalling: most days, maybe 60% of the class shows up, which is unprecedented, in my fairly long experience. I don’t know what to make of this. I know it’s not personal, or at least I’m trying not to take it personally, but that doesn’t make it any less disheartening. The students who are present are pretty quiet; I think – I hope – they are engaged, but much of the time it’s hard to tell, and I worry that at this point I am mostly performing enthusiasm, not eliciting it. The ones who do speak up have good things to say, but I’m not used to having to work so hard to get anything out of the class, to get any energy back from them. I’m going to keep trying! The ones who are showing up deserve no less, and I remain hopeful that between us we can and will make the most of this opportunity to read this great novel together.

I was really looking forward to these classes on Middlemarch because I thought, or hoped, they would shore up my faltering faith in all the ways I have spent my “one wild and precious life.” Whatever else was going wrong in my life before all of this, I could count on my classroom hours to make me feel better, by taking me out of my own head for a while and also because of the joy of engaging with students about books in ways I really do value and cherish and believe in. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it isn’t so simple this term. The image I keep returning to lately is that it’s like I’m crossing a suspension bridge. It’s a bit unsteady underfoot, but as long as I look straight ahead it’s not too bad moving forward, just doing the next thing that’s in front of me, and the next, and the next. It’s when I look down and realize all over again what’s below it, or it’s shaken by a gust of wind (a memory, a place, a picture, or just a feeling) that the vertiginous sensations return —  “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed” — and I am overcome, unbalanced, beside myself, in spite of myself.

I haven’t been doing well at my plan to return to regular posting about my classes, and in fact today I don’t really have a lot to say about them, except that overall I think they are going okay—though not great. Gaudy Night fell pretty flat in Women & Detective Fiction this time around, which was disappointing, but In A Lonely Place has clearly caught their interest, so that’s encouraging. It’s unusual for discussion of Lady Audley’s Secret to be as sluggish as it was this time in 19th-Century Fiction, which makes me anxious about starting Middlemarch next week. Attendance in that class this term is also the worst I’ve ever seen it, but I think that is mostly due to COVID (infections and exposures), and of course I’m glad those students are staying away. I do worry that the strategies I put in place to mitigate the effects of those absences might be influencing other students; missing classes can have a snowball effect on their (dis)engagement. But all I can do myself is keep showing up and trying to make our class time worth it to all of us. I’m doing the best I can at this. Sometimes it’s a real struggle to get myself there, but once the class is underway I usually feel better. Task-oriented coping ftw!

The things I’ve been brooding on lately, more than these specific and quite familiar pedagogical ups and downs, have been work-related in a more general way. It turns out—unsurprisingly, I suppose—that going back to campus after everything that has happened in the last three years, and especially after Owen’s death, has prompted a lot of what I’ve been thinking about as “senior moments,” meaning not dithery forgetfulness (although I do experience those kinds of senior moments too!) but reflections on my career, on what it means to me, both personally and professionally, to be one of the most senior members of my department. Indeed, in just a couple of years I will be the most senior, in age and in years of service.

One factor is that I have come back to a changed department, one where many of the colleagues I was closest to or worked most closely with have recently retired. Thanks to previous retirements (and some departures for other reasons), our full-time complement had already shrunk by around 40%; we have been fortunate to be allowed to hire some great new full-time faculty, but there has been nothing like a 1 to 1 replacement rate. So before COVID struck we were already a much smaller community than we once were, and now in many ways the department feels like an unfamiliar community to me, one in which I don’t know many of my colleagues very well, much less my own place among them. I don’t feel well-equipped to be a mentor or a role model: my relationship with our discipline and with our institution is too equivocal, not to mention that I’m hardly a good example of professional success, on academic terms and perhaps on any terms. I’m not sure what I have to offer my newer colleagues, then, and I’m not sure they want or need anything from me—or if they do, whether it would be something I’m willing or able to give at this point. (I was asked about teaching a course on book reviewing, for example, something I have no interest in doing, for both petty and principled reasons.)

What do I want from my professional life now? As I stare down the remaining years towards my own retirement, what goals or hopes do I have for them? If you’d asked me where I stood in 2019, I would have described myself as mid-career: poised for what I hoped might be a period of expansion and flourishing as my family responsibilities lightened, as I recovered from the blow to my self-confidence and sense of purpose inflicted by my failed promotion bid, and as my years of experience began to really pay off in the classroom. I also had projects on the go I was excited about. Now here I am in 2022 feeling as if I have missed that phase and gone straight to the end game—and, in the shadow of Owen’s death, wondering what it has all been worth, and how or if or when to put that kind of energy in again. All those guilt-ridden years of trying to be both a good mother and a good academic, all the crises and compromises, all the books and paperwork and panics, about parenting, on the one hand, and productivity on the other—and before too long it will all come down to a giant recycling bin outside my office door and discovering nobody else wants my shelves of marked-up Victorian novels or my complete 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica. The writers of this article seriously underestimate the degree to which our department lounge, with its stacks and cartons of discarded books, is all the memento mori any of us really needs.

These are melancholy reflections, perhaps unduly so, both because my grief is still so raw and the reality of Owen’s death still so bewildering—its meaning and its impact both still unfolding every day—and because I have been on campus again for such a short time. Once, I imagined that a lot of the questions I have entertained about my life and my work since Fall 2020, when we first went online and I also got my first invitation to consider early retirement, would be answered by being back in the classroom. I knew then that it wasn’t the right time to decide: I didn’t feel ready to go (mid-career, remember?) and I didn’t think teaching online during a pandemic was the right context for deciding when I would be. Owen’s death raised more existential questions; I didn’t think returning to teaching in person would necessarily sort those out, but work—or teaching, anyway—has always given me a sense of purpose and accomplishment, so I thought it would at least help. It has helped, I guess, but the sensation of time travel I had over the summer as I tried to re-familiarize myself with campus has shaded into something different, something more like suspension between a past I can vividly imagine and a future that so far I can’t.