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.
March was a rough month. For one thing, I had more academic integrity hearings stemming from a single assignment than I’ve ever had in one term. It was an exceptionally disheartening experience, especially given the lengths I have gone to in my introductory class to reduce the risk for students of just trying to do the work for themselves: this is the class in which I’m using specifications grading, meaning there is really no risk involved. As I plaintively reminded the class as it became clear just how widespread the problem was, the class is designed to make it safe to be wrong, safe to be confused, safe to be learning. But if you don’t actually do your own writing, you strip the whole process of its meaning. Plus (as I pointed out to many students in the actual hearings), if your uncertainty leads you to copying other people’s writing, you will never build your own skills and your own confidence: you will never find out that you can in fact do the work, and get better at it.
Easily the best novel I read in March was Claudia Piñeiro’s Elena Knows. This was recommended to me last year when I was (as I so often am) casting about for new ideas for my two mystery fiction courses. I started it then but had to abandon it, as a novel about suicide and a mother’s grief was not an experience I could bear. I kept it on my mental TBR, though, and I’m glad I tried again, because it really is exceptional: slight but fierce and complex, with its overlapping interests in disability, ageism, misogyny, and autonomy. I think it would be a really interesting book to read in my course on Women & Detective Fiction, even though in many ways it is not really a mystery. It is certainly about a crime – or, crimes, if you think socially and systemically – and there is an investigation, even if there isn’t a detective, or evidence, or any of the other conventional elements.
It has been quiet around here. I’m not really sure why that is. I’ve been busy at work, but that has never stopped me before. When this term began, I intended to make posting about my teaching routine again. When I kept that up, in the old days, it didn’t matter if I felt I had something in particular to say when I started: eventually I would discover what I had to say, because (as I’ve been trying to convince my first-year students) that’s how writing works. My reading hasn’t been going very well, but I used to write about it anyway.
“Start where you are and see where it takes you” is 
There’s so much emptiness in my life now. It’s not just Owen’s death, although every day I confront the ongoing ache and mystery of his absence. Some of it is the ongoing isolation of our COVID-cautious lifestyle: especially as most of the rest of the world seems to be moving on, it feels worse than it did when we were all in it together. Being back on campus and teaching in person helps with that, but it’s not the same as it was: I’m in my office a lot, but mostly with the door closed, because masks are required in classrooms but not hallways and I like to take my own mask off while I work. It’s winter, so the outdoor visits that sustained me through summer and fall are less appealing, as are my long solo walks in the park, when I was alone but, somehow, never lonely. (I often think of Marianne Moore’s line “the cure for loneliness is solitude.”) I could be busier at / with work than I am. I will be, soon, as assignments start coming in, but even so I don’t expect to be even as busy with teaching as I was last term, just because of the nature of my classes this term, the easy familiarity of one and the high degree of automation in the other. There is other work I could be doing, even a writing commitment I should be doing. I can’t seem to summon up much urgency or energy for it, though, or for the book idea I still sort of believe is worth pursuing. I’m not even reading much. I can’t seem to concentrate on most books I try; I don’t seem to like many of them, and it bothers me, worrying that it’s me, not them, that’s the problem.
Two things I did recently: 
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 
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.
Something else that’s different is how emotionally confusing and therefore exhausting I’m finding the present. The early days of grief are awful but absolute, almost simple, I realize now: there are no options, no expectations, for anything besides mourning. I have learned so much about grief since then, from experience but also from others, and from reading. One thing I’ve learned is that “it takes time” doesn’t mean that with time the grief lessens; it means something more like you get used to living with it, you learn to walk around with 
The mind is not only its own place, as Milton’s Satan observes, but it can also be a pretty strange place, or mine can anyway, especially these days. Today, for example, it has been six months (six months!) since Owen’s death, and what keeps running through my mind is a mangled version of lines from “The Charge of the Light Brigade”: “half a year, half a year, half a year onward, into the valley of death …” and then nothing comes next, it just starts over, because not only (of course) are these not the poem’s actual words but I don’t know what words of my own should follow to finish the thought.
It’s hard to imagine a poem that is less apt, for the occasion or for my feelings about it. (I hate this poem, actually, though I love so much of Tennyson’s poetry.*) I can’t think of any reason for this mental hiccup besides the generally cluttered condition of my mind thanks to two years of COVID isolation and now six months (six months!) of grieving. Six months is half a year—half a year! I have to keep repeating it to make myself believe it, and it’s probably just the repetition and rhythm of that phrase that trips my tired brain over into Tennyson’s too-familiar verse.
How should the thought finish? As I walk through the valley of the shadow of Owen’s death, I have no sure path or comfort. All I know, or hope I know, is that at some point, in some way, I will emerge from it and he will not. Six months ago today, devastated beyond any words of my own, I copied stanzas from Tennyson’s In Memoriam into my journal. It remains the best poem I know about grief, though as it turns towards a resolution not available to me, maybe it’s more accurate to say that it contains the best poetry I know about grief. (For that, I can forgive him the jingoistic tedium of “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”) This has always been my favorite section—it is so powerful in its stark simplicity:
Not a happy summer. That is all the materials for happiness; & nothing behind. If Julian had not died—still an incredible sentence to write—our happiness might have been profound . . . but his death—that extraordinary extinction—drains it of substance. (Woolf, Diaries, 26 September, 1937)
I haven’t written much new about Woolf yet this year (I’ve been focusing on other pieces of my project) but I have thought about her a lot—specifically, I have thought a lot about her suicide. One of my favorite things about Holtby’s Critical Memoir of Woolf is that Holtby died before Woolf did and so no shadow darkens her celebration of 
With Woolf on my mind again thanks to Queyras’s book, I picked up Volume 5 of her diary (1936-1941), which I have to hand because it covers the time she was working on The Years and Three Guineas. So much is always happening in her diaries and letters: you can dip into them anywhere and find something vital, interesting, fertile for thought. This volume of the diary also includes the lead-up to war and then her experience of the Blitz, and the final entries before her suicide, which are inevitably strange and poignant—even more so to me now. Leafing through its pages this time, though, it was the entries around the death of her nephew Julian Bell in July 1937 that drew me in: Woolf as mourner, not mourned.
Novel Readings 