This index highlights some of my writing on Victorian fiction–mostly blog posts, but also a few essays in other venues. You can also use the ‘Categories’ menu to look for posts on individual authors, browse the Teaching index for class discussions, or look through the complete list of my essays and reviews.
Sadly, The Valve is now unavailable, so those links will take you to dead ends. (You can, however, look for old Valve pieces via the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20110721231919/http://www.thevalve.org/go ). Open Letters Monthly has moved to a new archive site; I am in the process of updating my links – and cleaning up the formatting at the new site. That is going to take a long time! All of my OLM essays on George Eliot (newly edited and in some cases expanded) are available in my collection Widening the Skirts of Light (see link at right).
Special Events
Adam Bede (The Valve, Summer 2008)
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- Week I: Chapters I-V
- Week II: Chapters VI-XI
- Week III: Chapters XII-XVI
- Week IV: Chapters XVII-XXI
- Week V: Chapters XXII-XXVI
- Week VI: Chapters XXVII-XXXV
- Week VII: Chapters XXXVI-XLVIII
- Week VIII: The Whole Novel
The Chimes (The Valve, December 19, 2008)
Villette (The Valve, Summer 2009)
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- Week I: Chapters 1-8, “I, Lucy Snowe, was calm.”
- Week II: Chapters 1-15, “Ghostly nuns, cross-dressing, and Meribah’s waters gushing out”
- Week III: Chapters 1-22, “I had preferred to keep the matter to myself”
- Week IV: Chapters 1-27, “She’s ba-ack!”
- Week V: Chapters 1-35, “Oubliez les professeurs!”
- Week VI: Chapters 1-42, “Farewell”
Victorian Novelists
Anne Bronte
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Open Letters Monthly, January 2012)
Charlotte and Emily Bronte
- Wuthering Heights (February 1, 2007)
- Leslie Stephen, “Charlotte Bronte” (September 2, 2007)
- “Your Greater Misery”: Rereading Wuthering Heights (January 22, 2019)
Rhoda Broughton
- Cometh Up As A Flower (July 13, 2017)
Wilkie Collins
- No Name (January 12, 2014)
Charles Dickens
- Dickens and “the Limits of Anguished Humanism” (November 26, 2007)
- “What was a girl to Dombey and Son?” Dombey and Son II (February 16, 2019)
- Dombey and Son Is Pretty Long: Dombey and Son I (February 11, 2019)
George Eliot
- George Eliot: the Friendly Face of Unbelief (June 25, 2007)
- Middlemarch in the 21st Century? (April 3, 2008)
- But Why Always George Eliot? Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun and Middlemarch (May 26, 2009)
- The Radicalism of ‘Felix Holt’ (Open Letters, January 2010)
- George Eliot for Dummies: Brenda Maddox’s George Eliot in Love (Open Letters, November 2010)
- Rebecca Mead, “George Eliot and Me” (February 28, 2011)
- Macaroni and Cheese: The Trouble with Romola (Open Letters)
- “Look No More Backwards”: George Eliot and Atheism (Los Angeles Review of Books, October 5, 2012)
- Queen of the Gypsies: On Endings and The Mill on the Floss (Open Letters Monthly, February 2013)
- Her Hands Full of Sugar-Plus: The Miserable Morality of Middlemarch (Open Letters Monthly, March 2013)
- Why do I like George Eliot so very much? My top 10 reasons! (July 30, 2013)
- Revisiting “Janet’s Repentance” (January 7, 2015)
- Our Editions, Ourselves: Versions of Middlemarch (Open Letters Monthly, January 2016)
- Middlemarch and the “Cry from Soul to Soul” (Berfrois, August 26, 2015)
- Showing and Telling in Adam Bede (February 26, 2017)
Elizabeth Gaskell
- Clear Conscience, Brave Heart, Can’t Lose: Wives and Daughters (February 14, 2015)
- Mercy and Tenderness in “Lizzie Leigh” (October 28, 2016)
- The Comforts of Cranford (February 7, 2017)
George Gissing
- The Odd Women (May 13, 2014)
- “Literature Nowadays”: Rereading New Grub Street (January 17, 2019)
Rudyard Kipling
- “Who Is Kim?” Rudyard Kipling, Kim (February 26, 2019)
William Makepeace Thackeray
- The Morality of Vanity Fair (Open Letters, July 2010)
Anthony Trollope
- “Reading Anthony Trollope” (Open Letters, October 2009)
- The Doctor Drinks His Tea: Taking a Time Out with Trollope (February 3, 2018)
- Reading Trollope in the Age of Trump (TLS July 2018)
Updated September 1, 2019.
Novel Readings 