Vanity Fair in Venice

So I've been in Venice for the last three days, and feeling bad that I wasn't reading some nineteenth-century novel about English-speaking idiots in Venice, instead of Vanity Fair & A Clash of Kings, neither of which has anything to do with Venice. I read around in Stones of Venice on the vaporetto on the way to San Marco, and i read Paul Ruskin's description of Saint Mark's rising out of the vast square like a treasure-heap of color and how its angels are robed head to foot and blend vaguely into the golden ground and how the jaspers and marbles like Cleopatra offer the sunlight their blue veins to kiss, and we were standing next to one of those cafes with the orchestra and they were playing what Paul called "noir music," so this morning at breakfast Paul did a recitation of the Ruskin passage as performed by a private dick, into whose office a Byzantine-Gothic-Renaissance cathedral had walked & looked like trouble. But I couldn't find the passage about the good sculpture of a doge and a bad sculpture of a doge (the one with half his face unfinished, which, although you can't _see_ that it's unfinished, enraged Ruskin) and although I did find one description of a doge I couldn't locate the Baptistery in Saint Mark's to look at him, so altogether I was a terrible Ruskinian in Venice, and totally didn't even ruin my honeymoon peering over statuary and up at capitals and ignoring my spouse, as Ruskin did and as my professor claimed to sort of have done himself in Venice, wandering around the churches with Ruskin under his arm, even though when we were talking about it in class I felt very much inspired to do so.

Instead we rode around on vaporetti and explored tiny alleys and miniature canals and deserted piazze, and took a lot of overexposed pictures, and read novels on our Kindles that had nothing to do with Venice. The only parallel I can find between our travels & Vanity Fair is that Rawdon Crawley is always cheating everyone at cards and being a pool shark & so on & ruining tradesmen, and similarly Rory and Alison went to the Venice Casino on Saturday night, dressed respectively in Paul's suit from the wedding we went to in Greece and one of my sundresses, and totally cleaned up at the blackjack table. By which I mean they both instantly got 21, won 15 euro, and quit while they were ahead. Apparently the 10 euro chip they'd gotten with their 10 euro entry fee couldn't be cashed in, however, so they played another hand just using that chip and some high-roller rolled up and bet 400 euro on their success, and they lost, so I guess they ruined that high-roller just as Rawdon Crawley has ruined many a tradesman, as well as the faithful companion of his aunt Miss Crawley, Miss Briggs, whom Becky Sharp gets to be her "sheepdog" after Miss Crawley's death (you know, like her chaperone so she can entertain lords & dandies when her husband isn't home), and whom the Crawleys bilk out of her annuity, how awful.

As you may be able to guess, Becky is getting increasingly more awful as the novel goes on. After Amelia & George get secretly married, they meet up with the Crawleys while honeymooning in Brighton and everyone has a wonderful time together, except Amelia because Becky keeps flirting with George. Then the men get sent to Belgium for Waterloo, and Becky is like, "I'll go too!" because she likes adventure I guess, and Amelia is like, "oh, I'll go too, I guess" because she likes George, and Amelia's brother Joseph takes all the girls over and gets military fever and starts wearing a cocked hat and a gold-braided coat even though he's totally a civilian. Becky keeps on flirting with George and doing splendidly at balls (apparently everyone thinks it is super fun to be waiting for Waterloo to happen in Belgium and there are civilians everywhere staying at hotels and having a wonderful time) and Amelia is beside herself, but then when it's time to actually go into battle George feels bad about his dad and Amelia and wants to be a good son and a good husband but it's too late because he totally gets killed at Waterloo! but we don't find that out for a while. Instead we stay in the hotels with the women & civilians and watch Amelia flip out and Becky be hilarious. Everyone thinks the French are going to win, based on the evidence of some cowardly Belgian deserters who show up like ten minutes after the battle has started, being like "The French are really scary, we just ran out of there, we're the only survivors" so everyone's trying to get out of town. These mean English aristocrats want to buy Becky's two horses and she's like "No way! Ha ha good luck getting out of town without any horses, have fun while the French rip out those diamonds you've sewn into your boots." Instead she sells the horses to Amelia's brother for an extortionate sum on which she & Rawdon will be able to live for two years. Joseph Sedley totally hightails it out of there on the horses even though everyone says the English are actually winning and that he's a coward. Amelia just flips out for a while and does some nursing and then when she finds out her husband is dead actually flips out, possibly for years. Becky sews all HER valuables into her clothes and figures she will be a rich widow, but her husband survives and she amuses him and this general Tufto (with whom they've been having this confusing menage-a-trois) by maybe stripping down as she rips everything out of her clothes. Becky Sharp, made of money!

After that it's all Becky being the belle of Paris, and Becky and Amelia having matching babies, and Becky weaseling out of Paris when their credit runs out, and negotiating with all the creditors in England so they can come back and she can kind of be the belle of London. This is where you know that the author actually thinks Becky is evil because it turns out she is a terrible mom. Crawley actually loves their little boy and secretly hangs out with him and gives him presents, but Becky has no time for him, she's too busy entertaining Lord Steyne, who is not Gabriel Byrne after all but rather a horrible little balding red-haired man! Meanwhile Sir Pitt Crawley dies and Becky makes up pretty good with the heir, her brother-in-law; and Amelia is languishing away with her ruined parents in some suburb; and the two matching kids meet in the Park; and the Osborne family finds out about Amelia's kid and I think they will want to steal him. Also there is Dobbin, the gawky soldier who is in love with Amelia and who just heard some news about her (maybe that she's getting married? but she isn't; maybe that the in-laws want to get their hands on little Georgy?) so he's flipping out at Madras and asking for a leave to go deal with things in London.

That's about how far I am now. I guess you can also make a case for Becky's hypocrisy being like all the masks we tried on in Venice. Also WMT tells us that all good wives are hypocrites, because you try to make your husband feel good even if he is a booby. That's like when a friend of mine told me I was a hypocrite because I tried to comfort some girl who was crying, even though I thought the reason she was crying was stupid. Maybe my standards for honesty are pretty low, because I think that's much better than telling a crying person they are a booby. Who knew? I am as wicked as Becky Sharp!!

Vanity Fair: The Actual Book

So, Vanity Fair begins with some allegorical nonsense about how we are going to be watching this very exciting and depressing performance--"Yes, this is Vanity Fair; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy"--with WMT as "the manager of the Performance" who "sits before the curtain on the boards" where "a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him." I'm kind of confused about whether the Fair is a play taking place on a stage in a theater, which is suggested by all this manager stuff, or, like, a Fair where they sell stuff, which is what it seems to be in Pilgrim's Progress. I guess it's a performance OF the Vanity Fair, put on by Thackeray for our amusement? But also the Fair is maybe always a performance, because all the people selling things in it are such two-faced jerks? There is a difference between the way the actors behave when they're in the Fair and when they're at home:

Look at the faces of the actors and buffoons when they come off from their business; and Tom Fool washing the paint off his cheeks before he sits down to dinner with his wife and the little Jack Puddings behind the canvas. The curtain will be up presently, and he will be turning over head and heels, and crying, “How are you?”


Well, that doesn't seem so bad. We all go act like buffoons in the Fair (which is society, right? That's what you're talking about WMT?) and then we go home to our nice little family and have a pretty good time? The narrator says "When you come home you sit down in a sober, contemplative, not uncharitable frame of mind, and apply yourself to your books or your business." So it's like this novel is going to amuse and shock us for  a while, like the Fair itself, and then we'll go back to our regular old lives? But then sometimes in the book it seems like the Fair encompasses everything, from the Smedley's domestic lives to Becky's schoolroom to the barracks or whatever. Maybe I will figure this out as I go along.


Anyway, it's great when he talks about the "famous little Becky Puppet" who has been "pronounced to be uncommonly flexible in the joints" (yowza!) and the "Amelia Doll," which, "though it has had a smaller circle of admirers, has yet been carved and dressed by the greatest care by the artist." So now it's a puppet show, not a live-action play (maybe puppet shows are more usual entertainments at fairs?) It's clear that this "before the curtain" part was written after the rest of the novel was serialized, since WMT's clearly responding to everyone loving Becky and thinking Amelia is a drip (as we learn later, the girls in particular think Amelia is a drip.) He's always defending Amelia to everyone, and she seems perfectly nice and you sympathize with her and remember how in the movie she was played by the actress who was Gwendolyn Harleth in Daniel Deronda, showing quite a bit of range! (Question: How many Victorian novels have you read BEFORE watching the BBC miniseries? In my case it may only be all the Bronte novels, and, like, The Moonstone? Wait, it's possible I saw Daniel Deronda first, because I remember being in tremendous suspense about it on the subway, and in 2005 or whatever you didn't watch BBC miniseries on the subway like you do now, you crazy technologists.) But you're like, Mr. Thackeray, do you REALLY like Amelia better than Becky Sharp? That is hard to believe. Like, he clearly thinks Becky is a bad little girl, but is he not delighted by her? 


This brings me to the novel's subtitle: A Novel Without a Hero. Thackeray makes a lot of jokes about this throughout, and he's like, "oh, Amelia is as close to a heroine as we get in this novel without a hero," but clearly Becky is the hero, right? And it's a novel without a hero because she's a girl? Except like 50% of novels are about girls, so I guess he really means Becky is no kind of heroine because she's so amoral. In Writing Beyond the Ending Rachel Blau DuPlessis identifies this tension within female protagonists of 19th-century novels, where they're always both a "female hero" enacting a quest plot and a "heroine" enacting a marriage plot. The female hero is all gutsy and resourceful, while the heroine is carefully folded in to the embrace of an emerging romantic male hero at the end, and all her pluckiness, which helped her get married in the first place, is now useless and needs to be sublimated in some way. It's interesting to think about whether Becky fits in this paradigm: her quest plot is her marriage plot, more frankly than it is Jane Eyre's or whatever, and she's more ruthless and hilarious than an Austen heroine would be. So she really seems to be a genuine female hero, also because (although I haven't read this far yet) her struggles do go on beyond the ending (I seem to remember an excerpt where WMT extends his curtain metaphor and talks about writing after the curtain of matrimony has fallen), since she has all kinds of problems after her secret marriage. Even though WMT thinks she's so awful, she seems to be more like the hero of an 18th-century novel, like Tom Jones or Moll Flanders or somebody.


So the plot so far: Becky Sharp and Amelia Smedley leave school, where Amelia is beloved and where Becky is hated for being a sarcastic French-speaking minx who insists on getting paid for any work she does, to go hang out at Amelia's house in London before Becky  has to go be the governess for a baronet's family in Hampshire. Becky finds out Amelia's brother Joseph, who is home from his tax collector job in India with a liver complaint, is unmarried and rich, and she decides she will marry him and get all his elephants and saris, even though he's gluttonous and fat and stupid. Becky does a pretty good job seducing Joseph, despite his bashfulness, and they go on a fun outing to Vauxhall with Amelia and her childhood sweetheart Lt. George Osborne and Osborne's best friend Captain William Dobbin (Dobbin's deal is that Osborne exposed him as a grocer's son at school, and everyone was mean to him, but one day for some reason he saved Osborne from being thrashed by the First Cock at the school by thrashing the Cock himself and now they are fast friends and also Dobbin totally outranks him and is obviously great, although bashful and gawky), and Joseph is all ready to propose but he gets drunk on rack punch and then has a hangover the next day and Osborne somehow convinces him not to propose to Becky so Joseph goes away and Becky has to go and be a governess for the Crawley family. Becky is like, "rrgh, it's all George's fault" and Sir Crawley is this filthy ridiculous guy who is always going to law and cooks his own dinner in a saucepan and Becky is like, sheesh, but she does her best to ingratiate herself to everyone in the family, which includes: 1) greedy old dirty friendly-but-mean Sir Crawley; 2) sheepish ignored Lady Crawley, who is the 2nd Lady Crawley and who was an ironmonger's daughter so no one respects her; 3) Mr Pitt Crawley who is the son of the first wife and is like all into religion or something; 4) Captain Rawdon Crawley who is a dashing dragoon and loves to duel; 5) the two little girls, who are Lady Crawley's kids; 6) Mr Bute and 7) Mrs Bute Crawley, who are like a rector and his wife who are always scheming against Sir Crawley's family. Then there's Miss Crawley who is Sir Crawley's sister & her deal is she is super rich and likes to say shocking things and be entertained, so when she comes to visit of course she loves Becky and ends up taking Becky back to London with her to nurse her when she gets indigestion from eating too much lobster. This enrages Miss Crawley's usual retainers, as well as Mrs Bute Crawley who, despite her affection for Becky, has been trying to get Captain Rawdon Crawley to sleep with Becky so that Becky can't someday marry his dad and become Lady Crawley and cause more trouble and babies that will take money away from the Bute Crawleys, but Becky is like who cares I am such a charming and lively nurse. Then Lady Crawley, who was way sicker than Miss Crawley the whole time, but no one cared because she was a stupid ironmonger's daughter, dies, and Sir Crawley comes to London and proposes to Becky. Becky sheds something like "some of the only natural tears" she will ever shed, because she didn't think there was much of a chance of Lady Crawley dying and herself becoming the next Lady Crawley, and she knows she would be super good at managing Sir Crawley, BUT she already played her hand and it was to SECRETLY MARRY RAWDON CRAWLEY. Sir Crawley's son, remember? This is not immediately revealed but if you are smart you have figured it out, so I'll spare you all the little hints & so on. But all the Crawleys are like, this is very strange, why would she say no to such a great offer, and Miss Crawley is like, she must have another attachment, like to a grocer or something, HOW ROMANTIC I will set them up in a little shop. Becky decides the smartest thing to do is to run off with Rawdon & set up a little house and send a letter to Miss Crawley via one of the lackeys, asking for her forgiveness and blessing. This is a stupid move, because the lackeys hate Becky and Rawdon and now they're in the house with rich Miss Crawley and Becky & R aren't allowed in, and then Mrs Bute shows up and starts telling Miss Crawley all this stuff about how Becky's mom wasn't a Montmorency at all like she said, she was an OPERA singer and Becky herself has probably been on the stage and drank gin when she was a kid and so on. 


Meanwhile Amelia's dad has gone bankrupt because of Napoleon getting off Elba, and George's dad has forbidden him to have anything to do with Amelia, and Becky & Rawdon go to the estate sale and buy some of Amelia's stuff and Becky is pretty heartless about it. But Dobbin loves Amelia and buys her her piano back and sends it to the little suburban house where she's staying with her disgraced family, and they think it's from George and how romantic, and George is touched by the whole situation even though he had been being PRETTY AWFUL and neglectful of Amelia for most of the book, and so he showed up at her little suburban house and probably they're going to get married too.


So the main point of the book so far is DO NOT MARRY a stupid dragoon husband, they are jerks. Well, Rawdon hasn't been a jerk to Becky so far; he thinks she should be made the Pope or something, she is so great at everything she does. Rawdon has been a jerk to George and has cheated him at cards etc. and made him buy some lousy horses, but that's just what anyone would do to George, he is a miserable ponce.


What will happen next? Probably some misery. And some seeing behind the curtain after it drops on a happy couple. Also probably neglected babies, and near-prostitution? Also, like in the movie, Becky will sing a song based on a poem by Tennyson that he HAS NOT WRITTEN YET because Becky is so smart that she should be the pope.

Vanity Fair: R.R. Martin V. Makepeace Thackeray

I'm getting "reading credits" for this summer, so the idea was that as soon as I finished my final papers for my spring 2011 courses, I'd start reading. I was going to be traveling for about a month at the beginning of the summer, so I loaded up my Kindle with about 15 public domain e-texts that I thought might be likely to stay on my list, from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese to Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; as I lifted my backpack, which contained one Kindle and one netbook, I congratulated myself on choosing the nineteenth century.

Papers were due on May 23, but since I was getting on a plane on May 18 to celebrate a friend's wedding on a Greek island, I figured I'd have my work done by then, and that I'd start on my first book--William Makepeace Thackeray's 1848 Vanity Fair, a book I figured was very likely to stay on my list--on the plane. Of course, what really happened was that I spent the plane trip, and the 9-hour unexpected layover at Heathrow, and the bright shining mornings in our room at the island resort, painfully and furiously editing my last paper, which I submitted via e-mail as I sprawled poolside on a wicker divan minutes before the shuttle arrived to take us to the ferry off the island. So since my coursework wasn't done, I didn't feel like it was time to start my orals reading; instead, I rewarded myself for doing homework on vacation by reading George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones at bedtime, by the pool while drinking sparkling water and eating a Greek salad, on the ferry, and in the shadow of the Acropolis. My husband was reading the autobiography of The Stig from the English TV show Top Gear, so we were both engaging in these kind of escapist fantasies, and anyway we were enacting an escapist fantasy by even being on that island, so it was fine.

But then we were on the plane from Athens to Florence, where we'd be meeting up with my family and where I'd be staying with my mother for a couple of weeks, and it seemed like it was time to straighten out and fly right (even if our pilot kind of couldn't: "We have decided not to land the aircraft for operational reasons," he told us. "THIS IS COMPLETELY NORMAL."). Also I had finished A Game of Thrones, and also all the stuff about intrigue at court and betrayal and ambushes was making me paranoid: "I can count on Friend X's support, I think, and Friend Y will remain neutral, but Friend Z has been waiting for me to take a false step since we were children together . . ." So my husband convinced me it was time to start doing my real reading. After all, that adorable Becky Sharp won't be mixed up in any intrigue or betrayal or trickiness of any kind!

When I was about 15% of the way through Vanity Fair, however, I decided it would be nice just to have the next Game of Thrones book on my Kindle, so I downloaded A Clash of Kings. My husband has bet me 5 euro that this will ruin my reading schedule, and that I'll finish CoK before I finish VF. I think I'm pretty safe, though, since I'm like 20% of the way through Vanity Fair (I'm reading it on the Kindle, remember?) and Clash  of Kings seems to be super, super boring.

SO WHAT AM I READING?

In my PhD program, everybody comes up with a "major field," which is supposed to be a historical period or some other broad, clear category that everyone working in English will recognize as something you can specialize in--so you can pick "Victorian literature" or "American literature 1870 - present" or "postcolonial literature" & so on. You also pick two minor fields, which are more tailored to your research interests and can be more specific and quirky. I'm still working out my minor fields with my advisers, so since I have to start reading NOW I'm going to concentrate on my major list--Victorian literature and beyond!--and fill in the rest as we figure it out. This list is still absolutely subject to change, but it will give you a rough idea of what I'm going to be reading over the next year. As you can see, these are pretty famous books and you've probably read a lot of them, and so have I. We'll see what I do about rereading/refreshing my memory about some of these books; but I'm going to start with the ones I've NEVER read, which are marked with a star. You will notice my bizarre underpreparedness in Dickens & Hardy:

Fiction

1) Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838)*
2) Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
3) Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
4) William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847-8)*
5) Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849-50)*
6) Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852-3)*
7) Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853)*
8) Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1854)
9) Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859)*
10) George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
11) Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
12) Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864-5)
13) Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (1864-5)
14) Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
15) Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868)
16) George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-2)
17) Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1875)*
18) George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876)
19) Henry James, Portrait of a Lady (1881)
20) Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
21) Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)*
22) George Gissing, The Odd Women (1893)
23) Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895)*
24) Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
25) Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)*
26) E. M. Forster, Howard’s End (1910)
27) James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
28) Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (1918)*
29) May Sinclair, Mary Olivier: A Life (1919)
30) DH Lawrence, Women in Love (1920)
31) Katherine Mansfield, Bliss and Other Stories (1922)
32) Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)
33) Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)*

Poetry

1) Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)*

2) Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856)

3) Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Cry of the Children” (1844), “Grief”
(1844), “Substitution” (1844), “To George Sand: A Desire” (1844), “To
George Sand: A Recognition” (1844), “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”
(1850), “A Curse for a Nation" (1860)

4) Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859)*

5) Tennyson, The Princess (1847)*

6) Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)

7) Tennyson, Maud: A Monodrama (1855)

8) Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott”(1832), “The Palace of Art” (1832), “Mariana
in the South” (1832), “The Lotos-Eaters” (1832), “Oenone” (1832), “Ulysses”
(1842), “Morte d’Arthur” [The Epic] (1842), “Locksley Hall” (1842), “Break,
Break, Break” (1842), “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854), “Tithonus”
(1862), “Crossing the Bar” (1889), “Flower in the Crannied Wall” (1869)

9) Robert Browning, “Porphyria’s Lover” (1842), “My Last Duchess”
(1842), “Meeting at Night” and “Parting at Morning” (1845); “Home-Thoughts
from Abroad” (1845); “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix”
(1845),“Fra Lippo Lippi” (1855), “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”
(1855), “Love Among the Ruins” (1855), “The Last Ride Together” (1855), “The
Statue and the Bust” (1855), “Caliban Upon Setebos” (1864)

10) Emily Brontë, “The Night Is Darkening Around Me” (1837), “Long Neglect Has
Worn Away” (1837), “Riches I Hold in Light Esteem” (1841), “Plead for Me”
(1844), “To Imagination” (1844), “Remembrance” (1846), “No Coward Soul Is
Mine” (1846)*

11) Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage (1858)

12) Matthew Arnold, “The Forsaken Merman” (1849), “The Buried Life”
(1852), “Thyrsis” (1866), “Dover Beach” (1867)

13) Coventry Patmore, selections from The Angel in the House (1854-6)*

14) George Meredith, Modern Love (1862)

15) Dante Gabriel Rossetti, selections from The House of Life (1848-81)*

16) Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Blessed Damozel” (1850/70), “Mary’s Girlhood
(For a Picture)” (1848-9), “Jenny” (1848/70), “My Sister’s Sleep” (1850), “The
Woodspurge” (1856),“The Portrait” (1846/70), “After the French Liberation of
Italy” (1859), “Ballad of Dead Ladies” (1869)

17) Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market (1862)

18) Christina Rossetti, Monna Innominata (1882)*

19) Christina Rossetti, “Song” (1848), “Echo” (1854), “In an Artist’s Studio”
(1856), “A Birthday” (1857), “Uphill” (1862), “An Apple-Gathering”
(1862), “After Death” (1862), “Old and New Year Ditties” (1862), “A Bird’s-
Eye View” (1863), “ Life and Death” (1863), “Remember” (1862)

20) William Morris, The Earthly Paradise, selections (1868-70)*

21) William Morris, The Defence of Guenevere (1858)

22) Algernon Charles Swinburne, Atalanta and Calydon: “When the Hounds of
Spring” (1865)*

23) Algernon Charles Swinburne, “The Triumph of Time” (1866), “Anactoria”
(1866), “Hymn to Proserpine” (1866)

24) Thomas Hardy, “The Ruined Maid” (1866),” “Hap” (1866), “Neutral Tones”
(1867), “The Darkling Thrush” (1900), “The Milkmaid” (1901), “The Seasons
of Her Year” (1901), “George Meredith (1828-1909)” (1909), “Tess’s Lament”
(1911), “The Convergence of the Twain” (1912)

25) Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Carrion Comfort” (1855), “It Was a Hard Thing
to Undo This Knot” (1864; 1937) “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (1876/
7; 1918), “God’s Grandeur” (1877; 1895), “Pied Beauty” (1877; 1918), “The
Windhover” (1877; 1918), “Spring and Fall” (1880; 1918), “As kingfishers catch
fire” (1881-2?; 1918), “No Worst” (1885; 1918), “I Wake and Feel the Fell of
Dark” (1885?; 1918)

26) Augusta Webster, Portraits (1870)*

27) Augusta Webster, Mother and Daughter (published 1895)

28) Amy Levy, Xantippe and Other Verse (1881)*

29) Michael Field, “La Gioconda” (1892),“Drawing of Roses and
Violets”(1892), “Birth of Venus” (1892), “A Pen-Drawing of Leda”
(1892), “Death, men say, is like the sea” (1893), “An Apple Flower” (1893), “A
Spring Morning by the Sea” (1893), “It Was Deep April and the Morn”
(1893), “Noon” (1893), “Cyclamens” (1893)*

30) Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936), A Shropshire Lad (1896)*

31) W.B. Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1890); “When You are Old”
(1891); “Who Goes with Fergus?” (1893); “Adam’s Curse” (1902); “No

Second Troy” (1910); “The Second Coming” (1919); “Sailing to
Byzantium” (1926); “Leda and the Swan” (1923); “Among School Children”
(1926); “Byzantium” (1930); “Under Ben Bulben” (1938)
32) Charlotte Mew, “The Farmer’s Bride” (1916); “In Nunhead Cemetery” (1916)

33) T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1920); The Waste Land (1922)

Drama

Gilbert and Sullivan, Patience (1881)*
Arthur Wing Pinero, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893)*
Oscar Wilde, Salome (1893)
Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance (1893)
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
George Bernard Shaw, Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893)*
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)*
J.M. Barrie, Mary Rose (1920)*

THERE IS AN ANGEL AT THE END OF THIS BLOG

Well, not really. Just as Grover, the cuddly, cowardly, lovable monster of Sesame Street fame, turned out to be (SPOILER ALERT) the monster he feared was at the end of the book, I'm hoping that I will turn out to be the Victorian angel encased in this blog, bringing insight and wisdom and helpful loving-kindness to all who enter just as Coventry Patmore's Angel in the House was such an inspiring and tender helpmeet to everybody else in the house. I think. The problem with my analogy here is that I haven't really read The Angel in the House--I sort of skimmed it once when I was writing a paper and I wanted to make sure it didn't do some stuff that I was claiming was unique to the text I was writing about. But that's actually the goal of this blog: to read a lot of Victorian literature, and to tell you about it.

When I'm not an angel trapped in a blog (or being dragged out of the blog and killed by feminists, which, you know, is OK too) I'm a third-year PhD student reading for my oral exams. I've been hesitating for two years between specializing in Victorian women's writing and 20th-century American poetry, and when it was time to put together my orals lists I had to make a decision. So I sort of held my nose & jumped in with the Victorians (to mix my house metaphor with a pool metaphor--yikes!). I may or may not regret this decision as I make my way through 120 Victorian & Edwardian classics (& semi-classics/recovery projects/ephemera/trash), plus a few modernist texts to calm my inner proto-Plath, over the next twelve months. You may pass this blog on a street in Hampstead, or in a mew in Kensington, or in a depressingly regular brick-and-ironwork suburb of London, or even amid the gloriously decrepit American Victorian homes of Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, and from the cheerful front door overhung with wisteria, or the charming windows sashed with William Morris curtains, or the little picturesque gable in the attic, you may hear my screams of despair, or my cries of delight, or my pleas to be released into the sharp, clear air of the twentieth century, or at least into the excitingly foggy, Marimekko'd interiors of the C20 angel in the house, with her gleaming washing machines and her cigarettes and her Papa's Panic Palace. I don't know. What kind of noises does an angel/madwoman make from inside a nineteenth-century blog?

Let's find out!