So in Barbara Michaels's Houses of Stone, Our Heroine Karen is an academic with a focus on early nineteenth-century Gothics (oh yes I see what you did there Barbara Michaels, we all saw what you did there) who is convinced she's had the break of her career when her dashing bookseller friend finds a handwritten manuscript of a genuine! female- ( Read more... )

I was on vacation this weekend, so, as is traditional, I kicked off with a Barbara Michaels Gothic, Vanish With the Rose.The premise of this one is that our heroine Diana's baby brother vanished while working for an elderly woman at (of course) an enormous country house. The country house has since been sold to an enthusiastic pair of professors ( Read more... )

The other Barbara Michaels I read on vacation is The Master of Blacktower, which actually was Barbara Michaels' first Gothic, falling squarely into the proud genre known as 'Jane Eyre Lite ( Read more... )

I really committed to vacation-y reading on my vacation this year, and one of the most vacation-y of all was Barbara Michaels' Wait For What Will Come, which ...

....I don't think this book is intentional parody? I thought it was maybe just very early Barbara Michaels, but I just looked at her bibliography and actually it's pretty mid-career. So I ( Read more... )

Catch-up backlog booklogging: once upon a time, I was a member of the NYPL, and I had access to an enormous and beautiful collection of Barbara Michaels gothics on e-book ( Read more... )

Last catch-up Gothic post! I forgot to write up Barbara Michaels' Shattered Silk when I read it because it got overshadowed by Someone in the House and the MYSTERY OF KEVIN'S INVISIBLE SEX, but Shattered Silk is ALSO great, even though it's like the least Gothic Gothic ever to Gothic.

It is however deeply relevant to my interests because the ( Read more... )

Last weekend I was up in Maine, and I loaded up my Kindle with Barbara Michaels Gothics on e-book for the trip (since it turns out my library has a TREASURE TROVE'S WORTH.) But I wasn't necessarily expecting to read all that much on the trip.

Then I started Someone in the HouseTHE SCENE: *a companionable cottage in Maine filled with companionable ( Read more... )

Barbara Michaels' The Sea King's Daughter was my test-run of the Brooklyn Public Library's digital e-book download system! (Which works AMAZINGLY, for the record ( Read more... )