Aside from that, I picked Horace Walpole as today's writer. My set of his letters was printed in 1909. And so many pages are uncut! How could someone not read such delightful letters? But the purpose of uncut sets is to preserve the words for those of us farther down the road, of course. They get loved eventually, even if whoever bought the ( Read more... )

A Governess in the Age of Jane Austen, which is the diary and letters of Agnes Porter, a governess to the children of some of the Fox Strangway connections. She was extremely duty-oriented, but had a sense of humor. I marked a bunch of passages that illustrate life as it was then.
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John Davis was born the year before Jane Austen--same month, December. Both of them wrote from an early age, though Davis also spent a lot of time at sea. He wrote this novel (it's extremely short--novella, barely) around the time of the false peace, sold it, and the publisher, a Thomas Tegg, sat on it for a couple of years, and when the Nelson ( Read more... )

I was looking into Benedetta Craveri's bio of Madame Deffand for some data on another matter, but when I hit the chapter about her St. Joseph’s convent salon, the parallels between the 18th C French salons and the evolving blog-scene snapped into one of those rooms where mirrors on opposite walls stretch out into a kind of curved infinity.
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Sometimes I sit down with the Encyclopedia Britannica when I'm waiting for something to cook, or steeping my tea. Not just the one we bought ten or fifteen years ago, but also the 1771 edition.

I was paging through the latter this morning, and came across this definition:

NOVEL, in matters of literature, a fictitious history of a series of ( Read more... )

My reward reading has been all over the 17th C this week, so this evening’s foray was into Spectator. For the fun of it I looked up July 18th 1712, and the essay was the second of two parts, about men and women having civilized one another in their savage past: the men were coarse, bearded, didn’t pare their nails, and violent until their yearly ( Read more... )

I realized from an early age that rereading meant the book would change. One knew what would happen, so the surprise was gone, but if one could anticipate favorite scenes, savoring set in ( Read more... )