English literature

Thursday

Claudia FitzHerbert

Middlemarch: the novel that reads you

The genesis of The Road to Middlemarch was a fine article in the New Yorker about  Rebecca Mead’s unsuccessful search for the origin of the remark, sometimes attributed to George Eliot, that ‘it’s never too late to become the person you might have been’. To Mead this seemed at variance with the concentration in Middlemarch on ‘the melancholy acknowledgment of limitation’. She sets her vain attempt to re-attribute that sentence in apposition to Eliot’s story of  Lydgate, the doctor whose scientific ambitions are dashed in the wake of his marriage to the implacable Rosamond Vincy: ‘I had aspired to make a link in the chain of discovery, and had failed.’

Thursday

Victoria Glendinning

Anorexia, addiction, child-swapping — the Lake Poets would have alarmed social services

The last time the general reader was inveigled into the domestic intensities of the Wordsworth circle was by Frances Wilson in The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth. She engaged delicately with Dorothy’s inordinate love for her younger brother William, and seemed to think her passionate attachment was romantic and sentimental rather than sexual — though there are 50 shades of grey between the one and the other, and honestly, it doesn’t matter. Katie Waldegrave, in her riveting family saga The Poets’ Daughters, is not much concerned with that anyway. Her focus is on what happened to Wordsworth’s daughter Dora, the second of his five children, and Coleridge’s youngest, Sara. There were

Thursday

Charlotte Moore

The Professor of Poetry, by Grace McCleen – review

Elizabeth Stone, English professor at UCL,  has long lived on ‘paper and words and thin air’. Single, friendless, dessicated, respected, she passes out during a faculty meeting and wakes to find herself ‘attached by a chain of spit to her own cardigan’. A brain tumour is diagnosed, and removed. Expecting death, Elizabeth receives the news that her treatment was apparently successful as a gift: ‘Time had been returned to her.’ She takes her bravest decision in 30 years and goes back to ‘the city of books’ where, as an undergraduate, she had the only profound emotional experience of her adult life. When Elizabeth was seven, her unstable mother disappeared, leaving

Thursday

Rupert Christiansen

Memoirs of a Leavisite, by David Elllis – review

As the author of this wise, patient and delightful book wryly reminds us, Stephen Fry — who, of course, knows everything — has recently written F.R. Leavis off as a ‘sanctimonious prick’. The phrase is probably typical of the way that today’s literary intelligentsia caricatures this tragically lonely, embattled and complex figure. ‘Hairshirt paranoiac’ I’ve also encountered somewhere: it does the trick equally well. Does any academic under the age of 50 now treat Leavis’s map of English literature, let alone his values and judgments, as pedagogically viable forces? Most probably not: his enterprise as critic, teacher and editor of Scrutiny is now strictly a matter for the historians (Christopher