Warning: strpos(): Empty needle in /homepages/5/d845057890/htdocs/clickandbuilds/LionessatLarge/wp-content/plugins/regenerate-thumbnails-advanced/classes/Environment.php on line 47
20th Century & Contemporary BritLit – Lioness at Large

20th Century & Contemporary BritLit

Literature Reviews

Adventures in Arda

Note: This was my summer 2022 project — but while I posted the associated project pages here at the time (Middle-earth and its sub-project pages concerning the people and peoples, timeline, geography, etc. of Arda and Middle-earth, see enumeration under the Boromir meme, below), I never got around to also copying this introductory post from […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

J.R.R. Tolkien: Tales from the Perilous Realm

Blurb: Combined into one volume, this is the collection of Tolkien’s five modern classic ‘fairie’ tales in the vein of The Hobbit: Roverandom is a toy dog who, enchanted by a sand sorcerer, gets to explore the world and encounter strange and fabulous creatures. Farmer Giles of Ham is fat and unheroic, but – having […]

Read More
Literature Movies Reviews

Andy Serkis: Gollum: How We Made Movie Magic

Blurb: Film-making history was made when, in The Two Towers, an actor’s performance and digital animation were seamlessly integrated to create the world’s first totally lifelike computer-generated character. Now Andy Serkis tells his own story about how a three-week commission to provide a voiceover for Gollum grew into a five-year commitment to breathe life and […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

Robert Foster: The Complete Guide to Middle-earth

Blurb: For the millions who have already ventured to Middle-earth—and for the countless others who have yet to embark on the journey—here is the one indispensable A-to-Z guide that brings Tolkien’s universe to life. EVERY CHARACTER From Adaldrida Brandybuck to Zaragamba—every Hobbit, Elf, Dwarf, Man, Orc, and other resident of Middle-earth is vividly described and […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien: The Lays of Beleriand

Blurb: The third volume that contains the early myths and legends which led to the writing of Tolkien’s epic tale of war, The Silmarillion. This, the third volume of The History of Middle-earth, gives us a priviledged insight into the creation of the mythology of Middle-earth, through the alliterative verse tales of two of the […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien: The Fall of Gondolin

Blurb: Presented for the first time as a stand-alone work, the epic tale of The Fall of Gondolin reunites fans of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with Elves and Men, Balrogs, Dragons and Orcs and the rich landscape and creatures unique to Tolkien’s Middle-earth. This audio production features Samuel West, voicing J. […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien: Beren and Lúthien

Blurb: Beren was a mortal man, but Lúthien was an immortal Elf. Her father, a great Elvish lord, was deeply opposed to Beren, and imposed on him an impossible task that he must perform before he might wed Lúthien. Undaunted by Lord Thingol’s challenge, Beren and Lúthien embark on the supremely heroic attempt to rob […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien: Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth

Blurb: Unfinished Tales is a collection of narratives ranging in time from the Elder Days of Middle-earth to the end of the War of the Ring and provides those who have read The Lord of the Rings with a whole collection of background and new stories from the 20th century’s most acclaimed popular author. The […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien: The Children of Húrin

Blurb: There are tales of Middle-earth from times long before The Lord of the Rings. The story told in this book is set in the great country that lay beyond the Grey Havens in the West: lands where Treebeard once walked, but which were drowned in the great cataclysm that ended the First Age of […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

J.R.R. Tolkien: The Silmarillion

                      Blurb: The Silmarillion is an account of the Elder Days, of the First Age of Tolkien’s world. It is the ancient drama to which the characters in The Lord of the Rings look back, and in whose events some of them such as Elrond […]

Read More
Literature Reviews Uncategorized

J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit – Performed by Andy Serkis

Like its magnificent sequel, The Hobbit is, I think, many things to many people: the first exposition of the universe that would become Middle-earth; prelude to The Lord of the Rings; a bite-sized visit to Middle-earth whenever you don’t feel up to the full blow of the War of the Ring(s); one of the most […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

Karen Wynn Fonstad: The Atlas of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth

Blurb: “Find your way through every part of J.R.R. Tolkien’s great creation, from the Middle-earth of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to the undying lands of the West … The Atlas of Tolkien’s Middle-earth is an essential guide to the geography of Middle-earth, from its founding in the Elder Days – as […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

J.R.R. Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings – Performed by Andy Serkis

In another online community, we recently talked about the new Andy Serkis Lord of the Rings recordings.  Well, it turns out that the pull of The Ring is still mighty strong, for however much it may have been destroyed in Mount Doom. I had barely gotten my hands on these audios and I found I […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

Terry Pratchett: I Shall Wear Midnight

Tiffany Aching is growing up — finally! To be fair, it never felt like Pratchett was writing “down” to Tiffany or to a younger audience in the first three books of this subseries; for one thing, Pratchett was probably constitutionally incapable of writing down to anybody to begin with, and the fact that Tiffany (being […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

D.E. Stevenson: Miss Buncle’s Book

Next to the Golden Age mystery writers, another group of seemingly long-forgotten writers who seem to be experiencing a mini-renaissance in recent yeas are the women writers of the interwar years — Winifred Holtby, Angela Thirkell, Stella Gibbons, Dorothy Whipple, Mollie Panter-Downes, Miss Read, and, well, D.E. Stevenson are all seeing a renaissance of their […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

Q1 / 2022 Reading Recap

Well, as it turned out 2022 began as 2021 had ended — all work and no play, albeit with the addition of a hospital detour to boot.  (Nothing serious, just way more painful and, all told, protracted, than it had any right to be.)  So I’m back to posting one summary post for the first […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West: Love Letters

  The final entry of my exploration of Vita Sackville-West’s life and literature, and part 2 of circling back to Virginia Woolf, here via the two writers’ personal relationship. Both writers’ letters had previously been published individually; so had their diaries — you’d think an edition collecting their correspondence with each other in one volume, […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

Virginia Woolf: Orlando

As I said elsewhere, given the fact that Virginia Woolf was a 2021 (M)DWS author in residence, too, as part of my exploration of the life and work of Vita Sackville-West’s life and work I decided to circle back to Woolf; or rather, to the link between the two writers, which far exceeds their almost […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

An anthology giving a taste of every aspect of Sackville-West’s considerable oeuvre, from her memoirs and diaries, letters and travel writing to her literary criticism, her writing on gardening, her fiction (both longer works and short fiction), her poetry, and finally her reflection on animals (which she loved). I haven’t read the whole anthology yet […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

Vita Sackville-West: Seducers in Ecuador & The Heir

Two novellas from 1922 (The Heir) and 1924 (Seducers in Ecuador) that both deal with transformative experiences — and I suppose that is why they are typically published together –; however, in tone and setting they couldn’t be any more different. Seducers in Ecuador was the first piece of fiction writing by Vita Sackville-West published […]

Read More