E.M. Forster: Howards End
Homecomings Most of us connect the notion of “home” or “childhood home” with one particular place, that innocent paradise we have since had to give up and keep searching for forever after. In Ruth Wilcox’s world, Howards End is that place; the countryside house where she was born, where her family often returns to spend […]
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Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence
Love, Loneliness, and the Strictures of Society Imagine living in a world where life is governed by intricate rituals; a world “balanced so precariously that its harmony [can] be shattered by a whisper” (Wharton); a world ruled by self-declared experts on form, propriety and family history – read: scandal –; where everything is labeled and […]
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Michael Cox: The Meaning of Night
“For Death is the meaning of night, the eternal shadow into which all lives must fall, all hopes expire.” Phoebus Rainsford Daunt, we learn from this book’s alleged editor (one J.J. Antrobus,* who claims to have discovered the collection of quarto-leaf pages making up the “confession” reproduced herein amidst a series of papers recently left […]
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Jhumpa Lahiri: Interpreter of Maladies
Interpreting Maladies An Interpreter of Maladies is not, as Mrs. Das thinks (and as the reader of Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories may initially be thinking, too), a medical doctor or a psychologist; someone who interprets the origin and meaning of his patients’ various illnesses and malaises and then prescribes the adequate treatment. No: an Interpreter of […]
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Ellis Peters: A Morbid Taste for Bones
The First Chronicle of a Truly Rare Benedictine’s Adventures In a number of visions, a young monk of the Benedictine abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul at Shrewsbury believes he has encounters with St. Winifred, in her earthly life a girl from a remote Welsh village decapitated by an evil-spirited nobleman. The saint, Brother […]
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Agatha Christie: Miss Marple’s Final Cases
Dear Aunt Jane’s Final Short Cases “Miss Marple insinuated herself so quickly into my life that I hardly noticed her arrival,” Agatha Christie wrote in her posthumously-published autobiography (1977) about the elderly lady who, next to Belgian super-sleuth Hercule Poirot, quickly became one of her most beloved characters. Somewhat resembling Christie‘s own grandmother and her […]
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Eudora Welty: One Writer’s Beginnings
Glimpses Into a Unique Writer’s Mind “Listening,” “Learning to See” and “Finding a Voice,” Eudora Welty entitled the three chapters of her autobiography “One Writer’s Beginnings.” And while these may be steps that most writers will undergo at some point, Welty’s compact memoir is notable both because it allows a rare glimpse into the celebrated […]
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