I love Victorian ghost stories because they embody one of my favorite storytelling elements–the past haunting the present. In addition, the function of most Victorian ghost stories was to produce the pleasurable shudder, another of my favorite things.
Read More"Halfway down a bystreet of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm." Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Gothic classic, The House of The Seven Gables, combines my favorite storytelling elements and reads like a Dickens or Hardy novel. And it warns: Beware of the Sins of Your Forefathers
Read MoreIt’s highly unlikely a person will make it through life with their heart in one piece. Heartbreak is inevitable. Indeed, literature is replete with heartbreak, all due to failed romance, death, or betrayal. But at the same time it reminds us that broken hearts can mend. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre depicts lost yet redeemable love, which refuses to give up.
Read MoreMany claim Charles Dickens invented Christmas. And there’s a reason why. Click on the link for my full review.
Read MoreThis collection of tales transports the reader to a time when staircases creaked in old manor houses, and a candle could be blown out by a gust of wind, or by a passing ghost.
Read MoreWide Sargasso Sea tells the story of Mr. Rochester’s first wife, Antoinette Cosway Mason
Read MoreThings do not go as planned for the novel’s protagonist, Pip, in his quest to rise socially. And since this is a Dickens novel, rest assured, there are lessons to be learned.
Read MoreRomance, passion, vengeance. Wuthering Heights has it all. And there’s a reason it has not been out of print in over one-hundred and seventy years.
Read MoreReading this book is like having your own personal tour of ten famous houses in literature, such as: Rebecca’s Manderley, Great Expectations’s Satis House and Jane Eyre’s Thornfield Hall.
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