Aging: Kaleidoscope, Lear, Cranford Chronicles …. return to Gaskell

Florence Lacey, Kaleidoscope (A review) Friends and readers, Probably a coincidence which I’m noticing because I’m aging, but aging was and is the topic of the two plays and films I’ve gone to or been watching this week: this past Thursday, Matt Connor and Stephen Gregory Smith’s moving musical (a world premiere at Creative Cauldron, […]

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The rich experiences in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South

Margaret (Daniela Denby- Ashby) first making friends with Nicholas (Brendan Coyle) and Bessy Higgins (Anna Maxwell Martin) (Sandy Welch’s 2004 North and South, Part 2) yet men set me down in their fool’s books as a wise man, an independent character, strong-minded and all that cant — Mr Bell, North and South Dear friends and […]

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Victorian into Edwardian: Fictions of Affliction; Dickens & James; Gaskell & Suffragettes

Catherine Dickens (Joanna Scanlon) obeying Dickens and bringing to Ellen Ternan her jewelry (Invisible Woman, script Abi Morgan, directed, produced Ralph Fiennes) Again, from The Invisible Woman (adapted from Claire Tomalin’s book on Ellen Ternan) — we see (among others, Ellen Ternan (Felicity Jones), her mother (Kristin Scott Thomas), her sister Dear friends and readers, […]

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Not Quite a Year of Reading Gaskell: My Lady Ludlow & Sylvia’s Lovers

An illustration for Gaskell’s Ruth Dear Friends and readers, I’m sad to have to report we seem to have come to an end of our not quite a year of reading Elizabeth Gaskell on my two listserv communities. What had enabled us to keep on came to an end: three volumes of short stories (Cousin […]

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Elizabeth Gaskell festival still going on!

Camille Pissarro, Morning Light on Snow Dear friends and readers, Several months ago now (!), back in September I wrote a blog about how on WWTTA we had begun a reading and discussion of a group of Gaskell’s short stories and novellas that are online as well as in print in three separate collections (Cousin […]

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Elizabeth Gaskell festival: 3 short stories (comment on Elizabeth Spencer’s “Light in the Piazza”)

Elizabeth Gaskell (1865 watercolor) Elizabeth Spencer (1921-) Dear friends and readers, My listserv community (mailing list) WWTTA has embarked on a four month “Elizabeth Gaskell festival.” A group of us propose to read two short stories by Gaskell each week alternating occasionally with a novella over two to three weeks, at the end of which […]

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Anthony Trollope’s Two American Civil War Christmas stories: The Widow’s Mite & The Two Generals

Jo (Maya Hawke) in the 2017 British TV serial version of Little Women: opening Christmas scene anticipating the war to come Gentle friends and interested readers, For this Christmas I researched into two of Trollope’s little or lesser-known Christmas stories, especially his two American civil war Christmas “The Widow’s Mite” and “The Two Generals.” I […]

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Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: a black slave narrative become a white middle class woman’s novel

Early illustration of Uncle Tom ministered to by Cassy (from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1851-52) I assigned Uncle Tom’s Cabin 3 times in the early 1990s when I was teaching a class called American literary Masterpieces. It was part of a unit I called The Civil War, and my other two books were a set of […]

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Reading two lesser-known Trollope novels: The Vicar of Bullhampton & John Caldigate

Frank Fenwick faces the community and the Marquis of Trowbridge, defying them on behalf of the working class Sam Brattle whom they are about to keep in prison for crime there is no evidence he committed (Henry Woods, first illustrator of Vicar of Bullhampton) John Caldigate glimpses and is attracted to the independent Mrs Euphemia […]

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Jane Mander’s The Story of a New Zealand River

Ada (Tara Fitzgerald, the Alice Roland of film story) and Flora (Anna Paquin, the Asia of the film story) — from Jane Campion’s 1993 The Piano, a very free appropriation of Mander’s 1920 novel) Dear friends and readers, I do not remember what year it was when I first came across Jane Mander’s traditional novel […]

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