During my childhood, at regular intervals, somewhere in our house a book slammed shut and the call rang out, “Finished the book!” My father, my brother and I all participated in this ritual. My mother mostly read the Bible and of course, there’s never an end to that. This morning I quietly closed the 2533  Read the Rest…

It’s a good idea to know the definition of dapple (cloudy and rounded spots or patches of a color or shade different from their background) before you read Gerard Manley Hopkins because it’s a word he uses a lot and nobody else does. Not ever. I have a dappled relationship with him. Music, painting, and  Read the Rest…

Rudyard Kipling. The few of his poems featured in the Norton reminded me that I had an old copy (1899) of Plain Tales from the Hill that has a swastika embossed on the front. In India in 1899, the swastika was a revered symbol, however between the swastika on the book and what we today  Read the Rest…

“A deep sense of religion (is) compatible with the entire absence of theology.” So is Thomas Henry Huxley quoted in the Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol 2, and all over the Internet but no one seems to have any source other than “a letter.” A great statement like that is, in my opinion, free  Read the Rest…

Disclosure statement: I used Grammarly.com to grammar check this post because I wanted to see what it thought of Robert Browning’s 19th century English usage: not much. Actually I took the bait of using Grammarly to enter a contest. So here we go: In Victorian Lit class I was told that Robert Browning was set  Read the Rest…

“Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” I thought that was Shakespeare’s line.  He’s usually my first guess when I’m unsure. But, surprise, it’s Tennyson.  I was surprised over and over at the many familiar passages in his long poem, “In Memoriam A.H.H.” A.H.H. is Arthur Hallam, a  Read the Rest…

I have now left behind the Romantics and entered the age of Victorian Literature (1832-1901.)  What immediately strikes me is the similarity of the Victorian age to our own.  The anxiety, the social problems, the wide scope of attitudes towards sex, the arguments about religion, and the struggle of women all feel familiar.  After hacking  Read the Rest…

I got a little exercised about Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 essay, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, after I watched, in 2013, women being dragged out of the North Carolina and Texas legislatures and arrested for peaceful protest on their Capitol steps. I wasn’t sure I wanted to write about it because I found it  Read the Rest…

On the inside cover of my college text, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of Keats (edited, with an introduction by Harold Edgar Briggs, The Modern Library) is a penciled note, “read in Mary-Ellis’ book pg. 312, 317, 329-30” that I’ve been puzzling over.  I think it has to do with Romantic Lit being at 9:00  Read the Rest…

Percy Bysshe Shelley was an intense, wordy young man.  As I plowed through the Shelley selections in the Norton Anthology, I wondered why he was given so much more space than the other romantic poets.  Then I did a calculation (can you tell I am wearying of the Romantics?) and found that Byron, Coleridge, and  Read the Rest…