A Secret Sisterhood by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney
Reviewed by Harriet The subtitle of this book is ‘The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf’, which sounds very promising. I’ll start by saying that I found some…
Reviewed by Harriet The subtitle of this book is ‘The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf’, which sounds very promising. I’ll start by saying that I found some…
Review by Harriet Soon after midnight she would wake; and again at half past two; and again at four. As the months went by, I found myself quite distracted by…
Reviewed by Harriet If you’re a watcher of historical TV documentaries, you won’t need introducing to Lucy Worsley, who presents history programmes for the BBC, in which she often dresses…
By Harriet Jane Austen died two hundred years ago, on 18 July 1817, at the age of just 41. She had anonymously published four novels – Sense and Sensibility (1811),…
Reviewed by Harriet It’s every parent’s nightmare – one minute your child is there, next minute they’re gone. My own three-year-old daughter once wandered off in a busy market in…
Translated by Linda Coverdale Reviewed by Harriet What was he doing there? A hundred times, in the middle of an investigation, he’d had the same feeling of helplessness or, rather,…
Review by Harriet The deaths of poets matter to us because they become a lens through which to look at the poems. So say the authors, both poets themselves, in…
Review by Harriet ‘Aphra Behn was a woman who wore masks’. So says Janet Todd at the beginning of this monumental, newly revised biography of Behn, who was a prolific…
Reviewed by Harriet And if such a gift could come to him at such a time… — he opened his eyes, and yes, there it was, the perfect knowledge: Anything…
Reviewed by Harriet Dominic Dromgoole was the Artistic Director of London’s Globe Theatre from 2005 to 2016. During this successful period he initiated many memorable achievements, including a 2012 festival…
Reviewed by Harriet I’d never heard of Jean Hanff Korelitz when her 2014 novel, You Should Have Known, landed unsolicited in my mailbox. I read it with huge admiration and…
Reviewed by Harriet I wanted to write about people whose voices have not echoed through time and whose struggles and passions have been hidden from history So writes Helen Dunmore…
Reviewed by Harriet For some reason I’ve always been fascinated by child prodigies – people who seem to have been born with an innate talent for something, which very often…
Reviewed by Harriet Last year there was a bit of a flutter in the blogging world when Edith Nesbit’s complete works popped up on Amazon for a very low price….
Reviewed by Harriet You will have only one story… You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You will have only one. This advice, given to…
Reviewed by Harriet Subtitled ‘A History of Women and Desire’, this book explores the fields of literature, film and popular romance. Ranging from the early nineteenth century to the present…
Reviewed by Harriet When I was a small child my mother, who spent a lot of time in France and loved French cooking, used to have to go to the…
Reviewed by Harriet Who is JP Delaney? All that is known at the time of writing this review is that the pseudonym conceals the identity of ‘a writer who has…
Reviewed by Harriet All along, from the beginning of his conscious life, the persistent feeling that the forks and parallels of the roads taken and not taken were all being…
Reviewed by Harriet The British Library Crime Classics editions started a successful trend in 2014 with their publication of J. Jefferson Farjeon’s Mystery in White, which became a runaway best-seller….
Reviewed by Harriet She who dwells with me, with whom I’ve livedWith such communion, that no place on earthCan ever seem a solitude to me. So wrote William Wordsworth in…
Reviewed by Harriet It’s one thing to read about detectives, but quite another trying to be one. I’ve always loved whodunits – I’ve not just edited them, I’ve read them…
Reviewed by Harriet Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in…
Reviewed by Harriet In the pantheon of detective fiction there is nothing quite like it. So writes Martin Edwards in his introduction to the British Library’s new edition of this…