If you're a fandom scholar (that's not me), there is probably a lot to be gained out of studying just how much of an interpretive struggle there was between the Good Omens fandom and the actual authors, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. (Pratchett is apparently responsible for the majority of the text.) One of the novel's major bugs is that Aziraphale and Crowley, the angel and demon on whom most of the fandom fixated, are the most interesting characters in the narrative. That's a huge problem, because not only are they (very) supporting characters, but also the novel is clear that by its own philosophical and political logics they cannot be the main protagonists or the moral centers of the text. What you got, then, was a very dedicated fanbase that wanted to focus on pairing off the angel and the demon romantically as the logical outcome of the novel's narrative trajectory--which was not what Pratchett and Gaiman wanted. Over the course of the increasingly-fraught adaptations--this final one having nearly been axed after the ugly revelations about Gaiman--the fandom's desire to have a canon romance between the pair "won," in the sense that Gaiman clearly saw where the dollar signs lay. As one fan correctly pointed out not long after the first season aired, Gaiman, who had had a history of mocking the shippers, kept revising his authorial intentions on his social media accounts over the course of the next several months, so that what had not been a romance when it started was "confirmed" to be one within the year. (Ironically, part of Gaiman's problem was Michael Sheen, who kept aggressively advocating for his own explicitly romantic reading of the couple; interestingly enough, if you paid attention, Sheen hinted strongly at the series' actual ending, which I presume Gaiman told him and Tennant during the preparation for S2, in one of the S2 interviews.) The next two seasons were, then, about the romance, the commercial driver of the (new) fandom. And yet, they were also about Gaiman and now the most recent scriptwriters (or doctors?) trying to yank the series back to Pratchett's politics and away from some aspects of the fandom's readings. In many ways, that's what the botched final episode accomplishes.

S3 confirms two things about how the Good Omens alternate fantasy universe operates. First, its theology is what you might call "vulgar Calvinist," with no real free will for anyone; as Aziraphale says in the metafictional discussion with God at the end, he and everyone else (and arguably Crowley too, although Aziraphale wants to claim otherwise) were just "characters in her book." In a rewrite of the Nina/Maggie subplot from S2, which featured Aziraphale and Crowley trying to engineer a romance for them, God coolly answers Aziraphale's agonized question about why he was "given" Crowley only to lose him: it made her "smile." As even Aziraphale's phrasing warns us, this romance was also engineered. To God, Aziraphale and Crowley are "characters" whom she writes for her own pleasure, not individuals entitled to choice and organic self-development. This is one of the series' biggest rebukes to the fandom, a surprisingly big chunk of which thought "God ships it" was a romantic affirmation, when the point is that, in the world according to Pratchett, it's cruel. Second, as Satan hints, the series is running on a literal reading of Isaiah 45: 7: "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things." (No theologians were harmed in the making of this adaptation, or probably even read.) Even the struggle between good and evil, as the series has envisioned it, thus turns out to be simply a "cosmic game of solitaire," with no point other than God's entertainment; it's not surprising that Jesus, as he himself ruefully acknowledges before winking out, can't ever really get much accomplished. In other words, while Good Omens is itself a comedy, its universe is not reenacting the Divine Comedy. Nor is this a loving God. It's one thing to play God-the-author as a novelist, the series suggests, where your characters are plot functions; it's quite another to presume to author another person's real-life existence, to force them into a plot of your own designing.

This is where we return to the novel's politico-philosophy. After I saw S2, my prediction was that Gaiman was setting up to push the novel's positions to their full logical conclusion, and that (minus Gaiman) is in fact what happened. (Theoretically, this is Pratchett's ending, although given Gaiman's aforementioned habit of rewriting narratives--sort of like the Metatron, as it turns out--I suspect that there still wouldn't have been a romance anywhere to be seen.) Yes, the script is terrible and full of plot holes, especially when it comes to Crowley's final decision, but the outcome does follow. The novel's politics are liberal, prioritizing radical free will and a skepticism about ideological systems; its ideal individuals, while certainly living "in a society," are individuals first. This is why, for example, the novel rejects Pepper's second-wave feminism, which leads her to perceive the world through the lens of a patriarchal system, and instead celebrates Sister Mary Loquacious's internal process of self-realization: "She'd discovered, under layers of silliness and eagerness to please, Mary Hodges" (99). As a corollary, the novel insists that the flip side of radical free will is personal responsibility, something that, like it or not, also drives its approach to handling bigotry. Sgt. Shadwell's "quite inoffensive" (183) racism, homophobia, and misogyny are properly handled, as far as the novel is concerned, by other people simply dismissing them as a character quirk instead of being offended; by contrast, the novel mocks Aziraphale for reacting so badly to a child calling him a homophobic slur, or believing that Crowley is making fun of him about his weight. It's not an accident that Aziraphale's "THE Southern Pansy" (295) moment is aimed at Shadwell: the point isn't so much affirming a gay identity as taking responsibility for his own feelings.

Adam spends a lot of time ventriloquizing Pratchett at the air base, but Aziraphale and Crowley also get handed some didactic exposition. Adam tells Beelzebub and the Metatron that they aren't actually interested in "beating the other side"; instead, their game will simply go on forever, and "[y]ou'll just keep keep on sending people like these two [...] to mess people around" (362). Moreover--in dialogue partly handed over to Crowley at the end of S3--"I don't see what's so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin' upset 'cos they act like people [...] Anyway, if you stopped tellin' people it's all sorted out after they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive" (363). One of the biggest problems that I don't think the fandom discussed after S2 involved sending the Nazis to Hell. "Of course, the Nazis should be in Hell," you say. But in the novel's logic, sending the Nazis to Hell suggests that Heaven and Hell are justifiable sites of eternal reward and eternal punishment--that the system works properly. The novel argues that the right time for justice is human time, and the right way to achieve justice is to do it rather than defer it. That is, the novel theorizes that Heaven and Hell offer consolations that let humanity off the hook for their own decision-making. It does not offer guarantees that a fully-human moral system will work, which is not the point; the point, as Crowley himself says in S3, again drawing on the novel, is that the truest extremes of "grace" and "evil" lie within humanity itself, and not in Heaven or Hell. And this is why moving Aziraphale and Crowley to the center skewed the adaptations, because even they, humanized as they have become, are not human: we repeatedly see human characters arriving at moral conclusions that they aren't capable of making themselves, as in the fight over murdering the Antichrist in S1 or their manipulation of Maggie and Nina in S2.

The novel, however, does not eliminate the Heaven/Hell system, although Adam insists on an end to the messing about. Instead, Adam resets the universe because, humans being what they are, it is not possible to radically alter it from above without endlessly having to interfere. Change must originate from the ground up, not the top down. But in resetting the universe, he neither eliminates the powers of angels and demons--somebody miracles up that reservation at the Ritz--nor even his own powers. And here is where we see why S3's ending is probably the only one that follows completely from what the novel articulates, and why Crowley's apparently random change of heart is supposed to follow from the text. (It doesn't, because somebody deleted the entire thought process, but bear with me.) At the airbase, when Crowley decides to scram, Aziraphale gently reproves him:

"There are humans here," he said.

"Yes," said Crowley. "And me."

"I mean we shouldn't let this happen to them."

"Well, what--" Crowley began, and stopped.

"I mean, when you think about it, we've got them into enough trouble as it is. You and me. Over the years. What with one thing and another."

"We were only doing our jobs," muttered Crowley.

"Yes. So what? Lots of people in history have only done their jobs and look at the trouble they caused." (369-70)

Aziraphale and Crowley do not exist outside of the Heaven/Hell game, no matter how much they may have resented it over the years. They are fully complicit in it, and as a result, as Aziraphale insists, they have a moral obligation to choose to work against it in this moment. The humans and their thriving means more than their own survival, no matter what comes next. What Crowley realizes in this moment is that he "hadn't anything" to "lose" (370) by accepting responsibility and helping to protect the humans he has helped get "into enough trouble"; responsibility, that is, is the grounds of moral action, not some irksome burden. This dialogue does not happen in S1; we do, however, see chunks of it appearing in S3. Crowley has spent S1 and S2 trying to run away from Heaven and Hell, usually trying and failing to do so with Aziraphale in tow; as both S2 and S3 make clear, he cannot do that. He and Aziraphale may be unwilling participants in God's cosmic game of solitaire, but they are still participants, and in choosing the humans and the possibility of their true free will, Crowley finally accepts the moral responsibility that he had been rejecting for the past two seasons. When he and Aziraphale land all by themselves in the bookshop, the universe having otherwise been erased, Crowley actually sees what his fantasy of running away to Alpha Centauri looks like in practice; a world of just the two of them, as he has repeatedly fantasized, would be an arid blank in which they could never be happy. A reset to the status quo simply returns us to what we saw in S2, in which both of them are repeatedly manipulated by their higher-ups, no matter how often they try to resist, and in which, again, they could never be happy (not least because now they would both know that even their romance is subject to divine fiat). And, as both the novel and the previous two seasons make very clear, Aziraphale and Crowley do not interact with humans as humans (rewriting memories, trying to script people's lives, and so on). Moreover, they cannot do so, because angels and demons warp human realities by their very nature; hence the collapse of Whickber Street once Aziraphale leaves, for example. (Even in S3, Crowley immediately reaches for his miracles to get rid of the gangster, and Aziraphale rewrites Misty's mind.) There is no way to enact the novel's ideal world and have these characters still going about somewhere as occult/ethereal entities. Or even as humans, because they do not know how to human. So, yes, the only way to fully bring the game of solitaire to its conclusion is to take away all the cards, themselves included.

The rather sweet ending, in which they reincarnate as Asa Fell and Anthony Crowley, also maps out a new relationship dynamic for them. In the series, Aziraphale and Crowley never truly have an egalitarian relationship for more than brief bursts of time, even when we see them in Heaven (before the Beginning, Crowley clearly outranks Aziraphale; when they run into each other again after the battle, Crowley is a soldier on the run and Aziraphale is the conquering general of the Great War). Up until the ending of the original timeline, the characters tend to unconsciously battle for some kind of power over the other: Crowley over-invests in casting himself as Aziraphale's rescuer in situations where Aziraphale does not need rescuing, to the point where Aziraphale eventually finds it hurtful (prior to the confrontation with the demons in S2); Aziraphale's "choice" in S2 and S3, while explicitly done "for us," simply reverses the dynamic. In other words, they are trapped in a miniaturized version of God's and the Metatron's scripting of the universe, prioritizing their own plans for the other--even what in theory are loving plans--over what the other truly needs. Asa's shy attempt to ask Anthony out, at Derek's (the human Metatron) suggestion, initially is all about scripting: he repeatedly writes Anthony's rejections for him. But Anthony simply offers him what he needs.

I have not read any full-length reviews of the new Wuthering Heights adaptation. However I did see a number of responses on social media that were, shall we say, somewhat acerbic in tone. I therefore entered the movie theater (with all of five other people) with...well, not optimism, to be frank, but a bit of trepidation. "It can't be that appalling," I told myself.

Reader, it indeed could be that appalling.

Now, look: I occasionally teach classes on adaptation (one on Sherlock Holmes, another on Jane Eyre), and so I don't judge adaptations on fidelity alone. And creative appropriations of original works can be extraordinarily interesting in their own right. Yet both adaptation and appropriation succeed or fail on their engagement with the original--exploiting the potential of the shift to a new medium or even genre; exploring a work's key elements from a historical distance; moving a secondary character to the front; etc. (For example, the famous 1940s Picture of Dorian Gray--the one that shifts to technicolor for Ivan Albright's painting--cleverly brings out a point that students often miss in the novel, which is that Dorian is the only character for whom the painting makes any sense. Far from being a legible confession, to anyone else the painting is not even recognizably Dorian.) As even a loose reworking of Wuthering Heights, this film simply does not say much of anything about the novel. It does not even say much of anything about previous adaptations, even though its elimination of Generation Two is itself a conventional choice, as is its reading of Heathcliff's and Cathy's relationship as a fairly mundane romance.

In the interest of fairness, I will admit that the film does pick up on the role of windows in the novel--Heathcliff and Cathy watch each other through windows, Heathcliff comes into Isabella's bedroom through a window, Heathcliff breaks a window in anger, Cathy does the multiple last name thing on her bedroom window, and so on. Turning Nelly Dean into the villain in Heathcliff's and Cathy's relationship, while stretching a critical point, does at least draw on an interpretive tradition that sees some holes in her unreliable narration when it comes to her agency, as well as her interest in Heathcliff (and it's worth noting that in the novel, she inadvertently gives Heathcliff the idea for his revenge). By the same token, Nelly is correctly represented as a near-contemporary of Heathcliff and Cathy, not considerably their senior.

My fairness has now exhausted itself. It's not that the film has no ideas; it just drops them in and drops them out again. Hareton's illiteracy, for example, is given to Heathcliff, but Heathcliff never learns to read or write (not true in the novel), and is bizarrely reduced to demanding that Isabella write fictions about how terrible her life with him is in order to get Cathy to come visit. When Cathy II teaches Hareton to read, the characters enter into a relationship of care very different from Heathcliff dictating Linton Heathcliff's love letters. In the film, Heathcliff refuses to learn to read (perhaps not surprisingly, as Cathy is an incompetent teacher), and then...the point never comes back until the very end, when Isabella sneers at him in the midst of their (completely unbelievable) sadomasochistic, er, thingy that they have going on. (No, I don't know why they have a sadomasochistic, er, thingy going on either.) Similarly, Heathcliff buys Wuthering Heights from Earnshaw, but the film's Earnshaw, doing double duty for Hindley, doesn't need to be tricked out of it. It's not even clear that there's a revenge motive in play, let alone that Earnshaw cares all that much. Meanwhile, there actually are hints that the film meant to do something meaningful with the casting for Nelly and Edgar Linton, given Earnshaw's very specific snobbishness in relation to the two of them (this Nelly is the illegitimate daughter of a lord, and Edgar Linton is nouveau riche), but...it does not do that? What is the point?

What is the point, indeed. Despite the frequently bizarre set and costume designs--adult Cathy never foregoes a chance to show off her decolletage, including in the middle of winter--the film fails to be surreal, let alone Gothic. No, lots of fog and weird rock formations are not sufficient unto the day. There's some attempt at color painting with Cathy's endless red and white costumes (blood! passion! get it?) and, perhaps more successfully, the candy-colored Thrushcross Grange, but the stylization never truly comes off. There is a lot of sex, adulterous and otherwise, frequently in some extraordinarily stupid places. ("Yes, we can get it on in my bedroom, which is right across from Edgar's. Of course, sex in a carriage. No, I didn't have to explain anything to the coachman. Sex on the grounds is an excellent idea.") Oh, and the sex equals death, of course, given the fakeout introduction (where the apparently orgasmic sounds we hear are actually a man dying on the gallows, which...arouses...several members of the public). Given how relentlessly secular the film is, aside from the unexplained presence of a nun in full habit, it's not surprising that there's no real sense of forces at work beyond the material. Heathcliff and Cathy are not larger than life in their selfishness; in fact, this Heathcliff is a rather boring non-entity, lacking the original's malevolent energy. His manipulation of Isabella is the closest he gets to evil--not surprising, given that most of the evil manifests during his revenge plot--but here, she seems to be enjoying herself and has to be forcibly dragged away in the rain. (Characters do get rained on a lot.) Spoiler: the cute dog remains unhanged. You can't see either Heathcliff or Cathy bothering to come back from the grave.

Last week, we had a bit of a scare: GoogleBooks suddenly stopped returning search queries. Of anything. Initially, it appeared that they no longer wanted us to be able to search inside copyrighted materials; then, those books came back, as did all the others. I haven't found any comment from Google about what was perhaps just a glitch in the code.

In any event, to say that this struck terror into the hearts of academics is not too much of an understatement. While there had already been some very longstanding issues with the search function--trying to get it to perform a keyword search within your own library has been a useless endeavor for years--the GoogleBooks library is still essential for literary historians in particular. Or, rather, it has made itself essential. The only real competitors are HathiTrust and archive.org (the latter of which sometimes has full text of public domain material that GoogleBooks only has in snippet view, for reasons unclear to, well, anyone). If you are an academic at a regional comprehensive, like yours truly, then you have only limited access to subscription databases and even more limited access to travel funds. (Even I can acquire only so many Victorian religious novels.) The free online libraries enable us to do everything from annotating (e.g., tracking down misquotations) to assembling virtual collections (e.g., Victorian novels about colportage). They're now part of the academic infrastructure, so to speak.

• Favorite historical novels: Graeme Macrae Burnet, Benbecula; Michael Crummey, The Adversary
• Best historical novel with a ghost as one of the protagonists: Laura Elvery, Nightingale
• Historical novel with the most unusual narrator: Olga Ravn, The Wax Child
• Neo-Victorian novel with the most unexpected mashups: Virginia Teito, Victorian Psycho
• Historical novel with the most abrupt ending: Suzanne Desroches, A Bride of New France
• Favorite genre deconstruction: Anna Biller, Bluebeard's Castle
• Favorite single-author horror collection: Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds 
• Favorite horror (?) novel: Steven L. Peck, A Short Stay in Hell
• 1930s horror novel with the most uncomfortably realistic subplot: Alexander Laing's The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck (one of the protagonists is the president of a state college who is forever worried about the likelihood of the legislature stripping its funding)
• Favorite Victorian novels I had not read previously: Anthony Trollope, Mr. Scarborough's Family; Mary Taylor, Miss Miles
• Best novels reread for a class: Anthony Trollope, Doctor Thorne; Jeannette Ng, Under the Pendulum Sun 
• Best twentieth-century ghost (sort of) story reflecting on Jane Eyre: Marjorie Bowen, "Elsie's Lonely Afternoon"
• Most times the line "the author doth protest too much, methinks" swam into my head while reading a novel: Philip Pullman, The Rose Field
• Novel I suspected that I would dislike intensely, and, in fact, I did: Martha Wells, All Systems Red  
• Most surprisingly competent Victorian religious novels: Jean Ingelow, Allerton and Dreux; Lily Watson, The Vicar of Langthwaite
• Victorian religious novelist most defeated by any format longer than three hundred or so pages: William Francis Barry
• Favorite twentieth-century religious novels: Sheila Kaye-Smith, The End of the House of Alard; Rumer Godden, In this House of Brede
• There really were an unusual number of nuns and pseudo-nuns in my reading this year: Agustina Bazterrica, The Unworthy; Rumer Godden, In this House of Brede; Lauren Groff, Matrix; Viggy Parr Hampton, The Rotting Room; Caitlin Starling, The Starving Saints
• Book bargain that most people would probably find it odd to be excited about: William Jackson, Stories and Catechisings in Illustration of the Collects (all three volumes)
• Most useful yet exasperating bibliographical discovery while in the British Library: slowly realizing that some cataloger in the nineteenth century had misattributed a number of tracts
• Unexpurgated memoir belatedly expurgated: the first edition of William Carus Wilson's Memoir of a Beloved and Long-Afflicted Sister (1831) (the second edition erases its subject's rather, um, snippy comments about various guests, as well as all the complaints about one of her brothers being a terrible correspondent)
• Most antiquarian purchases: three volumes of Berquin's The Children's Friend (1786); Harriet Corp, Coelebs Deceived (1817); Elizabeth Sandham, The Twin Sisters (1819)
• Most useful but ill-advised purchase while traveling: three volumes of Chester W. Topp's Victorian Yellowbacks and Paperbacks, which was a bit heavy to lug back in one's suitcase
• Arguably the oddest book to be carting around in one's purse: John Mahoney, The Making of Moral Theology
• Most interesting Victorian studies monographs: Alexander Murray, Decadent Conservatism; Joseph McQueen, Liturgy, Ritual and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature
• Most interesting non-Victorian studies monographs: Arnold Hunt, Protestant Bodies: Gesture in the English Reformation; Timothy Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England
• Book that I apparently misshelved somewhere and therefore wound up buying a second time out of sheer frustration: Peter Sangster, Pity My Simplicity

Favorite fiction: Jon Clinch, The General and Julia; Amy Crider, Kells; Liam Davison, The White Woman; John Ehle, The Land Breakers; Percival Everett, James; Fiona Kidman, The Captive Wife; Karen Powell, Fifteen Wild Decembers; Ann Schlee, Rhine Journey.

What is this I have just read, the sequel: Brendan Connell, Cannibals of West Papua.  

Novel least like what I was expecting: Rachel Cantor, Half-Life of a Stolen Sister.  

Novel with the best unreliable narrator: Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time.  

I admit that I did not anticipate this plot twist: Hannah Kent, Devotion.  

Most (unintentionally?) unappealing protagonist of a trilogy: Rain in Gregory Maguire's Another Day series.

Detective novel with most implausible stunt by the main character: Ian Rankin, A Song for the Dark Times.  

Detective novelist who appears to have developed Doyle/Christie Syndrome: Ian Rankin (albeit in regards to supporting character Malcolm Fox).

Most lugubrious detective series, ongoing: John Banville, The Lock-Up.

Most metafictional detective novel: Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook.  

Horror author I'm enjoying at the moment: Nathan Ballingrud.  

Most brutal Victorian historical novel: Emily Lawless, Maelcho.  

Best novel reread for class: Charles Dickens, Bleak House.  

Victorian religious novel title most likely to cause confusion in the 21st century: W. J. Conybeare, Perversion.  

Most "I'm beginning to think this author may be confused" experience while reading a Victorian religious novel: F. W. Robinson, High Church.  

Excerpt from a Victorian religious novel most likely to make students go "???!!!!": the "Story on the Sixth Commandment" from Mrs. Sherwood, History of the Fairchild Family (the one with the rotting corpse).

Victorian novel eliciting the most "This novel is a great candidate for distant reading.  As in, why am I not 100 miles distant from this novel" response from me: Lucas Malet, The History of Sir Richard Calmady.  

Moment of greatest not-altogether-scholarly exasperation: discovering that a novella by Malet was a loose sequel to Richard Calmady.  

Most "well, that was convenient" death in a early twentieth-century religious novel: Josephine Ward, The Light Behind.  

Best antiquarian acquisition: Anne Carus Wilson (wife of William, a.k.a. Mr. Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre), Children's Stories in Children's Words. (Most copies of this book have vanished.)

Monograph I'm really excited to read next year: Joseph McQueen, Liturgy, Ritual, and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature.  

Saltiest monograph: M. Wynn Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit.  

Favorite historical fiction: William Golding, The Spire; Benjamin Myers, Beastings; Benjamin Myers, Cuddy; Kate Atkinson, Shrines of Gaiety; Fred D'Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts; Hernan Diaz, In the Distance.  

Favorite neo-Victorian mashup: Adam Roberts, The Death of Sir Martin Marprelate.

Favorite political allegory: Raphaela Edelbauer (trans. Jen Calleja), The Liquid Land.  

Favorite biofiction: Karen Powell, Fifteen Wild Decembers.  

Only religious memoir with an autopsy report included?: William Carus Wilson, Memoir of a Beloved and Long-Afflicted Sister.

Best horror-cum-social satire: Joan Samson, The Auctioneer.  

Novel eliciting the most "wait, what did I just read" reaction: Brendan Connell, The Translation of Father Torturo.

Victorian ghost stories I'm always happy to reread: Mary Elizabeth Braddon, "At Chrighton Abbey"; Elizabeth Gaskell, "The Old Nurse's Story."

Most Gothic biography: Daphne du Maurier, The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte.   

Favorite little-known psychological horror novel: Frank Baker, The Twisted Tree.   

Trend that I hope is coming to a close: Sherlock Holmes mashed up with Lovecraft.  

Mystery series I thought couldn't get any more lugubrious, and yet, it did: John Banville's Quirke (no longer published under the Benjamin Black pseudonym?).

Novels with endings that made me say "...really?!": Maggie O'Farrell, The Marriage Portrait; Elizabeth Hand, A Haunting on the Hill.  

Most unusual horror collection: Brian Evenson, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell.

Favorite horror anthology: Joyce Carol Oates, ed., A Darker Shade of Noir.  

Most competent long poem by Branwell Bronte?: "Sir Henry Tunstall."

Most competent Victorian religious novelist: Emma Jane Worboise.  

Most cheerful Victorian religious novel: J. W. Keyworth,  Willie's Secret. 

Best friend (well, arguably) of a famous novelist with the worst handwriting: Ellen Nussey.  

Victorian clergyman-diarist least willing to take a stand on anything: Henry Nussey.  You would think that the man could at least have an opinion about witnessing people speaking in tongues, but apparently not.  

Grimmest experience reading nineteenth-century correspondence: a tie between Thomas J. Wise making off with chunks of Ellen Nussey's collection of Charlotte Bronte's letters and his buddy Clement Shorter making off with (just about all of) Arthur Bell Nicholls' collection of Charlotte Bronte's everything else.   

Most grudging antiquarian purchase: a volume of William Carus Wilson's sermons.  

Most aggravating experience teaching with e-texts: a website I had been using for years suddenly vanished without a trace.  

There is no excuse for a POD book to cost this much: Margaret Smith, ed., The Letters of Charlotte Bronte: Volume Three.  

Here's an interesting document that just came into my possession: it's a memorandum between Emily Sarah Holt and the publisher John F. Shaw for the sale of copyright to her novel Sister Rose:

The witnesses are Holt's brother James Maden Holt, MP and his fiancee, Anna Haworth.  Holt sold the copyright for forty-two pounds.

One of the problems with writing the history of nineteenth-century religious fiction from the nuts-and-bolts angle--copyrights, royalties, correspondence with publishers, recruiting authors, in-house readers, etc.--is that virtually all of the publishers' archives have simply vanished.  This is true even for still-extant publishers like the Religious Tract Society (now Lutterworth), where only partial records are available, and Burns and Oates (now Sheed and Ward), where the backfile survives but apparently not anything else.  It's quite possible that some archives are still hanging about in attics or on top of wardrobes!  This is the first time I have come across anything from John F. Shaw, a publisher with a large trade in relatively inexpensive Evangelical prize books.  

In 1870, Holt would have been at the beginning of her novel-writing career.  She had published a work of historical biography in 1861, Memoirs of Royal Ladies (2 vols.), with Hurst and Blackett, but the book was not well-received--not least because such collective biographies were regarded as an overworked genre by that point.  However, after regrouping, she had a good reception for Mistress Margery: A Tale of the Lollards (Shaw, 1868).  Holt was therefore not an unknown quantity, but not an established bestseller, either.  For comparative purposes, one of the Religious Tract Society's most popular novelists, Hesba Stretton, had up until the mid-1860s been receiving "between 30 guineas and £50 for single-volume stories," [1] which suggests that for this type of publisher and this type of book, £42 would not have been outrageously low.  It would be interesting to see what Holt was able to command a decade later.  

[1] Elaine Lomax, The Writings of Hesba Stretton: Reclaiming the Outcast (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 74.  

Favorite historical novels: Naivo, Beyond the Rice Fields; Mirandi Riwoe, Stone Sky Gold Mountain; Julie Janson, Benevolence; Stevie Davies, Awakening; Rose Tremain, Lily: A Tale of Revenge.

Favorite genre anthologies: Jess Walter, ed., The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022; Mark Morris, ed., Close to Midnight.

Favorite single-author short story genre collection: Lisa Tuttle, The Dead Hours of Night.

Favorite genre deconstructions: John Darnielle, Devil House (true crime); J. W. Ocker, Twelve Nights at Rotter House (haunted house).

Favorite horror novel: Alison Rumfitt, Tell Me I'm Worthless. 

Author whose willingness to make himself look terrible in fiction never ceases to amaze: Anthony Horowitz's Hawthorne series.

Guaranteed to be the least-interesting villain in any neo-Victorian novel: Jack the Ripper.

Series detective with the most unconvincing ongoing career: Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus.

Somewhat puzzling genre development: multiple haunted-house novels that were just not...scary? (Not even in a "protagonist forced to plumb the depths of their misbegotten psyche" way.)

Biography with the most overblown title: John Lock and W. T. Dixon, A Man of Sorrow: The Life, Letters, and Times of the Reverend Patrick Bronte,  1777-1861.

Favorite biography: Michael Ledger-Lomas, Queen Victoria: This Thorny Crown.

After owning this monograph for nearly three decades, I finally have a reason to cite it: Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook.

Favorite book reread for class: Henry James, The Turn of the Screw.

Most antiquarian book purchase: a Religious Tract Society sammelband, featuring tracts published between 1785-90.  

Well, technically,  the Christmas Annual edition! As all good Victorianists know, the proper season for ghost stories was Christmas, so this year, I bring ghost stories published in Victorian periodicals' Christmas numbers.

• Anon., "Catherine's Quest" (Tinsley's Magazine, 1868).  A young woman has a very detailed dream about the intrigues (and murders) committed by her ancestors.  Also, there's a chest with human remains.  
• ---, "Experiences of Farthing Lodge" (Chambers' Journal, 1864).  Renters discover that on the fifteenth of each month, they share their lodgings with...something else.  
• Charles Collins, "No. 3 Branch Line.  The Compensation House" (All the Year Round, 1866).  A man has a very strange aversion to mirrors.
• W. W. Fenn, "The Steel Mirror: A Christmas Dream" (Routledge's Christmas Annual, 1867).  Prophetic mirrors are always aggravating, especially when somebody misreads the prophecy.  
• Eliza Lynn Linton, "Christmas Eve in Beach House" (Routledge's Christmas Annual, 1870).  An artist's wife has a very bad feeling about one of the locals.  Scandalous revelations eventually ensue.  This annual also includes a comic (and not well-executed) story about a young clerk obsessed with his employer's money, with what one presumes are ultimately fatal results, and another one about a tyrannical ship's captain who gets his comeuppance.
• ---, "The Legend of Lady House" (Routledge's Christmas Annual, 1869).  Women with dubious pasts, poisoning, curses, etc.  
• W. E. Norris, "The Specter of Strathannan" (Unwin's, 1887).  Apparently, a ghost appears to anyone who has terrible deeds upon their conscience.  Or does it?
• John Oxenford,  "His Umbrella" (All the Year Round, 1862).  A gentleman finds himself stuck with an aggravatingly persistent umbrella.
• Robert Reece,  "The Ghost in the Green Room" (Routledge's Christmas Annual, 1880).  The ghost of a failed actor decides it's finally time to get onstage.  

(Like rather a lot of other people, or so Twitter tells me, I found myself unable to read for anything except work for much of 2021.  More recently, I've found myself getting fully back into the swing of things.)

Best postcolonial rewrite of Adam and Eve: Michael Crummey, The Innocents.  

Best historical novels: Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet; Mudrooroo, Master of the Ghost Dreaming.

Best postapocalyptic novel: Paul Kingsnorth, Alexandria.  

Neo-Victorian fiction will be immensely improved by forgetting this personage ever existed: Jack the Ripper.  

"Well, that's a plot twist," I said, dubiously: Christian Klaver, The Classfied Dossier: Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula.

Sherlock Holmes novel that unintentionally makes a good case for the current Mrs. Watson divorcing the Doctor: Nicholas Meyer, The Return of the Pharoah: From the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.

Perhaps we are exhausting this mine of pastiches: Sherlock Holmes.  

Novelist most willing to make himself look incompetent in fiction: Anthony Horowitz, A Line to Kill.  

Most interesting tribute anthology: When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson.

Best horror anthology: The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, Volume One.  

Most epic schlimazels in the history of horror?: the protagonists of Gretchen Felker-Martin, Ego Homini Lupus.  

Creepiest use of medical terminology: Michael Blumlein, "Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report" (in Ellen Datlow, Body Shocks).

Most disturbing revenge tale: Kaaron Warren, "A Positive" (ditto).

Favorite monograph sent for review: Josephine McDonagh, Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815-1876.

Favorite monographs on literature and religion: Christopher Stokes, Romantic Prayer: Reinventing the Poetics of Devotion, 1773-1832; Christopher D. Phillips, The Hymnal: A Reading History. 

Favorite historical monographs: Joseph Hardwick, An Anglican British World: The Church of England and the Expansion of the Settler Empire, c. 1790-1860; Rachel Wheeler, To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and MIssionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast.

Academic publisher whose business model I continue not to understand: Palgrave Macmillan.    

Finally, I found a copy of this: Rachel McCrindell, The Convent; A Narrative, Founded on Fact.  

Physically smallest book purchased this year: Old Jessie, The Hindoo Mother (a Methodist tract).

Most underrated short story by a Victorian woman writer?: Geraldine Jewsbury, "Agnes Lee."

Best mildly irate Victorian response to Jane Eyre: Margaret Oliphant, "The Story of a Wedding-Tour."

Least-enjoyable epic-length nineteenth-century poem: Charlotte Elizabeth, Osric.  

Every time I teach it, I am again convinced that this is Mary Elizabeth Braddon's best short story: "At Chrighton Abbey."

Victorian ghost stories of a sort that tend not to be anthologized: Mrs. Molesworth, The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction.  

Modernist novel with the worst TV adaptation: Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier. 

This blog arises from the dead for its annual cavalcade of horror stories.  This year, we feature...haunted professors, students, and academics of all stripes, somewhat loosely construed.  OK, very loosely construed.  In a number of cases, the horror is also somewhat loosely construed...

• "The Harvard College Ghost" (Ghost Stories: Collected with a Particular View to Counteract the Vulgar Beliefs in Ghost and Apparitions, 1846).  A prank goes off script.  
• "The College Ghost.  A Legend of Old South Middle" (Yale Literary Magazine, 1856).  A young man is visited by a ghastly vision that actually turns out to be a pretty terrible pun on this edition of Horace.
• S. Baring-Gouid, "The Brunswick Ghost" (Cassell's Family Magazine, 1887).  The ghost of an academic with some unfinished business comes back looking for help.
• J. Edmund V. Cooke, "The Hypnotized Ghost" (Overland Monthly, 1893).  A hypnotist finds himself controlling his the ghost of a dead man.
• M. R. Gilkeson, "Hobgoblins" (Oliver Optic's Magazine, 1873).  For children.  A German professor is invited out to help investigate the mystery of some ghostly sounds.  
• Henry Hill, "Professor Falkenstein's Ghost Story" (Godey's Magazine, 1878).  Professor Falkenstein narrates a story about making a deal with a musical ghost, only for there to be an unexpected twist.
• [Mary Ann Hoare], "The Ghost-Raiser" (Household Words, 1852).  A skeptical student faces off against the horror raised by a fellow traveler.  Er, sort of.
• M. R. James, "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad."  A professor ignores one of the most important rules in horror fiction: never take a vacation.  
• Augustus Jessopp, "An Antiquarian's Ghost Story" (Lantern, 1977; first published in 1880).  An antiquarian doing some research has a visitor.  And that's pretty much it.
• J. S. Le Fanu, "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street" (Dublin University Magazine, 1851).  Two medical students discover that they're sharing their rooms with an unpleasant resident.
• Bram Stoker, "The Judge's House" (1891).  In a tip of the hat to Le Fanu, a student rents a house and, again, discovers that he's sharing his rooms with an unpleasant resident.
• [Walter Thornbury], "How Professor Gaster Lectured a Ghost" (All the Year Round, 1862).  After eating rather too much at dinner, Professor Gaster is surprised by the company of two chatty skeletons.  He out-chats them, however.  (In some versions, "Professor Gaster" is "Professor Pepsine.")

What sound do I hear? The sound of readers wondering where on earth I went, I imagine.  The physical "where" has to do with House the Trilogy, which had various, uh, issues that left me without furniture until (checks notes) mid-October and without unpacked books until (checks notes again) now.  As in, I finished unpacking them on Tuesday (proper shelving has now commenced).  The mental "where" followed on from the physical one, as I was admittedly rather depressed for a good chunk of the semester--and also really, really behind.  Who would possibly have thought that finishing articles on time with no access to your library might be...hard? Impossible, even?  In any event, I decided that while I could justify tweeting while I had articles overdue, I most certainly could not justify blogging.  

*sigh* Anyway.

Here are the ongoing adventures of a full professor at a regional comprehensive college in Western New York:

Teaching:

• I taught two courses (I have a course release for administrative reasons; see below), one a seminar on early Gothic and the other Honors Composition.  The seminar was an updated version of an earlier course, while composition was, as always, entirely new.  

Service:

• This is my final year as associate chair (the associate chair's position runs concurrently with the chair's, and the chair decided not to come back for another term).  There may be a further adventure on the horizon, however...
• I served on an ad hoc committee for promotion to full professor.
• I was on the graduate committee.

Scholarship:

• I completed two commissioned articles, one on women writers and Victorian Unitarianism (awaiting editorial corrections) and one on the novel and religion for a Cambridge Companion.
• I sent back the proofs on an article that may annoy some historians.  It is, appropriately enough, appearing in a history journal.
• I completed two book reviews.  
• I delivered a paper at NAVSA.  
• I signed a book contract.  

Life has been interesting! Also, I am behind on an article, and as I had to request an extension, I felt guilty about doing much in the way of blogging.  Nevertheless, a couple of things have happened:

1) I'm writing a book about...Charlotte Bronte! An author of whom people have actually heard! This is a momentous occasion that may never occur again, so mark the date.  (Religion, however, is still involved.  Religion is actually the point.)  In any event, the book is under contract for OUP's "Spiritual Lives" series, with a manuscript delivery date of 2024.  

2) I purchased a house with my parents, so I have been dealing with putting my current house on the market, packing up (I move next month), and handling contractors.  Needless to say, this has been eating a lot of my spare time since about March.  The new house is a Victorian mansion--

BLOG READERS: Oh, she's speaking figuratively--

--No, I mean, it's an actual 7200 sq ft Victorian mansion from 1850--

BLOG READERS: What the--

--With, um, parlors, cool decorative ceilings, lots of mahogany--

BLOG READERS: Are you even kidding me--

--OK, so we just had to install a third furnace--

BLOG READERS: Please describe your thought processes--

--It's...just a really cool house, OK? (Also, the twentieth-century section of the house is suitable for long-term parental stays, which was the point.). The twentieth-century addition has to be completely redone, but the original house, most of which will be given over to yours truly, just needs cosmetics (floor restoration, painting) and some electrical updating.  

I am now officially banned from ever complaining about a lack of space for books.

Main staircase drama (I'll need to replace the runner once all the upstairs painting is finished):

One of the neat things about the house is that many of the original details have been preserved, like the doorknobs:

Nineteenth-century glassed-in bookcases in the second parlor:

If nothing else, I will now have 19th-c. vibes to help me while I write.