This Week's Acquisitions
- Eliza Smith Richardson, The Veil Lifted; Or the Romance and Reality of Convent Life (Henry Hoyt, c. 1869). Anti-convent novel, featuring the usual run of abused nuns, insanity, weird-goings on, etc. Also, it ends with a really bad poem. (eBay)
- John Ehle, The Land Breakers (NYRB, 2014). Reprint of Ehle's 1964 historical novel about settling the Appalachian mountains. (Amazon)
- Julie Melnyk, ed., Women's Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Transfiguring the Faith of Their Fathers (Garland, 1998). An important essay collection featuring chapters on Christina Rossetti, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Charlotte M. Yonge, etc. (Amazon [secondhand])
- Kelsey L. Bennett, Principle and Propensity: Experience and Religion in the Nineteenth-Century English and American Bildungsroman (U of South Carolina, 2014). Analyzes the concept of bildung in relation to specifically Protestant theories of the relationship between the self and God. I'm reviewing this for Choice. (Review copy)
- Michael J. Cullen, The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain: The Foundations of Empirical Social Research (Harvester, 1975). How the Victorians started classifying and quantifying everything in sight. (Amazon [secondhand])