This Week's Acquisitions
- Susan Ferrier, Destiny; Or, the Chief's Daughter, 2 vols. (Bentley, 1892). Reprint of the 1831 original. More information on Ferrier here and here.
- The Rev. T. S. Millington, The Shadow on the Hearth (RTS, n.d.). A novel in the Religious Tract Society's "For Faith and Freedom" series, this time involving an interfaith marriage between a Protestant and an Irish Catholic.
- Sarah Dunant, The Birth of Venus (Random House, 2003). Historical novel about an ambitious young female artist in the age of Savonarola.
- Kate Moses, Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath (St. Martin's, 2003). Novel set just prior to Plath's suicide.
- Graham Swift, Waterland (Poseidon, 1983). A teacher at the end of his career lectures his students on the Fens and, by extension, the secrets of his own life.
- Barbara Vine (a.k.a. Ruth Rendell), The Blood Doctor (Vintage, 2003). A man's researches into the life of his Victorian ancestor turn up some unsettling results.
- Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (Liberty Fund, 2004). Another entry in the Liberty Fund's "Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics" series.
- Kathleen J. Renk, Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts: Women's Writing and Decolonization (Virginia, 1999). Caribbean rewritings of Victorian narratives; Rhys, Kincaid, etc.
- Christine Krueger, ed., Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time (Ohio, 2002). Postmodern revisions of Victorian culture in literature, film, advertising, etc.
- Kimberle S. Lopez, Latin American Novels of the Conquest: Reinventing the New World (Missouri, 2002). Analyzes Latin American historical fiction written to both critique and commemorate Columbus' landing.
- Christine Riding and Jacqueline Riding, eds., The Houses of Parliament: History, Art, Architecture (Merrell, 2000). A lavishly illustrated history.
- Janice Carlisle, Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction (Oxford, 2004). Examines how scent defines social class in 1860s fiction. (I'm reviewing this one for Choice.)
- Jeffrey Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (Yale, 1999). Social and cultural history of the exhibition and its influence.