Yesterday evening I returned home from my classics book club meeting very sad. We read Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, and when I last read it, I remember wishing I could read and discuss with other classics readers. My classics reading group (last year, a total of four of us) agreed to give it a

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Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is a story of two children’s growing understanding of the double standards of the world. It’s also the story of a small community struggling to come together during the economic era of the Great Depression and the political upheaval of a mixed racial pre-Civil Rights southern town. It is

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After I finished reading The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens (first published serially in 1836-7), I began to read the introduction to my edition1. Almost immediately, it confirmed what I’d thought as I’d read it: that Mr. Pickwick is a Don Quixote and Bertie Wooster character. So I stopped reading the introduction; I’ll tell you

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Cranford (published 1851) is a quiet book, focusing on traditions in a changing pre-Victorian society in a small rural community. Given it’s slow pace, when I first read Cranford (thoughts here), I really struggled. I felt stifled by the overbearing traditions of the community of Cranford, and I wondered where the plot was. Yet, by

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This post may contain thematic spoilers of My Lady Ludlow. Lady Ludlow is the representation of the old aristocracy in England.  She is a conservative who does not want to allow the lower classes to gain an education or to gain “rights” in the post-Revolutionary years. Beyond those that are her servants, she essentially does

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I finished Jane Austen’s Persuasion almost a month ago now, and I’ve been putting off writing my thoughts simply because I didn’t like it. Before you attack me with incredulity, you should know that I read it in the midst of stressful and busy time of year, during a whirlwind trip to my grandmother’s funeral,

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I loved George Eliot’s Middlemarch (published 1874; thoughts), despite its 800 pages. I can’t say the same about Eliot’s Silas Marner (published 1861), despite its comparative brevity. Now, if you have been reading my blog in the past, you will know that I tend to read classics and I normally love them, especially Victorian novels.

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Part of my problem with Jane Austen’s Emma (first published in 1815) lay in the main character. Jane Austen once famously said, “I’m going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” Unfortunately, such was the case for me. I disliked Emma Woodhouse’s immature manipulation of others around her, and found

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