Elizabeth gaskell

This is the kind of book I wish I had the chance to sit down and discuss with the author. It is accessible without sacrificing academic rigour, astute and ingenious in its close readings and balances breadth with depth admirably. But why on earth does it have a singular title, given that the whole thrust of the argument depends on silence being a multifarious phenomenon? The reader encounters the enigma of silence as rapture, failure, slyness, avoidance, challenge. Silence is both built into literature and a kind of enwrapping, enclosing ocean, out of which words will emerge and back into which they will sink, rather like the primordial chaos at the beginning of Genesis. Speaking or writing about silence is inherently paradoxical. Many years ago I interviewed A.S.

It’s the perfect opportunity to crack open those classics of 19th-century fiction you’ve always been meaning to read, and I am here to offer some recommendations. But there’s an immediate problem. Do I gesture towards the blindingly obvious? Or do I recommend a variety of obscure and arcane titles? The former strategy is liable only to insult your intelligence — of course you already know Jane Austen and Charles Dickens are worth reading — whereas the latter runs the risk of merely putting you off and making me seem pretentious. There is, though, a third way. What did the Victorians themselves reckon were the great authors of their age? The answer, above all others, is Sir Walter Scott. I know nobody now reads him, but in the 19th century everybody did.