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“... pictures it is the humans not the fairies who are drained of colour. The catalogue, edited by Jane Martineau, includes essays on much that the exhibition could not include: John Warwick, for example, describes the innovations which fairy subjects inspired in the music of Weber, Mendelssohn, Liszt and Verdi. The essay by Charlotte Gere, who is also ...”

“... Above the entrance to the saloon bar there is a picture of Shakespeare on the swinging sign. It is the same picture of Shakespeare that I remember from my schooldays, when I frowned over Timon of Athens and The Merchant of Venice. Haven’t they got a better one? Did he really look like that all the time? You’d have thought that by now his publicity people would have come up with something a little more attractive ...”

“... Reminiscences, a hundred years since Alexander Carlyle’s New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, Froude’s posthumous My Relations with Carlyle, and Alexander Carlyle and Sir James Crichton-Browne’s The Nemesis of Froude. Everyone has long since taken sides, if not with the tactless first biographer or with the vindictive and ...”

“... on his own encounters with mesmerism, and probably also on the famous case of the writer Harriet Martineau. Even his modest invalid knew enough to know that she was living in an age of prescientific ferment. One of Alison Winter’s main points in Mesmerised is that, in an age when so much of what was being discovered seemed extraordinary, a belief in the ...”

“... of the book was agony for Carlyle, and it is obvious that he made it pretty rough for his wife Jane, too. He wrote, he says, with his heart’s blood. The physiological contribution would be more realistically seen as his digestive juices. He distrusted the world of literary evaluation, did not see how a man could honestly live by writing, and yet had to ...”

“... and reading novels – wh. seems the employment of English ladies . . . as my favourite Miss Martineau says it is far nobler to earn than to save. I think I should like to earn very much & become celebrated like the aforesaid Harriet who is one of the only sensible women living beside thee & me & 2 or 3 more I know. The first thing she published was an ...”

“... never materialised, for reasons best known to the author, Helen Blackwood, Lady Dufferin. One of Jane Robinson’s many speculations in this biography is that Dufferin’s satirical target was Barbara Leigh Smith, who had travelled to Algeria in 1856 and engaged herself to an eccentric French doctor of noble lineage, Eugène Bodichon. There’s no evidence ...”

“... the author’s life, another on his works. This was the solution adopted, many years ago, by Henri Martineau, who brought out a two-volume life, Le Coeur de Stendhal, which turned out to be much more worthwhile than his one-volume Oeuvre de Stendhal. There is, however, something a little artificial in separating ‘life’ and ‘work’ (or works), especially ...”

“... sea as a ‘boy entrant’, to serve on HMS Namur, a 74-gun man-of-war. The vessel’s captain was Jane Austen’s younger brother, Charles (there are no references to Douglas in the Austen family correspondence). He entered the Royal Navy not as a cabin-boy but as officer material, and was (probably) instructed in reading, writing and seamanship by the ...”

“... in the mushrooming industrial cities consumed it with fervour; but the austere Harriet Martineau liked it too, as did General Gordon, Joseph Conrad and Edward VII. Its appeal spread far beyond British readers. R.K. Narayan dwells fondly on the ‘bitter tears’ he shed over East Lynne in his 1975 memoir, My Days: ‘Reading and rereading it always ...”

“... the first time he compassionated Rhoda.’ It sounds like Fanny Knatchbull talking about her aunt, Jane Austen. Barfoot marries Agnes Brissenden. There is no suggestion in The Odd Women that the New Woman is sexually unattractive. On the contrary: the worldly (as we are meant to think) Barfoot feels she might have very special attractions, and Gissing’s ...”

“... are luxury editions, befitting the occasion, and reprints of the novels and of the manuscript of Jane Eyre, updated selections of the letters, non-updated editions of Charlotte’s and Emily’s poetry, books about the novels (scholarly and not), books of essays, books about their belongings, about the parsonage and Haworth, comic books, volumes of artwork ...”

“... remained a lifelong confidant. He introduced Charles and Emma to the political economist Harriet Martineau (whom Charles and his sisters once feared might carry Erasmus off in marriage), Thomas and Jane Carlyle, George Eliot and G.H. Lewes. Cash and connections flowed through family channels, and it was the ...”