Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life by Lyndall Gordon

2023-10-25T00:51:23+00:00October 25th, 2023|

Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life, by Lyndall Gordon. Highly recommended for readers who love women's writing, especially the Brontes. I was attracted to it because I recently read Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte, and I read and reviewed Gordon's terrific biography of Emily Dickinson a few [...]

Galileo’s Daughter: A Drama of Science, Faith and Love

2022-07-24T06:49:46+00:00July 23rd, 2022|

Galileo Galilei, in 1609, set a telescope in the garden of his house and turned it skywards. Never-before-seen stars leaped out of the darkness to enhance familiar constellations: the nebulous Milky Way resolved into a swath of densely-packed stars; mountains and valleys pockmarked the storied perfection of [...]

Fiction with a twist: Margaret Forster’s last novel

2022-04-16T03:17:54+00:00April 16th, 2022|

Margaret Forster published her last novel in 2016, after an extraordinary career as a novelist and biographer: 25 fiction works and 10 non-fiction, plus an edited selection of poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. When I found her last novel, How to Measure a Cow, on the shelf [...]

Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn’t Ours

2022-03-09T02:29:47+00:00March 9th, 2022|

This memoir was recommended to me by my daughter. She said one of the things she loves about it is the way the author, Sarah Senilles, weaves in reflections on family and kinship in indigenous cultures and nature — birds, trees, animals. Also snippets from history, theology and [...]

Third masterpiece in a trilogy of historical fiction

2021-01-25T06:05:05+00:00January 25th, 2021|

Hilary Mantel was expected by many (including, it seems, herself) to score a trifecta and win the Man Booker prize for the third time with The Mirror and the Light, the long-awaited finale to the story of Thomas Cromwell. Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, the [...]

Go to Top