This week’s quotation is provided by Sydney Owenson/Lady Morgan’s The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806). Fed up with his son Horatio’s feckless behaviour, The Earl of M dispatches him to Connaught where he hopes he will focus on his legal studies. Upon his arrival in Dublin, Horatio writes a letter to a friend to share his initial impressions of Ireland… “…I feel the…
Month: November 2016
Insult of the Week: I am often sorry to notice how unrefined your ideas are
In Mary Cholmondley’s 1893 novel Diana Tempest (vol I, vol II, vol III), our eponymous heroine has the doubtful pleasure of encountering a recently married friend, Madeleine Verelst, at a gathering at the home of Lord and Lady Hemsworth. As is typical for this book, which is characterised by incisive and bleakly funny observations of…
Images of the Week: “A Hymn to the Moon”
In honour of this week’s supermoon, we have uncovered some beautiful moonscapes from the British library and the Internet Archive. They are reproduced below alongside Lady Wortley Montague’s (1689-1762) fitting poem “A Hymn to the Moon” from the 1805 collection, Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, written during her travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa. A HYMN TO THE…
Insult of the Week: You flaming floundering fool
Please excuse our lack of blogging lately! We’ve had a remarkable number of back-to-back deadlines in the last couple of weeks, and are currently knee-deep in an exciting new project that’s due out before Christmas. (I can’t give full details yet, but watch this space!) On a perhaps-not-entirely-unrelated note, our insult this week comes from…
Charlotte Riddell’s Weird Stories
Although the Halloween season on the blog is coming to a close, we couldn’t resist posting one more 19th-century ghost story – this time by Charlotte Riddell. Born in County Antrim in 1832, Charlotte Cowan moved to London with her mother after her father’s death. Much of her early work was published under the pseudonym F.G Trafford and…
The Sea of Books 