There are 62 references to cake so far in our 19th- century corpus, ranging from Jane Eyre’s slightly depressing “oaten-cakes” (also found in Shelley’s Frankenstein) to the more lavish offerings of plum-cake, plum-pudding, tea-cake, sponge-cake, and cheese-cake that appear in works by Dickens, Le Fanu and others. Here are a few of the most famous – although…
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5 Mega-Bestsellers from the 19th Century (That You’ve Probably Never Heard Of)
Pssst: If you’re here because you’re interested in nineteenth-century bestsellers, you may like our more recent post series on the subject! I started putting together the figures for this post more than two years ago, when we were in the early stages of compiling our list of works that we wanted to look at on…
The Six Most Impertinent Things Ever Said By Elizabeth Bennet
Elizabeth is one of the truly great heroines of English literature. She has fine eyes; she’ll walk three miles of muddy countryside without fear of censure or ruined hemlines; she has tremendous chemistry with Colin Firth, and these days she’ll even put down a zombie uprising for you. But there’s one thing that really keeps…
The 5 Least Important Characters in Pride and Prejudice
Two weeks ago we sent out a call to fans of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, to come answer a survey on how they rate the importance of the characters in the novel. And the results are in! While we’re not going to release the full list of rankings just yet, I can assure you…
These Three Weird Tricks Will Help You Write 47 Victorian Novels
As I journeyed across France to Marseilles, and made thence a terribly rough voyage to Alexandria, I wrote my allotted number of pages every day. On this occasion more than once I left my paper on the cabin table, rushing away to be sick in the privacy of my state room. It was February, and…
The Sea of Books 