Alice Spawls

Claudia Johnson begins with a ghost story. One summer morning, as she sat by the leaded gothic windows of her Princeton study editing the Norton Critical Edition of Mansfield Park, she was stumped about where a comma ought to go. In the second sentence of the eighth chapter there is a discrepancy between the first and second edition of the novel: did Mr Rushworth’s mother come ‘to...

Little​ more than forty years separate Poe’s Dupin, the original fictional detective, and A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes’s first outing, but by the time Conan Doyle put pen to paper everyone was reading detective stories. In the intervening years they multiplied out of sensation and mystery novels, gothic melodramas, feuilletons, casebooks and crime reports and became a...

An outsider​ by birth as well as by disposition, Flora Thompson took solitary pleasure in observing her fellow villagers. She stored away characters and scenes from an early age – the naughty children who pulled her hair, Queenie who spoke to bees, the annual pig killing, May Day, the harvest – but published nothing until she was in her thirties, and nothing on her childhood...

‘The women surrealists​ were considered secondary to the male,’ Leonora Carrington reported; their role was to inspire, as well as cook and clean. But she was never comfortable with being a muse, or as Breton cast her, the femme enfant whose naive access to the unconscious made her the ideal conduit for the male artist. Only women, he thought, had ‘the illuminism of lucid...

Riccardo Selvatico​, the progressive mayor of Venice in the early 1890s and author of poems and comic plays, lost his post to a less secular, less intellectually minded candidate before the inauguration of his great scheme for the city, the Biennale, in 1895. Selvatico must have known his time was short: construction began in May 1894, only a month after the idea was announced at a meeting...