Rosemarie Bodenheimer

Rosemarie Bodenheimer teaches English at Boston College and is the author of Knowing Dickens.

Love of His Life: Dickens

Rosemarie Bodenheimer, 8 July 2010

The bicentenary of Charles Dickens’s birth falls on 7 February 2012, and Dickensians across the globe are stirring. Dickens, who held strong opinions about virtually everything, had his own view of such occasions. Michael Slater notes his ‘embarrassment’ and ‘irritation’ at the Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations of 1864:

always for Dickens the best way for a...

Give us a break: Gissing’s Life

Rosemarie Bodenheimer, 9 July 2009

‘For Gissing,’ Paul Delany notes, ‘writing was a grim and lonely task, made grimmer by one of the most disastrous family lives of any English writer. At times this misery threatened to become contagious.’ This confession comes at the end of Delany’s engaging new biography of George Gissing, and suggests the special difficulty of spending long periods in the...

Secret-Keeping: Elizabeth Gaskell

Rosemarie Bodenheimer, 16 August 2007

The new Pickering and Chatto edition of the complete works of Elizabeth Gaskell arrived just in time to mark a century since the publication of the previous standard text, A.W. Ward’s Knutsford Edition of 1906. In the meantime, Gaskell has been transformed from a charming woman who wrote wry nostalgic sketches to a major figure in Victorian studies.

Raymond Williams jump-started this...

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