Talk about doing

Frank Kermode, 26 October 1989

Against Deconstruction 
by John Ellis.
Princeton, 168 pp., £13.70, February 1989, 0 691 06754 6
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The New Historicism 
by H. Aram Veeser.
Routledge, 318 pp., £30, July 1989, 0 415 90070 0
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Rethinking Historicism: Critical Essays in Romantic History 
by Marjorie Levinson, Marilyn Butler, Jerome McGann and Paul Hamilton.
Blackwell, 149 pp., £22.50, August 1989, 0 631 16591 6
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Towards a Literature of Knowledge 
by Jerome McGann.
Oxford, 138 pp., £16.50, May 1989, 9780198117407
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The Stoic in Love: Selected Essays on Literature and Ideas 
by A.D. Nuttall.
Harvester, 209 pp., £25, July 1989, 0 7450 0614 0
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“... the power of the institution to absorb and neutralise new fashions – and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s convincing demonstration that the New Historicists haven’t really given enough thought to history, or even to the sense in which the word ‘historicism’ has formerly been used. This chimes with Fish’s observation that in the ...”

Self-Made Women

John Sutherland, 11 July 1991

The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present 
edited by Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy and Patricia Clements.
Batsford, 1231 pp., £35, August 1990, 0 7134 5848 8
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The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel 
by Richard Altick.
Ohio State, 854 pp., $45, March 1991, 0 8142 0518 6
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“... age of 17, Florence Warden was taught by finishing governesses – she was not employed as one. Elizabeth Linington writes her Vic Varallo (not ‘Vatallo’) novels as Lesley Egan, not in her own name. There are two hands at work in the Alice Perrin entry, one of whom thinks the author published her first book in 1901 (wrong), another who thinks it was ...”

Her pen made the first move

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 7 July 1994

Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life 
by Lyndall Gordon.
Chatto, 418 pp., £17.99, March 1994, 9780701161378
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Shared Lives 
by Lyndall Gordon.
Vintage, 285 pp., £6.99, March 1994, 0 09 942461 4
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The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill 
by Miriam Bailin.
Cambridge, 169 pp., £30, April 1994, 0 521 44526 4
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“... writing. The recipient, however, responded more equivocally. While Brontë would later tell Elizabeth Gaskell that Southey’s letter had been ‘kind and admirable’, if ‘a little stringent’, to the writer himself she returned an answer in which genuine humility and self-abasement can barely be distinguished from an edgy and corrosive ...”

Risks

Tom Paulin, 1 August 1985

On the Contrary 
by Miroslav Holub, translated by Ewald Osers.
Bloodaxe, 126 pp., £8.95, October 1984, 0 906427 75 4
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The Lamentation of the Dead 
by Peter Levi.
Anvil, 40 pp., £2.95, October 1984, 0 85646 140 7
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Collected Poems 
by Peter Levi.
Anvil, 255 pp., £12, November 1984, 0 85646 134 2
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Elegies 
by Douglas Dunn.
Faber, 64 pp., £7.50, March 1985, 0 571 13570 6
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Poems: 1963-1983 
by Michael Longley.
Salamander, 206 pp., £9.95, March 1985, 0 904011 77 1
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Making for the Open: The Chatto Book of Post-Feminist Poetry 
edited by Carol Rumens.
Chatto, 151 pp., £4.95, March 1985, 0 7011 2848 8
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Direct Dialling 
by Carol Rumens.
Chatto, 48 pp., £3.95, March 1985, 0 7011 2911 5
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The Man Named East 
by Peter Redgrove.
Routledge, 137 pp., £4.95, March 1985, 0 7102 0014 5
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“... be read for the marvellous poems it contains by Anne Stevenson, Fleur Adcock, Dorothy Hewett, Elizabeth Bishop, Barbara Guest, Carolyn Forché, Miriam Waddington, and Eunice De Souza, whose ‘Marriages are made’ is about an Indian arranged marriage where the girl is first given a complete medical examination before being deemed able to do justice to ...”

God’s Iceberg

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 4 December 1986

The ‘Titanic’: The Full Story of a Tragedy 
by Michael Davie.
Bodley Head, 244 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 9780370307640
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The IT Girls: Elinor Glyn and Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon 
by Meredith Etherington-Smith and Jeremy Pilcher.
Hamish Hamilton, 258 pp., £14.95, September 1986, 0 241 11950 2
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“... bystander and suggested he run along the deck to see if any stray pieces of ice had come on board. Elizabeth Eustis and Martha Eustis Stevenson, sisters from Haverford, Pennsylvania, travelling first-class, were asleep in their cabin. The collision, though almost soundless – ‘like tearing a strip of calico, nothing more’ – woke them up. ...”

Naughty Children

Christopher Turner: Freud’s Free Clinics, 6 October 2005

Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice 1918-38 
by Elizabeth Ann Danto.
Columbia, 348 pp., £19.50, May 2005, 0 231 13180 1
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“... who seeks treatment – unmarried men with inherited money.’ But in Freud’s Free Clinics, Elizabeth Danto shows that thanks to Freud’s speech in Budapest and the enthusiastic response to it, ‘between 1918 and 1938 psychoanalysis was neither impractical for working people, nor rigidly structured, nor luxurious in length.’ During the interwar ...”

In fonder times, the tsar scalded and stabbed to death a prince

James Meek: Ivan the Terrible, 1 December 2005

Ivan the Terrible: First Tsar of Russia 
by Isabel de Madariaga.
Yale, 484 pp., £25, July 2005, 0 300 09757 3
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“... traders reached Russia, bringing, among other things, armaments, and wary messages from Queen Elizabeth and her government, with vague promises of political asylum for the paranoid tyrant and suggestions of brides (Elizabeth herself, de Madariaga believes, was never a possible consort for the tsar). Though he never ...”

Reckless Effrontery

Barbara Newman: Richard II and Henry IV, 20 March 2025

The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV 
by Helen Castor.
Allen Lane, 652 pp., £35, October 2024, 978 0 241 41932 8
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“... because it made him seem indispensable. Two hundred years later, another childless monarch, Elizabeth I, had John Hayward imprisoned in the Tower for dedicating a book on the events of 1399 to her rebellious former favourite, the Earl of Essex. The queen found it seditious even to broach the topic of a past tyrannicide; Essex’s supporters planned to ...”

Biogspeak

Terry Eagleton, 21 September 1995

George Eliot: A Biography 
by Frederick Karl.
HarperCollins, 708 pp., £25, July 1995, 0 00 255574 3
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“... an anatomy of human feeling. The role of the female novelist is thus in a sense supplementary: Elizabeth Gaskell admits that she knows little of economics, but one function of the Victorian novel is to nurture the lived experience, interpersonal values and affective pieties which those economics are in danger of brusquely dispelling. The Dickens of Hard ...”

Burying Scott

Marilyn Butler, 7 September 1995

The Life of Walter Scott: A Critical Biography 
by John Sutherland.
Blackwell, 386 pp., £19.99, January 1995, 1 55786 231 1
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“... consort of George II, as a healing principle of Mercy in The Heart of Midlothian (1818), and Queen Elizabeth I, epitome of successful English monarchs, in Kenilworth (1821). Sutherland is especially dismissive of Kenilworth, since he sees it as little better than an extended compliment to royalty. The festivities it describes for ...”

Scenes from South African Life

R.W. Johnson, 13 October 1988

“... has already been reached. At the height of the 1984-86 urban insurrection, unemployment in Port Elizabeth reached 56 per cent; today it is at 57 per cent and the result is seething townships and massive outward migration to less blighted cities. But by 2000, with a national unemployment rate of 55 per cent, there will be nowhere much to go. Meanwhile Port ...”

Out of the closet

Tom Paulin, 29 October 1987

Emily Dickinson 
by Helen McNeil.
Virago, 208 pp., £3.50, April 1986, 0 86068 619 1
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Emily Dickinson: Looking to Canaan 
by John Robinson.
Faber, 191 pp., £3.95, August 1986, 0 571 13943 4
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Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar 
by Christanne Miller.
Harvard, 212 pp., £15.95, July 1987, 0 674 25035 4
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Emily Dickinson: The Poet on the Second Story 
by Jerome Loving.
Cambridge, 128 pp., £20, April 1987, 0 521 32781 4
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“... She searched for role models among famous women writers of her day – George Eliot, the Brontës, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yet as Christanne Miller points out, Dickinson didn’t actively support the political campaign for women’s rights ‘or, apparently, sympathise with women generally’. It is in the radical new language of the poems themselves that ...”

Bob and Betty

Jenny Diski, 26 January 1995

A Mind of My Own: My Life with Robert Maxwell 
by Elizabeth Maxwell.
Sidgwick, 536 pp., £16.99, November 1994, 0 283 06251 7
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“... celebrated Parisian salons’) and shares them with us in prose similar to her description of Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes: ‘of a deep, rich velvety purple’. Istanbul is encased in its geographical surroundings like ‘a jewel in lapis lazuli’; the Taj Mahal, ‘one of the Seven Wonders of the World’, she saw ‘at dawn, when the main dome was ...”

Inconstancy

Peter Campbell, 20 July 1995

Brancusi 
Pompidou Centre, August 1995Show More
Constantin Brancusi: A Survey of His work 
by Sanda Miller.
Oxford, 256 pp., £45, April 1995, 0 19 817514 0
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Constantin Brancusi Photographe 
by Elizabeth Brown.
Assouline, 79 pp., frs 99, April 1995, 2 908228 23 8
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Constantin Brancusi: 1876-1957 
by Margit Rowell and Ann Temkin.
Gallimard, 408 pp., frs 390, April 1995, 2 85850 819 4
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“... can be constructed in a museum, the most satisfying publication on sale at the exhibition is Elizabeth Brown’s book of Brancusi’s photographs. The studio photographs are also reproduced in the catalogue, often facing colour plates of the same subjects, made in the technically brilliant high-key manner perfected for the photography of watches, glass ...”

Lincoln, Illinois

William Fiennes, 6 March 1997

All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories 
by William Maxwell.
Harvill, 415 pp., £10.99, January 1997, 1 86046 308 8
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So Long, See You Tomorrow 
by William Maxwell.
Harvill, 135 pp., £8.99, January 1997, 9781860463075
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“... has insider status. The cover of the American paperback of The Chateau reproduces the praise of Elizabeth Bowen; the novel’s epigraph is taken from Elizabeth Bowen; it is dedicated to an ‘E.B.’ This new edition of All the Days and Nights quotes the praise of Eudora Welty, to whom one of the stories is ...”