Search Results

Advanced Search

1 to 15 of 37 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Blurbs and puffs, 20 July 2006

... is easiest when X, Y and Z have been written by the same person. You see The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, remember how much you enjoyed Sarah Waters’s other books – it’s a no-brainer. And just in case you’re the kind of person who remembers the titles of novels more easily than the names of ...

Hoist that dollymop’s sail

John Sutherland: New Victorian Novels, 31 October 2002

Fingersmith 
by Sarah Waters.
Virago, 549 pp., £12.99, February 2002, 1 86049 882 5
Show More
The Crimson Petal and the White 
by Michel Faber.
Canongate, 838 pp., £17.99, October 2002, 1 84195 323 7
Show More
Show More
... Have you ever tried to write a Victorian novel? Here’s a beginning, with apologies to Sarah Waters and Michel Faber (and a nod to George MacDonald Fraser): London, 1860. November. A pea-souper billowing up from the flotsam bobbing in the Thames. The gas lamps already blearing. Good things of day begin to drowse ...

Charging about in Brogues

Jenny Turner: Sarah Waters, 23 February 2006

The Night Watch 
by Sarah Waters.
Virago, 472 pp., £16.99, February 2006, 1 84408 246 6
Show More
Show More
... of those muddy, confused old photographs has come alive and started to talk. The Night Watch is Sarah Waters’s fourth novel, her first to abandon the ‘frissony’, ‘pastiche’, ‘lesbo-Victorian’ theme developed, to great popular and critical success, in Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith ...

Plottergeist

Thomas Jones: Sarah Waters, 9 July 2009

The Little Stranger 
by Sarah Waters.
Virago, 501 pp., £16.99, June 2009, 978 1 84408 601 6
Show More
Show More
... other than a normal way for the patriarchs of a respectable middle-class family to behave. Sarah Waters’s novels – the first three set in the Victorian era, the more recent two in the 1940s – have always been interested in the ways in which English society has disposed of its more awkward or inconvenient members by locking them away in ...

A Perfect Eel

Elaine Showalter: ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’, 21 June 2012

Lady Audley’s Secret 
by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, edited by Lyn Pykett.
Oxford, 448 pp., £9.99, January 2012, 978 0 19 957703 3
Show More
Show More
... or sometimes ‘neo-sensationalism’, whose exponents include A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters and Michel Faber. M.E. Braddon’s secrets would make a sensational novel of their own. Brought up and educated by her mother, she was ‘a keen, precocious and eclectic reader’ of Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray and ...

‘The Meeting of the Waters

John Barrell, 27 July 2017

... of a year beginning in late 2013, I found myself at five separate places called the Meeting of the Waters. The first was the confluence of the Greta and the Tees on the Rokeby estate in Teesdale, thought to have been named by Walter Scott after the song of that title by the Irish Romantic poet Thomas Moore. This was then the only place I knew of so named. Next ...

Head in an Iron Safe

David Trotter: Dickens’s Tricks, 17 December 2020

The Artful Dickens: Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist 
by John Mullan.
Bloomsbury, 428 pp., £16.99, October 2020, 978 1 4088 6681 8
Show More
Show More
... thinks, to modernist and postmodern writers from James Joyce to Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood and Sarah Waters. Chapters on the delight Dickens took in names and his use of coincidence demonstrate with equal conviction that technique can be a way of knowing the world.Mullan’s accounts of key preoccupations ...

Wasp-Waisted Minoans

Miranda Carter: Mary Renault’s Heroes, 13 April 2023

‘The King Must Die’ and ‘The Bull from the Sea’ 
by Mary Renault.
Everyman, 632 pp., £16.99, October 2022, 978 1 84159 409 5
Show More
Show More
... 2015 – she attracts a more specialised admirer: history obsessives, novelists (Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Madeline Miller), classicists (Robin Lane Fox, Bettany Hughes), historians (Tom Holland), who salute her muscular resurrections of the classical world, and gay men who see her as a pioneer in her writing about homosexual relationships. Along ...

Roman Fever

Sarah Perry, 26 September 2019

Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire 
by Jessica Howell.
Cambridge, 238 pp., £75, October 2018, 978 1 108 48468 8
Show More
Show More
... it was an atavistic fear then, and remains so now, despite its locus moving from pestilential waters, or the ‘bad air’ which gives the disease its name, to the bite of an infected anopheles mosquito. In 2009, at a conference in California, Bill Gates released a swarm of mosquitoes into the audience. ‘There is no reason,’ he said, ‘only poorer ...

A good God is hard to find

James Francken: Jenny Diski, 4 January 2001

Only Human: A Divine Comedy 
by Jenny Diski.
Virago, 215 pp., £15.99, October 2000, 1 86049 839 6
Show More
Show More
... Only Human rattles through the lives of Adam, Cain and Noah and retells the story of Abraham and Sarah. But the omniscient third-person narrative is interrupted; the novel’s central character is God and Diski lets her deity have a point of view. In extended monologues, God looks down on the world, judging the ‘happy, human family’: ‘What ...

Period Pain

Patricia Beer, 9 June 1994

Aristocrats 
by Stella Tillyard.
Chatto, 462 pp., £20, April 1994, 0 7011 5933 2
Show More
Show More
... many inferences about aristocracy as we can or wish to. The women are Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, daughters of the second Duke of Richmond, the grandson of Charles II and his mistress Louise de Kéroualle. The main story starts with the birth of Caroline in 1723 and ends with the death of Sarah in 1826. About ...

Joinedupwritingwithavengeance

Danny Karlin, 7 January 1993

Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West 
by M.B. Parkes.
Scolar, 327 pp., £55, September 1992, 0 85967 742 7
Show More
Show More
... The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters; And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters. A roman numeral designates the stanza and initial capitals mark the beginnings of each line; other capitals (litterae notabiliores) highlight and personalise the names of the birds, in contrast to the other nouns, which describe the weather or organic ...

At the tent flap sin crouches

James Wood: The Fleshpots of Egypt, 23 February 2006

The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary 
by Robert Alter.
Norton, 1064 pp., £34, November 2004, 0 393 01955 1
Show More
Show More
... in the second verse of the opening of Genesis. ‘And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’ Two uses of ‘face’ in one verse, and a third implied face, surely: God’s own, hovering over the face of his still uncreated world. The Almighty, looking into the face of his ...

Mary Swann’s Way

Danny Karlin, 27 September 1990

Jane Fairfax 
by Joan Aiken.
Gollancz, 252 pp., £12.95, September 1990, 0 575 04889 1
Show More
Lady’s Maid 
by Margaret Forster.
Chatto, 536 pp., £13.95, July 1990, 0 7011 3574 3
Show More
Mary Swann 
by Carol Shields.
Fourth Estate, 313 pp., £12.99, August 1990, 1 872180 02 7
Show More
Show More
... would have been much greater: but then this novel has already been written – it is called Esther Waters. In its scenic aspects – its depiction of Victorian landscapes and interiors, of social and private life in both England and Italy – the novel is a deep disappointment. It is no good saying that Wilson was an ordinary person and so her fictionalised ...

What’s It All About?

Tom Lubbock, 6 April 1995

Shark-Infested WatersThe Saatchi Collection of British Art in the Nineties 
by Sarah Kent.
Zwemmer, 270 pp., £19.95, November 1994, 0 302 00648 6
Show More
The Reviews that Caused the Rumpus, and Other Pieces 
by Brian Sewell.
Bloomsbury, 365 pp., £12.99, November 1994, 0 7475 1872 6
Show More
Show More
... make lists. In favour of ‘contemporary art’: Nicholas Serota (at the Tate), Charles Saatchi, Sarah Kent (Time Out), Richard Dorment (Daily Telegraph, oddly enough). Against: Modern Painters, Brian Sewell (Evening Standard), Giles Auty (Spectator), Glynn Williams (at the RCA) and any number of Johnsonian or Waugh-like commentators who throw themselves ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences