Reading Victorian Literature (Novel Readings)

About the Author

Rohan Maitzen

I am an English professor in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I blog at Novel Readings. More information about me can be found at my home page.

About This Index

I began blogging at Novel Readings in January, 2007. This index page provides a guide to the majority of the substantive reviews and commentaries posted there. The usual format of a blog, always presenting the most recent content first, implies (misleadingly, in my view) that older content becomes less relevant and interesting as it recedes into the archives. Searching by 'label,' though it gathers related content, similarly enforces the primacy of the latest installment--even though the most recent post most likely builds on a chain of thoughts and references developed over time and thus best followed in chronological order.

Because I have conceived of Novel Readings not (or not just) as a news feed on my latest reading, teaching or thinking, but also as a repository of ideas and readings, I hope here to off-set this bias towards the recent by organizing the content of the blog according to a different principle or image: as an interrelated set of constantly evolving or expanding chapters. Each 'chapter' heading is followed by a chronological series of links to posts at Novel Readings, then--or, on occasion, to posts at The Valve, where I have been a contributor since March 2008. I hope that by offering this alternative approach to navigating the blog that I can enhance its usefulness, not only to myself by making it easier to locate and track the unfolding of ideas I'm not finished with yet, but also to visitors. To paraphrase a famous philosopher, Novel Readings (like every blog) will not therefore have been, (nor will it ever be) a book--but it is something like one, a malleable, unstable, diffuse one, in ways that this Index helps display.

Index to Novel Readings‎ > ‎

Reading Victorian Literature

Special Events

Adam Bede (The Valve, Summer 2008)

The Chimes (The Valve, Winter 2008)

Chime in on "The Chimes" (Novel Readings, December 19, 2008)
Ring Out, Wild Bells! (The Valve, December 19, 2008)

Villette (The Valve, Summer 2009)

Week I: Chapters 1-8, "I, Lucy Snowe, was calm."
Week II: Chapters 1-15, "Ghostly nuns, cross-dressing, and Meribah's waters gushing out"
Week III: Chapters 1-22, "I had preferred to keep the matter to myself"
Week IV: Chapters 1-27, "She's ba-ack!"
Week V: Chapters 1-35, "Oubliez les professeurs!"
Week VI: Chapters 1-42, "Farewell"

Focus on Victorian Novelists (see also This Week in My Classes)

Charlotte and Emily Bronte

Wuthering Heights (February 1, 2007)
Leslie Stephen, "Charlotte Bronte" (September 2, 2007)

Charles Dickens

"Indicting Charles Dickens"? (November 23, 2007)
Dickens and "the Limits of Anguished Humanism" (November 26, 2007)
Fog. Mud. Smoke. Soot. Gas. Fog. (October 27, 2008)

George Eliot

George Eliot: the Friendly Face of Unbelief (June 25, 2007)
Becoming George? (August 18, 2007)
George Eliot and Prayer (October 28, 2007)
Teaching Middlemarch (October 29, 2007; November 5, 2007; November 14, 2007)
Middlemarch in the 21st Century? (April 2, 2008)
Zadie Smith on George Eliot: "the Secular Laureate of Revelation" (May 25, 2008)
Reading George Eliot Well (May 28, 2008)
Teaching The Mill on the Floss (November 19, 2008; November 25, 2008)
"The Little Child Had Come to Link Him Once More with the World" (December 11, 2008)

Elizabeth Gaskell

Margaret Oliphant

Miss Marjoribanks (March 23, 2007)
Hester (May 9, 2007)
Autobiography (September 17, 2007)

William Makepeace Thackeray

Vanity Fair: It's All About You (The Valve, September 22, 2008)

Anthony Trollope

Blogging He Knew He Was Right (August 22, 2007; August 24, 2007; August 27, 2007;

Other Victorian Novelists

Evaluating East Lynne (August 4, 2007)

Not-Victorian Novelists

Jane Austen

Sir Walter Scott