Barbara Pym wasn’t a Penelope Fitzgerald fan. In a letter to Phillip Larkin, Pym writes, “I read Penelope Fitzgerld’s The Book Shop,...

Penelope Fitzgerald writes such quietly brutal books. Florence Green with her naivete and kindness says toward the end of The Bookshop,...

Early in Vita Sackville-West's All Passion Spent, the elderly protagonist Lady Slane says, “Besides, I have considered the eyes of the...

There’s a great passage in Manifesto: On Never Giving Up where Bernardine Evaristo declares “In spite of what my father endured, he never...

I finished Good Behavior which I read without great relish. I mostly cringed and held my breath. Molly Keane is merciless in presenting...

Nightbitch has created a tangled skein of ideas in my head and I’m not sure I’ll unravel it. You know how Austin Kleon does mind maps? I...

In The Optimist’s Daughter, the dark forces in the novel are Fay and her family, people “who never know the meaning of what has happened...

Don’t you think Persuasion the best Jane Austen novel ever? It’s by far my favorite. That’s kind of a joke because most characters in...

I like year-end best-of lists. Reading others’ lists is a fun way to learn about things I’ve missed. And thinking about my own best-of...

Rereading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I caved in and let myself skip Helen’s painful awakening to her husband’s true character. At first...