The little white attic

I quit on Jane and Prudence after about 50 pages.  Some of you will probably say I’m missing the point, but Barbara Pym writes about the tr...

1/ This is my first Zola.  Thérèse Raquin , like Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet , begins with a detailed description of the surroundings. Place th...

- 10 favourite novels (updated):  The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu  Anna Karenina by Lev Tolstoy War and Peace by Lev Tolstoy M...

As I read about the relationship between a charming, dominating woman and a naïve, inexperienced younger man in My Cousin Rachel , I can’t h...

The House of Mirth has an interesting premise. If Jane Austen writes about courtship and a woman’s search for the right one to marry, and G...

Soon we will enter the 2020s, so let’s talk about our reading over the past decade, shall we?   1/ I came to Norway in 2009—before this, I ...

Do you wonder about how much time passes between events or how long something lasts in Madame Bovary ? I did. It’s not always clear, but I’m...

Let’s look at this passage, after Rodolphe dumps Emma:  “As for memories of Rodolphe, she stored them away in the depths of her heart, and...

Discussing  Madame Bovary , people tend to write about Emma’s sentimentality, silliness, and extravagance, and the way she foolishly expects...

“As Charles was giving the harness a final check he noticed something on the ground between the horse’s legs; he picked up a cigar case edg...

Look at these lines—Flaubert describes the people at the Marquis’s party that Emma Bovary looks at:  “Their clothes, of better cut, seemed...