I've read Deerbrook last year and loved it! I find it very similar to Gaskell in North and South or Mary Barton, meaning that everything seem quite and cozy and nice and then something happens and makes things look horrible until the very end 😅 I hope you'll enjoy it and good luck with your reading project! PS: I also hate Hardy's characters names 😣
Glad to hear about Deerbrook. I want to read it. I've read Return of the Native. It's good. You know Hardy. LOL. Interesting you consider Henry James a Victorian author. I never knew what to call him. I've read several of his novels. He's a heavy weight, as I call him. Once you start reading him, you know he is extraordinary. Same with Edith Wharton. You will enjoy his book. i've read that one. There's a movie. It came out in the ninties I believe,
Yay, so glad you did this 🎉 I’ve definitely read less from the first decade of the Victorian period, too. I don’t think I recommended The Vicar of Wrexhill, but I do recommend The Widow Barnaby! I want to read more by her, too, if you want to buddy read The Vicar of Wrexhill sometime. Night and Morning was good - very Dickensian kind of coming of age story. I did not like Barry Lyndon - the narrator is so annoying 😂
The only one I've read in that group is Man and Wife cuz I'm a lover of all things Wilkie Collins! I think I got started on Portrait of a Lady once, but got distracted & never finished. Time to give it another go ... most others are totally new to me, but look forward to exploring them! Thanks!!
I decided not to check my own list because I’m planning on mood reading a lot next year and I knew if I looked I’d start planning 😉. I imagine I still have a fair few years to go, especially at the beginning of the period. People seem either to really like The Eustace Diamonds or find it the weakest in the series- I won’t tell you which side I fall on 😉 and I really enjoyed Portrait of a Lady. I’m not sure about the Henry James Victorian thing but he did become a British citizen before he died so 🤷♀️
In trying to find a female Victorian playwright I found a play by Catherine Gore but now can't get access to the website so I'm waiting for a paper copy to turn up. I note, there's a cheap ebook Christmas story so I might read that, nearer the season. On my 19th C novel course, I had to read what Henry James, Robert Louis Stephenson and George Henry Lewes thoughts on the novel and one of the novels was ''The Portrait of a Lady' - in my opinion there's something up with his syntax, I want to rearrange everyone of his sentences. I'm reading a book about literary friendships and wondering about 'Miss Miles' by Mary Taylor who was a friend of Charlotte Bronte.
