billybookblog

*contains spoilers* Between the years 1225 and 1230, Guillaume de Lorris worked on and completed his portion of this novel, called Roman de la Rose , which was taken up by Jean de Meun and completed between the years 1269 and 1278. In fact, the only reason we know of Lorris’s identity at all is because Meun mentions him in his own portion of the text, giving a firm justification for the idea of paying homage to one’s literary forbears. Thanks to Meun’s attentive assignation, we are luckily not burdened by the prospect of having to refer to this text as part apocryphal. Though it came later – some hundred years or so – this text constantly brought to my mind the allegory contained in William Langland’s Piers Plowman through its use of the personification of abstract human qualities and actions such as Courtesy, Chastity and Fair Welcome. Once more we have a young man on the brink of adulthood drifting off to sleep by a river, and the images and messages that come to him in a resulting ...

*contains spoilers* In 1803, Jane Austen finished her first novel for publication, and was paid £10 by Benjamin Croft & Co. for her hard work. Unfortunately, this novel sat unpublished by Croft for six years, and, on asking in a very strongly worded letter whether they had lost the first manuscript and, if so, would they like a second, Croft offered to return the original for same price they had paid for it six years before. Unfortunately, Austen was at this time in some financial difficulty, and could not afford to buy back the manuscript – instead, she decided to turn her attention to finishing the other novels she had begun since then: Sense and Sensibility , Pride and Prejudice , and Emma (you may have heard of them). The novel which remained unpublished until her death in 1817 is the one about which I am writing now – Northanger Abbey – and was thankfully bought back from the publisher after the success of the three previously named works made that endeavour possible. In 181...

*contains spoilers* In 1910, the literary critic Desmond MacCarthy wrote “Impressionism encouraged an artist to paint a tree as it appeared to him at the moment under particular circumstances”. Henry James, the painter of the portrait about which I’m writing now, was very much of the same mind when it came to literature. I was even more convinced on this on finding out that James asked for his own portrait to be painted by the noted Impressionist artist John Singer Sargent, as James himself appreciated the notion that his image was to be a personal interpretation of the artist’s mind as much as it was to be his own, corporeal, physical form. Somewhere in between the objective form and the artist’s interpretation lies an unreliability that is aptly reflected in the narrator of this beautiful piece of work’s delivery as he toys with the reader in both knowing perfectly and yet not being quite sure exactly how a character feels. In this way, James bridges the gap between Victorian Realism...