BleakChesneyWold

                                             Industrial  'social' novel from 1855                                       Introduction                               The Elizabeth Gaskell Society was established in 1985. During  the 2000's several of Mrs Gaskell's novels were televised.  North and South ,  Wives and   Daughters  and  Cranford  (which were three stories effectively rammed together). In 2014 the Manchester Historic Buildings Trust helped finance the opening of the Elizabeth Gaskell House at 84 Plymouth Road to the public, Mrs Gaskell's home from 1850- 1865. Now operates as a museum devoted to her work.  Mrs Gaskell wrote some several novels and a...

                          A lesser known Hardy novel : No classic but interesting.             It is hard to call The Well -Beloved   a 'lost classic' : Usually depicted as a novel for Hardy diehards only. In fact D.H.Lawrence described it as 'sheer rubbish' VICTORIAN WEB .  F.B.Pinion in his extensive survey of Hardy writings thought that the novel was 'light' and 'tragic-comic'. F.B.PINION   Hardy's recent biographer  Claire Tomalin advises that the novel began as  a lighthearted story  The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved  TOMALIN    T he first version was p ublished in weekly instalment form in The Illustrated News  from October-December 1892, this work was not published as a novel until 1897 with an extra portion, making it technically Hardy's last published novel. THOMAS HARDY SOCIETY. A new edition emerged in 1912 with some m...

                                                                     " Wildfell Hall is a feminist manifesto of revolutionary power and intelligence'                                            Stevie Davies (1996)                   "It ( The Tenant of Wildfell Hall  ) was written too obviously as a work of propaganda, a treatise against drunkeness, to be considered a work of art "                                                        Winifred Gerin (1959)                ...

                                            One of Hardy's Neglected Novels  The term 'Laodicean'  comes from the Book of Revelation, chapter 3, meaning 'lukewarm' and 'non committal' or even 'incapable of making a real commitment'. [ 14 ] And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write; These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God; [ 15 ] I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. [ 16 ] So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth I can not trace any TV,radio, or stage adaptations. A screenplay  has been written with an audio version uploaded on to You Tube in seven parts, not sure if this was ever performed. This highlights the storyline's more comic elements.  Hardy was ill in bed when constructing working...

                                                         A Lost Occult Horror Classic                       John Atkinson Grimshaw 'Nightfall on the Thames' 1880 in the public domain courtesy of Wikipedia Richard Marsh was born Richard Bernard Heldman in London  on 12th October 1857. The son of a lace merchant who married a lacemaker. The Heldman family were Jewish converts to Christianity. His father went bankrupt not long after Richard's birth, and became a school master. From 1880 up to 1883, Richard Heldman had short stories published in boy's fiction and adventure magazines, but appears to have stopped writing in June 1883. For the rest of the year, Heldman drifted through Britain and France, living from the proceeds of forged cheques. In February 1884, he was arrested and th...