One of the reasons I love reading Victorian/Regency novels is that I get a glimpse of the everyday rituals, strange to us now, that were so important to the people performing them. One of those rituals that always seemed at once charming and terrifying to me was the obligation of…
As I wrote about last year when I read Ethan Frome, descriptions of meals in books are one of the things that really catch my attention when I'm reading. I like to imagine how all the elements of the meal work together. I read this description recently in Margaret Drabble's The…
Memorial plaques for three of the family members of Plum Johnson, author of the memoir They Left us Everything (check it out at amazon.ca or amazon.com), which I mentioned in a recent entry. I would hesitate to call this "history," but seeing these plaques (I had forgotten they were there, so…
