When I read this, I of course immediately wanted to know: How did Dickens clock her? What was the tell? Most readers at the time took the male name on the cover in good faith, so much so that some rube who happened to live near the town on which the setting in Scenes of Clerical Life was modeled started going around taking credit for it.
Dickens said nothing in his letter to explain how he could discern from words on a page that the person who wrote them was a woman. Maybe it was because, a few years earlier, he had made himself “mentally…like a woman” in Bleak House, which is interspersed with chapters from the first-person point of view of a young woman named Esther Summerson. Dickens told an American journalist the effort had “cost him no little labor and anxiety. ‘Is it quite natural,’ he asked, ‘quite girlish?’” Charlotte Brontë, for one, thought it wasn’t: “It seems to me too often weak and twaddling; an amiable nature caricatured, not faithfully rendered.” But Dickens felt he had succeeded, writing another friend that he had done “a pretty womanly thing as the sex will like.”
To students new to the study of nineteenth-century American literature, it may seem that the field has been so thoroughly studied and catalogued that there can be very little left to discover about it. This could hardly be further from the truth. The bodies of work of the most well-studied of American authors from the period—much less writers who are only just beginning to receive their critical due—are almost all incomplete. Indeed, it is probably a rare thing to study a writer who does not have works, either known or suspected, missing from their corpuses. This seems to be especially true of authors of the nineteenth century, for a few reasons.
When searching for a tea emoji on most text messaging apps, a range of options appear. One shows what looks like green liquid in a white bowl. Another features a saucer and a cup filled with a darker liquid that doubles as coffee.
These emoji’s designs allude to the long history of tea, tracing how this centerpiece of a cherished Asian tradition grew into a global beverage. For most of recorded history, the word “tea” referred to green tea from China and later Japan—illustrated by the emoji officially called “teacup without handle.”
More than her human protagonists, her furry characters exude distinct, memorable, impossible-to-ignore personalities. From one tale to the next, tissues might get soggy and eyes puffy, but the hope that there will be more stories will surely lift readers’ hearts.
Many academics are clinical prose stylists, but Sinykin writes with verve and narrative flair as he documents the consolidation of the major publishing houses — and, along the way, overturns the myth of “the romantic author,” that lone genius unfettered by social circumstances or material constraints. Far from working in isolation, he argues, writers inhabit a “hidden world” of “subsidiary rights specialists, art directors, marketing managers, sales staff, wholesalers, chain book buyers, philanthropists, government bureaucrats.” In “Big Fiction,” these shadowy figures, so central yet so uncelebrated, slink out of the wings and onto the stage. The result is a fascinating and informative account of the convulsions roiling the American publishing industry for the past half-century — and a devastating reckoning with the ways in which conglomeration has altered American fiction.