Edna Ferber Revisited
The first-generation Jewish American novelist exposed entrenched prejudices of her day. A reissue of The Girls introduces her wit to new readers.
Gender, Meat-Eating, and British Colonialism
As the power of the East India Company grew, British writers embraced the idea that the (alleged) passiveness of Indians was due in part to vegetarianism.
The Reading Abbey Girls’ School
This all-girls boarding school in England produced a generation of accomplished female writers in the eighteenth century.
In the Gutters of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman
Gaiman’s stories echo with narratives from the Western canon, taken from folktales and communal memory, displaced into something that feels fresh.
Sorry, but Jane Eyre Isn’t the Romance You Want It to Be
Charlotte Brontë, a woman whose life was steeped in stifled near-romance, refused to write love as ruly, predictable, or safe.
The Secret Syndicate behind Nancy Drew
If you remember your grade-school reading log, the Nancy Drew mysteries are by Carolyn Keene. Only she never existed.
What Exactly Is Jane Austen’s Sanditon?
An unfinished, fragmentary Austen novel is being adapted for television. Can we ever know what Austen meant for this book to eventually become?
On Embracing Boredom
What does "boredom" even mean? As both a word and a concept, boredom is not a universal phenomenon but a historical construction specific to our times.