Word: bede
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Through much of her career, the author of Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch commanded great critical and public esteem. But her reputation began to decline with the new century until the epochal year 1933. It was then that a young American instructor named Gordon Haight came across a cache of Eliot letters in the Yale University Library. For the next 50 years Haight devoted himself to the correspondence. He became the general editor of the definitive Clarendon Edition of Eliot's novels and, in 1968, produced a fine, now standard biography. Haight's crowning achievement...
...excellent women live through it, in a round of jumble sales, festivals, parish politics and hopeless crushes on clergymen. If Pym's ecclesiastics tend to be a weak, feckless lot, it is no wonder: they are endlessly cosseted by women. One of her most vibrant characters is Harriet Bede in Some Tame Gazelle, actually an affectionate portrait of the author's sister Hilary. This middle-aged lady is crazy about curates, the younger and more threadbare the better. Any veteran of her bounty-rich food, good sherry, hand-knit woollies-is spoiled for life...
...Rome to form a patchwork of hybrid races, all of them notable for ferocity, hatred, stupidity, craftiness, lust and brutality-how did it happen that, from all this, there should come the Gregorian chant, monasteries and cathedrals, the poems of Prudentius, the commentaries and histories of Bede... St. Augustine's City...