Word: victorian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...know of Audrey Niffenegger is her achingly romantic novel The Time Traveler's Wife, then you're in for a surprise with her latest. Her Fearful Symmetry, Niffenegger's follow-up to her time-hopping best seller, is a Victorian ghost story set in the present that's more in tune with her creepy "visual novels" The Adventuress and The Three Incestuous Sisters. Starring a pair of waifish twins who inherit their mysterious (and dead, but maybe not-so-dead) aunt's London flat, the book is set in and around the city's famous Highgate Cemetery. Niffenegger talked...
London is literature's Victorian ghost-story capital. Did you have to grapple with everything that came before in that genre? I definitely wanted to ground my story in all the stuff that had come before. A couple of reviewers have faulted me for using all these terrible old clichés, but that was actually the project - to take all the tropes of the 19th century English novel and try to reanimate them. The book is definitely supposed to comment and hopefully expand on London ghost stories of yore...
With an ongoing preservation initiative, the cemetery plans to record the inscriptions of all its 19th century inhabitants, from Victorian hotshots (like poet Henry W. Longfellow, cookbook author Fannie Farmer, and clergyman and Harvard alum Phillips Brooks) to its less notable grave-dwellers...
...Director of Sophomore Advising, and a Ph.D. candidate. Studying primate biology as an undergraduate at Columbia University, Jenkins never expected to end up where he is today. But after contracting malaria during a research trip to Kenya, Jenkins decided to switch to literature to feed his obsession with the Victorian novel. Though the two topics seem unrelated, Jenkins sees a clear connection. “In both disciplines, you are searching for great significance in the tiniest details, great meaning in minute actions and things,” he says...
...this repurposing is easier said than done. Statistically speaking, we may have too many too large houses, but try to split them up - as people did a century ago with those Victorian mansions - and you're sure to hear from the neighbors. In order to keep houses as single-family homes and ostensibly protect property values, zoning ordinances and neighborhood bylaws often limit the number of unrelated people allowed to live in one dwelling...