Word: victorian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Possession is by far A.S. Byatt's best-known novel. A miraculous blend of contemporary and Victorian morality and romance, it won the 1990 Booker Prize in Britain just as it was being published in the U.S. to glowing reviews and warm sales. Babel Tower (Random House; 625 pages; $25.95) is Byatt's first novel since then, and will surely attract the attention of all those enchanted by Possession. It is also likely to provoke some head scratching, since the new novel continues a story begun in two of Byatt's earlier, pre-Possession books...
Edward, like many of Kennedy's Celtic charmers, is tough and fireproof. He saves his wife but discovers that the disaster has transformed her into a perpetual mourner, a woman as cool and distant as a piece of Victorian cemetery statuary. In contrast, Edward defies fate with...
...imperfect though invariably wise and right was a novel idea, Travers' gift to the modern children's book, just as the idea that a little boy could go off and have unsupervised adventures with his stuffed animals, however fantastical, was Milne's. Both writers were emerging from a Victorian tradition that saw children's literature as a didactic form whose function--if it wasn't to romanticize childhood--was to instill a respect for adult values and behavior...
...There is an Inn in San Francisco called the Red Victorian, where every room is different," she said...
...symbolism draws attention to itself through the play's title, but it becomes something of a joke by being pat and trite, like a Victorian maxim. The upstanding Lord Windemere bestows the fan on his chaste wife as a gift, but when jealousy leads her to rendezvous with Lord Darlington late at night, she leaves it lying on his table. She explicitly forgets it, and virtue, in his chambers...