Second Glance: Fatal Beauty
/Nothing shakes up the literary establishment like women writers -- or women readers -- who won't stay quietly in their place.
Read MoreBeethoven in the Soul
/Over time, the books of our youth make way for titles better suited to the grown-up readers we have become. But not all of them: YA or not, some books -- such as K. M. Peyton's Pennington trilogy -- deserve a lasting place on our shelves.
Read MoreSecond Glance: No Lesser Crime
/“The Moonstone will have its vengeance on you and yours!” Those fateful words propel us into one of the first and best of modern English detective novels -- still sensational after all these years.
Read MoreSecond Glance: Her Hands Full of Sugar-Plums
/George Eliot's Middlemarch is beloved for its wit and wisdom. But behind its many beauties lurks a disquieting possibility: that misery is the price we must pay for morality.
Read MoreSecond Glance: Queen of the Gypsies
/Spoiler alert! It’s a familiar warning — but isn’t it also a silly one? There’s so much more to novels than their plots. And yet what if we're better readers for not knowing? Consider The Mill on the Floss, for example.
Read MoreSecond Glance: The Radicalism of Felix Holt
/Felix Holt, the Radical may be one of George Eliot’s least-read novels, but its questions about a democracy that puts power in the hands of "ignorant numbers" still have both moral and political resonance.
Read MoreSecond Glance: The Quiet One
/Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is usually overshadowed by her sisters' masterpieces, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, but this gripping novel, a startling exposé of Victorian patriarchy, deserves a turn in the spotlight.
Read MoreSecond Glance: Against the Wind
/It's one of the iconic bestsellers of the 20th century, an epic of love and war -- but how well does "Gone With The Wind" hold up, as a book? A personal journey through a problematic classic.
Read MoreSecond Glance: The Morality of Vanity Fair: It’s All About You
/Thackeray's seminal big baggy monster of a novel is a satiric romp across all levels of English society - and every bit as enjoyable now as it was when it was the talk of London in 1847
Read MoreSecond Glance: Reading Anthony Trollope
/He wrote over 40 novels, many of which are classics, and that sheer quantity can be daunting. Rohan Maitzen tells us how best to approach the literary dynamo that was Anthony Trollope.
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