Favourite thing yesterday: a passage from Felix Holt that I was teaching in class. Here are the last few lines of her powerfully nostalgic opening chapter: "The poets have told us of a dolorous enchanted forest in the under world. The thorn-bushes there, and the thick-barked stems, have human histories hidden in them; the power of unuttered cries dwells in the passionless-seeming branches, and the red warm blood is darkly feeding the quivering nerves of a sleepless memory that watches through all dreams. These things are a parable." It is such a weird and riveting and grim (given that those "human histories," following Dante on whom the passage is based, relate to suicides) and, ultimately, haunting way to open this novel (which is not, btw, my favourite Victorian novel although this is one of my favourite passages in a Victorian novel).
I thought I'd look to the list to see if anyone had mentioned a Victorian novel as a favourite thing. Alas, no one had. (Would I, I wonder?) But Franny mentioned a novel with a Victorian novelist as a character in it. Here it is: "Favourite recent read: William Flanagan, Wanting." I'll try to read it soon so that I can comment on it rather than just listing it here.
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