Our critics have done the hard work for you by sifting through copies options to bring you an unmissable selection of 30 period dramas full of tension, romance and intrigue.
“Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest,” George Eliot writes in Romola, a novel that presents marriage as the latter and charts the eponymous heroine’s efforts to escape a domineering husband. “Marriage is a state of higher duties,” the young Dorothea Brooke says in Middlemarch. “I never thought of it as mere personal ease.” Her marriage to the musty, dusty, cold-hearted scholar Casaubon, “a dried bookworm towards fifty,” turns out to be a trial. If only she had listened to her uncle, who declares marriage to be a “noose.” Gwendolen Harleth, in Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda, feels a similar constriction in her marriage, imagining not a noose around her neck but rather the “throttling fingers” of her tyrannical husband Henleigh Grandcourt. In Eliot’s 1859 novella The Lifted Veil, love curdles into loathing for Latimer and Bertha, and their marriage becomes such an ordeal that she ends up conspiring with her maid to poison him.
George Eliot s Subversive Vision of Marriage theatlantic.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theatlantic.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
[Essay] Put on the Diamonds , By Vivian Gornick harpers.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from harpers.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.