Braddon in Bohemia

November 4th's session was a 'sensational' success, in the main because of the (at times) thrilling yarn Mary Elizabeth Braddon provided us in Eleanor's Victory (1863), written while she was living in 26 Mecklenburgh Square. Featuring a vivid, even sensual, portrait of The Colonnade, a cobbled mews road that can be found still between two much grander streets between Russell and Brunswick squares, the novel found in 1850s Bloomsbury a bohemianism we might have imagined did not feature until a few decades later. Exploring reviews from the period proved particularly fun, and we found not a few points of congruence, both in terms of critique for its plot and character implausibilities, as well as praise for its stylistic fluency and emotional intelligence. The ideologically and generically driven ending means that Eleanor might not quite be a female Hamlet, though, we felt she makes a very valiant attempt at such a role.

Gissing in Gower Place

On Thursday 7th October, we had the grim satisfaction of discussing Gissing's first novel, Workers in the Dawn (1880), in the vicinity of the Reading Room he made his own in New Grub Street - grim, in that the Bloomsbury he offered us was generally rainy, alcoholic, and with few obvious means of amelioration; satisfying, in that the convivial atmosphere of the Old Sanskrit Library meant that by constrast we felt noticeably less alienated and desperate than the protagonist Arthur Golding does towards the end of the novel. We had the pleasure of comparing London Library editions with the new paperback out in Broadview Press, another plug for which excellent commodity seems justified, seeing as one of our regulars, Professor Richard Dennis, has contributed a map to it...