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.
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