Victorian Musings

Who pays the price of a writer's fame ? One Wednesday morning in November 1912, the aging Thomas Hardy, entombed by paper and books and increasingly estranged from his wife Emma, finds her dying in her bedroom. Between his speaking to her and taking her in his arms, she is gone. In the aftermath of his shattering loss, he comes across a set of diaries that Emma had secretly kept about their life together and he discovers what she had truly felt about their marriage. By turns tender, surprising, comic and true, The Chosen hauntingly searches the unknowable spaces between husband and wife and regret, life and art.     Hardcover ,  304 pages Published April 14th 2022 by Riverrun - Quercus Books Immediately, what I love about The Chosen is the cover. The woman on the cover is a portrait of the real first Mrs. Hardy, Emma Lavinia GIfford herself. A stroke of genius for a cover as ever I saw one. He doesn't remember that time. I am an irrelevance, a clog on his real life. He forgets

The title page of  A Book of Rhymes  by Charlotte Brontë. Images credit: James Cummins Bookseller. The contents page of  A Book of Rhymes  by Charlotte Brontë. Images credit: James Cummins Bookseller. TAKEN FROM ANTIQUES TRADE GAZETTE website: A Book of Ryhmes, a  15-page manuscript smaller than a playing card, is a collection of 10 poems written by Brontë at the age of 13, stitched in its original brown paper covers and dated December 1829. The manuscript is well known in the world of Brontë scholarship: a mention appears in Mrs Gaskell’s  Life of Charlotte Brontë  (1857), from the transcription of Charlotte’s own handwritten catalogue of the books she wrote in 1829 and 1830. The titles of the 10 poems have been known, but the poems themselves have never been published, photographed, transcribed or even summarised. Ann Dinsdale, principal curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, said: “It is always emotional when an item belonging to the family is returned home and this final little bo