serpentine smiles

Pride and Prejudice, play adaptation by Sherwood Smith (sartorias) of the Jane Austen novel. Thank you sartorias for letting us read your adaptation of P&P originally performed by high school students! It did a really good job of condensing the plot while leaving in some dialogue that adaptations often leave out, and it was funny!

Much Ado About Numbers, Rob Eastaway. I picked this up again and finished it, but found that the bits that I'd already read were the most interesting to me. I found this book to be strongest when it was explaining the technology level of Shakespeare's time, and weakest when it was going into speculative interpretations of Shakespeare. (Though some of the theories it admitted were too far out there, like the joking theory that Cassio the "great arithmetician" might have inspired the naming of the Casio calculator.)

Alice James: Her brothers, her journal, edited by Alice Robeson Burr. I recently learned about Alice James, sister of the better known late 19th century American intellectuals Willam and Henry James, and was interested enough to pick up her diary. This book also contains Alice Robeson Burr's essay on the James family, which had some interesting tidbits that led to my learning more about forgotten 19th century American women intelectuals, like Mary Moody Emerson, aunt of and inspiration to the better-known Ralph Waldo, and Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, of which Burr writes "In those days and communities, there was always a woman who read Greek, and in Concord it was Mrs. Ripley who had this distinction."

I'm about halfway through Alice James's diary ; being a diary (and without contextual footnotes) it is slow going although it does have some good passages writing about her chronic illness and other things.

St. Helios, Alice Robeson Burr. The diary being slow going, I decided to look into what else Anna Robeson Burr had published -- she was a prolific popular novelist, and encountered this entertainingly snarky review of her novel St. Helios, which was enough to get me to pick it up. I found it to be very readable but ultimately disappointing novel. It is set in 1920 and centers on the triangle between an aristocratic British poet who is both a relic of the Victorian era and a Byronic figure, his illegimate daughter, and the American lawyer who falls in love with both (though the book is not that slashy). The daughter starts out as the most interesting of the three main characters, but halfway through she gets a change of heart and moves from manipulative schemer to damsel in distress. After reading, I found two more contemporary reviews of this book, which are just as entertaining as the NYT review.