Back to Blog
Armadale collins5/11/2023 ![]() ![]() What makes it to my mind more gothic is its bold splash of the supernatural: its reliance on dreams, coincidences and fate to suggest another way of reading the world, its exploration of identity and its central use of the motif of the double, an old favourite of gothic writers including E.T.A. It contains everything you would wish to find in such a book: intrigue, murder, deception, fraud, a secret diary and a wicked lady whom you rather hope will triumph in her criminal ways though you fear she won’t. After a rush of children’s books and detective novels about which I felt I had nothing interesting to write, I have been wallowing in the Victorian delights of Armadale and I have Thoughts.įirst serialised in 1864–66, Armadale is a wonderful chunk of nineteenth-century fiction which is usually classed, alongside Lady Audley’s Secret et al., as sensationalist, but in my opinion is more of a gothic novel. ![]() Hello again! I’m sorry, I haven’t felt like writing here for weeks – for no particular reason, we are all fine, the cats are fine, the hens are fine though on strike (and when they do bother to lay an egg, as often as not they just let it fall out wherever they happen to be and then stand on it). (John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Thoughts of the Past, oil on canvas, first exhibited 1859 Tate Britain found here) ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |