February 2011 Preview

     Greetings, fellow readers!

     I hope you enjoyed the MacDonald reviews.  Perhaps we will return to this author sometime in the future.  I would like to read The Princess and the Goblin and At the Back of the North Wind.  If you would like a more complete list of his writings please visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_MacDonald#Partial_list_of_works
     I will not focus on a single author for the month of February.  In honor of Valentine's Day, I will review three romance novels.  Due to my busy schedule, I will release one review each week for the next three weeks.  For the final week of February, I will post a preview for the month of March.  If I have time, I may release special editions.
     For the month of February, the featured authors will be:  Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Geraldine Brooks.
     Elizabeth Gaskell was an English woman who wrote in the mid-1800s.  Her writings include Mary Barton, North and South, Cranford, and Wives and Daughters.  Molly Gibson, of Wives and Daughters, is one of my favorite Victorian literary heroines.  I look forward to sharing my favorite Gaskell novel with you.
     Harriet Beecher Stowe is best remembered for her controversial anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, published only a few years before the American Civil War.  However, this was only one of several novels that she wrote between 1852 and 1890.  I will review The Pearl of Orr's Island, written ten years after Uncle Tom's Cabin.
     Geraldine Brooks, not to be confused with the Australian writer of the same name, wrote at the turn of the 20th century.  Titles include: Dames and Daughters of the French Court, Dames and Daughters of Colonial Days, and Dames and Daughters of the Young Republic.  Each book is a collection of short stories about different women in history.  I have had the privilege of only reading Romances of Colonial Days by Geraldine Brooks.  I will, however, keep my eyes open at all antique shops for copies of her other novels.  They are quite interesting.  She references people I have read about in history books, and women whom I've never heard of before, but women who nonetheless lived and breathed and had joys and sorrows like we do today.
     Thank you for visiting Victorian Bookshelf, and I hope you will return this coming month for these new treasures of literature.
                                 ~ Katelyn