First published in 1897, Dracula is the best-known vampire story in English. It has been endlessly adapted for screen, but today’s stories tend to dilute the horror at the novel’s heart.
Henry James called her a ‘great, horse-faced bluestocking’. On the 200th anniversary of her birth, we celebrate George Eliot, a literary trailblazer with an endless appetite for ideas, living in a patriarchal time.
While clear-eyed about the country’s injustices, Melville never succumbed to cynicism. On the author’s bicentennial, American readers could use a dose of his ability to fuse realism with idealism.
Leigh Hunt is a nineteenth-century writer who grappled with the question: How can we celebrate and enjoy ourselves at this time of the year when there is so much misery in the world?