Finola Austin's Blog: The Secret Victorianist, page 2

2024: My Year in Reading—A Retrospect

Happy New Year! After tracking my progress via Goodreads, today, for the fifth year in a row, I’m sharing a retrospect on the books I read in the last year. (Here are the links to check out the 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020 editions if you’d like to travel back in time!)In 2024, as in 2023, I read 50 books, an average pace of approximately 50 pages a day. My preference for fiction over

Review: The Animal, Rachilde (1893)

I very much enjoyed reviewing French Decadent writer Rachilde’s 1887’s The Marquise de Sade for this blog back in 2020, which was one reason why I was so delighted when publisher Rachilde & Co. got in touch about their new translation/edition of her 1893 novel, The Animal. The Animal, Rachilde (1893)Available in English for the very first time, The Animal tells the story of Laure Lordès,

Review: Three Tales, Gustave Flaubert (1877)

I’ve previously reviewed Gustave Flaubert’s 1869 novel, A Sentimental Education, for this blog, but this month I’m back with a post about a lesser-known work—his collection of Three Tales, published eight years later in 1877. In the first story, ‘A Simple Heart,’ a servant woman, Felicité, suffers through a difficult existence, despite the love she has to give. She ends her days unable to

The Historical Novel Society UK 2024 Conference in Quotes

Last week, I flew back from England after attending my fourth HNS conference in person. This time we were in Dartington Hall in Devon, the theme of the conference was “from the author’s page to screen and stage,” and I spoke on a panel with fellow writers Heather Webb and Kris Waldherr about authors as “adaptors” in retellings. On the ground at HNS 2024Throughout the conference, as usual, I

The Historical Novel Society UK 2024 Conference: An Interview with Finola Austin

I'm currently in London en route to the Historical Novel Society UK 2024 conference in Dartington Hall, Devon, where I'm speaking on a panel alongside fellow writers Heather Webb and Kris Waldherr.Check out my pre-conference speaker interview here! If you're also going to the conference, please connect with me, on person or online (on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or by subscribing to my email

Neo-Victorian Voices: Frog Music, Emma Donoghue (2014)

I’m back with a review of yet another novel written in the twenty-first century, but set in the nineteenth, as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices blog series. This time we’re in 1876 San Francisco for Frog Music by Emma Donoghue, whose 2016 novel, The Wonder, I reviewed back in 2018.Frog Music really drives home the idea that truth can be stranger than fiction when it comes to writing historical

What About Margaret? Reading Sense and Sensibility with Fresh Eyes

Welcome back to the Secret Victorianist. This month I wrote a guest post for Sarah Emsley's blog as part of her A Summer Party for Sense and Sensibility series, exploring Jane Austen's novel from a variety of perspectives.In my post I share a close reading of the sections of Sense and Sensibility that deal with Margaret Dashwood. If Elinor represents sense and Marianne sensibility, what are we to

Neo-Victorian Voices: The Witches of New York, Ami McKay (2016)

Welcome back to my long-running Neo-Victorian Voices series, in which I review books set in the nineteenth century but published in the twenty-first. Today, I’m blogging about Ami McKay’s 2016 novel, The Witches of New York, which combines three of my favorite things—the 1800s, NYC, and a little dash of magic. Beatrice Dunn arrives in New York in 1880 on the same day as the great obelisk,

Review: Stranger in the Shogun’s City, A Japanese Woman and Her World, Amy Stanley (2020)

I know very little about nineteenth-century Japan, but I strongly identified with non-fiction writer Amy Stanley’s author note in her 2020 biography, Stranger in the Shogun’s City. Stanley writes about her excitement at uncovering the story of Tsuneno, a woman born in the early years of the nineteenth-century, through letters and other family records. As a writer of historical fiction, I too have

A Dickensian Master Class in Epiphanies

Welcome back to my master class blog series, where I dissect passages by famous nineteenth-century authors to inspire writers today. This is the fifth time I’m taking cues from Charles Dickens (1812-1870). Previously, I used his novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859) to talk about powerful openings, his novella The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848) to talk about repetition, and his short