'The tall windows are like blind eyes, the great door is a shut mouth.'

Finally finished this selection of Edith Wharton's ghost stories. They're a mixed bunch - more robust and muscular, less ambiguous, than those of Henry James, but oddly powerful. The best are those, like 'Afterwards', 'All Souls' and 'Pomegranate Seeds', where knowing exactly what has taken place doesn't diminish the strangeness and fright she's built up. Shivering.

Byatt's first novel and like a lot of first novels, more warm and open and ragged and flawed than one expects from a book of hers.
I found Anna, her conviction that radical transformation awaits in the future, consequent inability to engage with anything in the present and her insistent sense that there was something precious in the waiting, pathetic and moving and the ending disquieting. I wish Anna had kept faith. I wish I had.

'Though the years are sad, the days have a way of being jubilant.'

Haven't updated in a while due to moving flats but this was too rich & wonderful not to recommend. I knew nothing about Wharton's life and this superb biography of a difficult, unlikeable, magnificent, thwarted, 'lonely-hearted and remembering' person has not only remedied that but enriched Wharton's writing for me. Masterful biography. Adored it.

'The first time I read her stories I felt inexplicably lonely, and then realised it was because I wanted to have already read them a dozen times. I wanted ti get to the point where we were companions, where i could open the book at any page and pick up a conversation that was already ongoing.'

Patricia Lockwood on Lucia Berlin. I've never read Berlin, but I'm very familiar with this specific kind of intense longing and loneliness.

I saw some of the most extraordinary books I've ever had the good fortune to see in real life at the Ashmolean Museum's 'Spellbound' exhibition today, from medieval manuals of conjuration to the bleak 17th-century witchfinder's tomes. An incredible exhibition, couldn't stop myself from buying the exhibition catalogue ... Do go.

'I shall be queen when I am burned.'

- fragment of a poem called 'The Witch's Last Song', by Ruth Fainlight from 1973. I long to read the rest, but it isn't online anywhere that I can find. A name to remember.

'She opened her mouth and a voice came out that wasn't a whisper, but it wasn't a proper voice either.... When it was my turn, the same voice came out, a crippled animal running on broken legs. You could hear splinters in my voice, bones rubbing jagged against one another.'

Why did I never read this book until now? Devoured in one day, with me forever now. It's a tour de force.

Some people hate it when a book they're reading has been highlighted or annotated by someone else - I love it. This second-hand copy has been highlighted in two colours (possibly by two different people), bits underlined in pencil (a third person?) and pages turned down at the corners. I feel like I've joined in on an ongoing conversation as the book resonates with people and they respond.

'I have a natural gift for community life. It seems to me sane and civilised and economically right. I like to live spaciously but rather plainly, in large halls with great spaces and quiet libraries. I like to wake in the morning with the sense of a great, silent garden round me.'
- Jane Ellen Harrison, who I'd never heard of before. Considered the first modern female academic. Heroine of Virginia Woolf.

'[Women] will be able to be friends and companions in a way they cannot be now.' (Geraldine Jewsbury to Jane Carlyle, 1849)

'When you've made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand - she's as good as any other; they be all alike in the groundwork; 'tis only in the flourishes there's a difference.'

'Parsons look so miserable and awkward when one's house is in a muddle; walking about and making impossible suggestions in quaint academic phrases till your flesh creeps and you wish them dead.'

Love running across a Harry Potter word 'in the wild'. Truly J. K. Rowling is a genius when it comes to naming.

Third time reading this novel and it never ceases to amaze how beautifully this scene is in dialogue with the ending of The Age of Innocence (and Edith Wharton was a great friend of Henry James - I wish I knew more about their relationship).

Henry wondered too what life would have had for her and how her exquisite faculty of challenge could have dealt with a world which would invariably attempt to confine her. His consolation was that at least he had known her as the world had not, and the pain of living without her was no more than a penalty he paid for the privilege of having been young with her.

Colm Toibin here writing as Henry James with one of the best evocations of a particular moment - a girl-child made to feel a gendered, sexual shame in an act of casual cruelty by an adult. It's queasy and haunting.