Word: even
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1970
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that Dickens, publishing most of his works in serial form, achieved the same intimate, regular contact with his audience as Scheherazade in his childhood favorite, The Arabian Nights. Dickens kept telling another tale. Jokes and fantasies, social and political critiques, plummy visions of Christmas swept from his pen. He even wrote a front-page article in his own magazine, Household Words, to explain and justify the breaking up of his staunchly Victorian marriage after 22 years...
...Later he cast his wife-the bland, slightly perplexed daughter of one of his former editors-as the traditional loyal helpmeet. She seems to have ended by boring him. The result was that in his fiction he was never able to display a fully rounded view of women. Even his most memorable females-Esther Summerson in Bleak House, or Mrs. Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewit-are little more than ingenious cutouts, painted in brilliant hues of pathos and humor...
...long line of murderers stalk through Dickens' novels, from Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist to John Jasper in Edwin Drood. Among other things, they embody his belief in an irredeemable evil in human nature-a belief that tends to be forgotten because of the hilarity Dickens spread through even his darkest passages...
There is no Bozolatry in Wilson's book, even though it is part of the official commemoration of the centenary of Dickens' death. A centenary can be a fete worse than death. But at best it provides a good occasion to settle accounts, not just with Dickens but with his critics and interpreters. The past century has piled up a long bill of critical complaints that he was sentimental, arch and melodramatic; that he would never do what he could merely overdo. In recent decades, on the other hand, critics have rescued him from his earlier reputation...
...also done the conventional things: campaigning tirelessly for liberal causes, dining with Henry Kissinger, out-wrestling movie moguls (said Hal Wallis: "Without me, she'd be a fading chorus girl instead of a fading star"). Most of all she has researched her roles with a zeal that beggars even the Method. One of the book's highlights recounts Shirley's prepping for Irma, which in part consisted of peeking through a peephole in the bedroom door of a Paris brothel, watching the top performer...