Dear Serial Readers,
Please join in reading Wilkie Collins's Poor Miss Finch, first serialized in Cassell's Magazine in 26 parts (from Sept. 1871 to Feb. 1872). To speed up our serial reading schedule, we'll aim for three installments per week, beginning the week of April 21, 2014.
The first three installments include the first 10 chapters (with the serial divisions after chapters 4, 7, 10). You might use the Oxford World's Classics edition of the novel, or you may read it online by downloading Poor Miss Finch
Rachel Herzl-Betz will join me in this serial reading adventure by sharing the lead posts. We'll alternate in some fashion, so stay tuned! Please share this website link!
Serially starting soon,
Serial Susan
1 comment:
Poor Miss Finch (1871) is a wonder, even in the context of Collins’s other late novels. On the one hand, there’s the plot, narrated by a “curious foreign woman,” written in fragments of letters and journals, and starring a blind woman afraid of the color blue.
At the same time, we have Wilkie Collins’s introduction to the novel, which suggests a specific goal for his protagonist:
“More than one charming bind girl, in fiction and in the drama, has preceded ‘Poor Miss Finch,’” he notes. “But, so far as I know, blindness in these cases has been always exhibited, more or less exclusively, from the ideal and the sentimental point of view. The attempt here made is to appeal to an interest of another kind, by exhibiting blindness as it really is.”
Collins goes on to explain that he has “carefully gathered the information necessary” and thus presents Lucilla Finch as an entirely new kind of blind woman: unsentimental, unvarnished, and utterly real.
I offer Wilkie’s take on his own text as the beginning of a discussion about Lucilla, Madame Pratalungo, Oscar Dubourg, and the rest:
• What does “reality” mean within the context of this novel? How can a story that features a blue man claim verisimilitude?
• How does Poor Miss Finch comment on the generic boundaries (or their lack) between realism and sensation fiction in the 1870s?
• For my own research, where does this novel fit as a representation of blindness and disability during the nineteenth century?
It’s going to be a wild ride folks, and I look forward to sharing the journey!
Post a Comment