The breath of spring births blossoms and young love. A thief of frost: she tongues each valley and kisses lips of dandelions. Watching is the weakened widow who spies upon the mating birds. The blood-red berries, succulent and bare, are plucked off one by one. The lovers prance outside her home lungs bathing in the lilac...
Victorian society was riddled with harsh social constructs that dictated how people interacted and behaved, often exclusively for the sake of achieving or maintaining social status. In particular, romantic interactions were characterized by a consistent prioritization of external appearances and social class over internal qualities...
Christina Rossetti’s “In an Artist’s Studio” (1856) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) each portray a woman perceived through the male gaze, which imposes upon them the impossible expectations of the Victorian woman and dresses them in romanticized idealizations to satisfy a male...
We used to live in a yellow house. It was beautiful, with white shutters on the windows and a garden in the back. We would spend every Sunday afternoon in that garden, helping Dad plant the chrysanthemums. My sister Daisy would pick which colours went...
Back to back, wrinkled and withered, we lay in the garden as sleeping thoughts flittered. Crumpled in grey, bathing in dirt, we will take to the grave all the lessons we learnt. But for now, who can say? Who could ever forget? Not us, surely, who have mastered intellect. The mammoth of knowledge, a titanic of...