Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All offers a sweeping, insightful tour through all 38 plays. Scholarly yet accessible, it captures Shakespeare’s enduring genius—though with a reverence that sometimes borders on worship. A must-read for lovers of the Bard.

Harold Bloom’s Genius is a sweeping, intimate journey through 100 of history’s greatest creative minds. Erudite yet deeply human, Bloom makes the classics feel alive again—an unforgettable meditation on originality, influence, and the enduring power of literature.

Leslie Carroll’s Inglorious Royal Marriages is a witty, fast-paced chronicle of five centuries of disastrous royal unions. Equal parts history and gossip, it reveals the passion, politics, and heartbreak behind the crowns—proof that even royalty can’t escape love’s chaos.

Bridgerton Season 2 trades steamy scandal for slow-burn romance, as Anthony Bridgerton and Kate Sharma’s charged rivalry blossoms into love. Elegant, emotional, and gorgeously filmed, it’s a more mature, deeply satisfying evolution of Netflix’s Regency phenomenon.

Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a study of desire as rhetoric and power. The Glenn Close film and Christopher Hampton’s stage play capture its elegance, but only the novel preserves its linguistic cruelty—where every letter becomes both weapon and confession.

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Book Review: Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber

Netflix’s Queen Charlotte reimagines the young queen’s rise and her marriage to King George III with beauty, depth, and heartbreak. Equal parts romance and reinvention, it’s Shonda Rhimes’ most elegant, emotionally resonant work in the Bridgerton world.

Victorian culture embraced “other sciences” like phrenology, alienism, and spiritualism alongside mourning rituals. These practices mirrored anxieties about race, empire, gender, and death—revealing how science, the occult, and grief shaped the shadows of progress.

Hermione Lee’s Edith Wharton is a masterful, deeply human portrait of the Gilded Age novelist. Combining meticulous research with literary insight, Lee reveals Wharton’s wit, ambition, and modernity in what remains the definitive biography of a remarkable life.

Comparing the 1994 and 2019 Little Women films reveals two visions of feminism: one tender and domestic, the other bold and self-aware. Living near Louisa May Alcott’s Concord home, I see how both honor her legacy—different keys of the same enduring song of sisterhood and art.

Explore the emotional journey of choosing self-preservation over societal expectations of forgiveness in this poignant reflection on a father's death and a queer individual's fight for healing and self-worth.

HBO’s The Gilded Age dazzles with opulent sets and sharp performances, especially Carrie Coon’s magnetic Bertha Russell. Though uneven in pacing, Season 1 delivers a richly detailed portrait of ambition, class, and the birth of modern America.

Explore the cultural power of dolls in Dolls Beyond Play by Erick DuPree—a groundbreaking study tracing dolls from ancient artifacts to modern collectibles. Blending history, psychology, and gender studies, this book reveals dolls as vital tools of identity, memory, and meaning.

Jonathan Beckman’s How to Ruin a Queen retells the infamous Diamond Necklace Affair with wit, clarity, and precision. A riveting account of deception and downfall, it reveals how scandal—not politics—helped destroy Marie Antoinette and ignite the French Revolution.

Victorian empire thrived on science and classification, yet its literature—Kipling, Haggard, and beyond—reveals the shadows of knowledge. Anthropology, ethnography, and adventure tales exposed anxieties about race, empire, and the unknowable.

Netflix’s Bridgerton Season 1 is a dazzling, sensual reimagining of Regency London—part romance, part social satire. With lush design, diverse casting, and sizzling chemistry between Phoebe Dynevor and Regé-Jean Page, it turns the period drama into pure, irresistible escapism.

Little Ladies: Victorian Fashion Dolls and the Feminine Ideal explores how 19th-century dolls served as tools of gender training and socialization. Beneath the silks and lace lies a powerful story of class, empire, and the making of the “proper” woman—stitched in miniature.