Serial Readers Discuss 'Wives and Daughters'

My friend Serial Susan writes a blog called Serial Readers. This is an excellent place to engage in an on-going web-based book group, with guidance from a scholar. Susan David Bernstein’s (English) research and teaching focus (at the University of Wisconsin Madison) is on Victorian literature and culture, nineteenth-century transatlantic literature, as well as feminist theory and women’s writing. She's also co-taught a course on Darwin, but more on that another day.

The blog features chapter-by-chapter entries, calling attention to themes and interesting bits of the current book. Comments come from other dedicated readers. You can jump in back where the entries for a particular book began, and hasten to catch up.

Right now the serial readers are immersed in Wives and Daughters, a wonderful novel (or "every-day story") by Elizabeth Gaskell, first published in the Cornhill Magazine from August 1864 to January 1866. When Mrs. Gaskell died suddenly in 1865, the book was incomplete; the last section was written by Frederick Greenwood. The story revolves around Molly Gibson, only daughter of a widowed doctor living in a provincial English town in the 1830s.

There's a link at Serial Readers to a piece about web-based novels, or wovels. Making me wonder, will that irksome-yet-clever word also catch on?