A good article in the LRB about working class Victorian wives and husbands. Reminds me of the endless stories told by our female servants when I was growing up. Nothing changes, not across centuries or continents.
I also reverted briefly to my teenage and read a book, A Brightness Long Ago, by Guy Gavriel Kay, a fantasy author who wrote a couple of books I really loved back in those days. I think I will not reread those books as the flaws in this will be all too obvious in those, particularly the lugubrious sentimentality and the ponderous asides on the nature of the world and times that the characters lived in. He’s curiously preoccupied by powerful men with an eternal enmity shading into love, and a woman on the side. I think that set of characters appears in several of his books. Well, it was enjoyable and a quick read. One of his things is writing not-quite-fantasy in a historical setting that is almost identical (but with slight fantasy trappings) to ours. In this book, in the distance, the analogue of Constantinople falls, and impacts heavily on the analogue of Italy. Curious to read it sitting in Istanbul, and in any case being on the side of the conquerors.