2024: My Year in Reading—A Retrospect

Happy New Year! After tracking my progress via Goodreads, today, for the fifth year in a row, I’m sharing a retrospect on the books I read in the last year. (Here are the links to check out the 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020 editions if you’d like to travel back in time!)

In 2024, as in 2023, I read 50 books, an average pace of approximately 50 pages a day. 

My preference for fiction over non-fiction remains clear, with 41 vs. 9 books read. But my non-fiction reading covered topics of particular interest to me, such as art (All the Beauty in the World, Patrick Bringley, and The Art Thief, Michael Finkel), ballet (Turning Pointe, Chloe Angyal), and the nineteenth century (Stranger in the Shogun’s City, Amy Stanley, reviewed here, and The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, Margalit Fox), and expanded into less expected areas (e.g., memoirs by Flea, Esmeralda Santiago, and Patricia E. Beattie, and the story of an eighteenth-century naval mutiny, in David Grann’s The Wager).

When it comes to fiction, for the first time in one of these reviews, one contemporary author dominates—I read six (!) novels by Tana French in 2024 and continue to love her work. 

I reviewed three novels as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series, covering books set in the nineteenth century, but written in the twenty-first: Edward Carey’s Edith Holler, Ami McKay’s The Witches of New York, and Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music. And I also read and blogged about two pieces of nineteenth-century French fiction in translation: Three Tales, Gustave Flaubert, and The Animal, Rachilde. 

My interest in my own genre, historical fiction, remains strong, accounting for 20% of books I read last year. Other strong themes for the year in fiction included witches (The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch, Melinda Taub, The Manningtree Witches, A.K. Blakemore, The Witches of New York, Ami McKay, and Weyward, Emilia Hart), ballet (Tiny Pretty Things, Dhonielle Clayton and Sona Charaipotra, and The Dance of the Dolls, Lucy Ashe), and, as ever, books by friends/acquaintances (Marvelous, Molly Greeley, The Last Star Standing, C.G. Twiles, and What's Eating Jackie Oh?, Patricia Park). 

Thirty-five books I read this year were by women, and 15 by men, which is slightly more gender-balanced than in 2023. 

In 2025, I’ll again be aiming to read 50 books. My reading resolutions? Continue to embrace the unexpected (one of my favorite 2024 reads was Chelsea G. Summers’s A Certain Hunger, a book about a female cannibal!), prioritize joy in reading, and continue to support writer friends. 

What books did you enjoy reading in 2024 that I should continue adding to my list? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Want to stay in touch? Sign up to my monthly email newsletter here.

Neo-Victorian Voices: The Doll Factory, Elizabeth Macneal (2019)

My Neo-Victorian Voices series is dedicated to books written in the twenty-first century, but set in the nineteenth. Last time, I reviewed Marley, Jon Clinch’s 2019 novel about Scrooge’s business partner from Charles Dickens’s 1843 A Christmas Carol. This time I’m writing about Elizabeth Macneal’s debut novel, The Doll Factory, which is set in 1850s London.

The Doll Factory (2019)

The Doll Factory is the story of Iris, who spends her days painting dolls for a laudanum-addicted shop owner, and working alongside her disfigured twin sister. Her life changes forever after meeting two men—Louis Frost, fictional member of the real-life group of artists known as the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), and Silas, a lonely taxidermist and curator of curiosities. Iris has artistic aspirations of her own and so agrees to model for Louis, despite her parents’ and sister’s opposition and concern for her virtue. Meanwhile, Silas grows increasingly obsessed with her, fantasising about adding her to his morbid collection.

The novel is dark and certainly not for the squeamish, but there are moments of levity too. The PRB’s dinner and pub conversation is well wrought and believable, and their quirks add colour and interest. Macneal includes anecdotes both real and apocryphal about William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti et al., from imperilling their models by posing them in bathtubs to killing an unfortunate wombat that ate a box of their cigars.

I also found a secondary point of view character, Albie, particularly compelling. He’s a single-toothed street urchin who brings Silas dead animals and dreams of one day earning enough money to buy a set of fake gnashers (that or saving his sister from prostitution). The conclusion to his story was one of the best paragraphs of a beautifully written book.

Elizabeth Macneal (1988- )

But the heart of the novel is how well Macneal paints Silas, with his delusions, fixations and obsessions. If you enjoy getting into the heads of creepy and amoral characters, this novel is a wonderful exercise in understanding a disturbed mind. If you’d prefer to stick with the heroes, this won’t be for you. In this regard, the novel reminded me of Catherine Chidgey’s 2005 The Transformation, which I also reviewed for this series and very much enjoyed. The denouement of The Doll Factory, which brings Silas and Iris together, keeps you guessing and is hard to put down. Warning: you might miss your subway stop.

There’s just enough time and space dedicated to the technicalities of painting for readers with a particular interest in the art. And the Great Exhibition provides a wonderful historical backdrop to the vents of the novel. If I had to quibble, I’d say the love story isn’t as successful as the rest of the book, but this may be a question of personal taste. No spoilers here, but I was longing to see Iris choose for herself vs. being chosen and yearned for an even greater contrast between Louis and Silas’s desire to own her, especially towards the end. Overall, The Doll Factory is more than worthy of the attention it’s received. If you love the Gothic and Victoriana that’s more macabre than Christmassy, this one’s for you!

Do you have recommendations for which novel I should review next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

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Art Review: Boilly: Scenes of Parisian Life, The National Gallery, London

Recently the Secret Victorianist found herself back in London and on the hunt for nineteenth-century culture in the British capital.

‘A Carnival Scene’ (1832)

The National Gallery’s ‘Scenes of Parisian Life’ exhibition is the first dedicated to lesser-known French painter Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845) in the UK. It features around twenty paintings but what the exhibition lacks in scale it more than makes up for in variety, demonstrating the range of Boilly’s subjects and media.

Looked down on as ‘just’ a genre painter in his day without the support of the establishment given lauded neoclassical history painters like Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), Boilly’s output was dictated by public taste and market forces.

'Comparing Little Feet' (1791)

After arriving in Paris in 1785, he did a brisk trade in scenes featuring young woman in elegant interiors, often with a risqué edge. One of these, ‘Comparing Little Feet’ (1791) was on display at the National Gallery. In it, two women strip off their stockings, ostensibly to compare their shoe sizes.

However, in the tumultuous time of the Revolution, Boilly found himself in hot water for his brand of titillating art. He survived with his head but pivoted—to more patriotic subjects, visual illusions and the Parisian crowdscapes for which he is most remembered.

'The Meeting of Artists in Isabey’s Studio’ (1799)

His ‘The Meeting of Artists in Isabey’s Studio’ (1799) (also on view) is a ‘who’s who’ of the Parisian art world at the advent of the nineteenth century, including 31 painters, sculptors and architects and, of course, Boilly himself. Notably, not a single woman is invited to this idealised meeting of the minds, despite the Revolution being an unprecedented period of freedom for women artists.

Crowd scenes featured in the exhibition include ‘The Barrel Game’ (1828), ‘The Poor Cat’ (1832) and ‘A Carnival Scene’ (1832). All depict the colourful menagerie of nineteenth-century urban life, with city-dwellers of every class side by side. Hidden in the paintings are dramatic incidents that provoke a smile—a child grasps at an apple, a man urinates against a wall, a boy picks a pocket, a dog runs off with a carnival mask.

'The Poor Cat’ (1832) 

Boilly’s humour is distinctive, even if his expression in his self-portraits is usually stern. He coined the term ‘trompe-l’oeil’ (a trick of the eye) for works in which uses one medium to imitate another. His painting of crucifix appears 3D, while his signature seems to be pinned beside it, a slightly blasphemous advertisement.

'A Trompe-l'oeil: Crucifix of Ivory and Wood' (1812)

Observing Boilly’s Paris is like reading Dickens’s London. Never has the nineteenth century looked so alive. 

‘Boilly:Scenes of Parisian Life’ is free and open to the public at The National Gallery until 19^th May 2019. Visit if you can.

Do you know of any New York-based nineteenth-century-focused exhibitions you’d like the Secret Victorianist to review next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Art Review: It’s Alive! Frankenstein at 200, Morgan Library & Museum, New York City

In the summer of 1818, twenty-year-old Mary Shelley (then Mary Godwin, although living as ‘Mrs Shelley’ with Percy Bysshe Shelley in Geneva) wrote one of the most culturally influential stories in the English language. Her Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus has spawned countless adaptations across multiple media and has come to be a definitive part of the Gothic and Romantic movements.

The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli (1781)

To mark the bicentenary of the novel’s creation, the Morgan Library & Museum has unveiled a major exhibition dedicated to the work and its influence.

Three Witches, Henry Fuseli (1783)

I began my visit by exploring the Gothic art that inspired Shelley and her contemporaries. Many of these paintings draw upon or suggest narratives, such as Henry Fuseli’s 1781 The Nightmare, in which a demon crouches atop a prostrate woman’s chest, and his 1783 Three Witches, which has influenced subsequent depictions of Shakespeare’s weird sisters. There are also skeletal depictions of Death, such as John Hamilton Mortimer’s drawing of Death on a Pale Horse (c.1775) and multiple instances of men and women attempting resurrections by an open grave.

Death on a Pale Horse, John Hamilton Mortimer (c.1775)

In the next section of the exhibition it’s easy to see synergies between the Gothic imagination and contemporary scientific advancements. Doctors and anatomists are depicted as grave robbers, while artists show their instruments destroying and restoring life, as well as extending it.

The Anatomist Overtaken by the Watch, William Austin (1773)

Parts of the Frankenstein manuscript are on display, as well as letters between the Godwins, Shelleys and others. The romance of the Frankenstein’s creation, and the characters of Shelley, Shelley, Byron and Keats, seem to add to its mystique and appeal, as much as the story itself.

The manuscript

In a second room we move out of the nineteenth century and into Frankenstein’s afterlife in film and graphic novels. We trace the monster’s evolution from reanimated corpse to superhuman villain to participant in superhero-style showdowns. The movies become weather vanes for the sensibilities of their time. For instance, the creature’s accidental child killing appalled audiences in 1931 and so the moment was cut from the film. The bride of Frankenstein (a creature Viktor chooses not to animate in Shelley’s original tale) becomes part of our cultural inheritance—here you can observe her wig, listen to her blood curdling screams.

A poster for the 1931 adaptation

At the centre of the exhibition is Richard Rothwell’s 1840 portrait of Mary Shelley. She watches over proceedings serenely as movie buffs, bibliophiles, and lovers of the macabre file through. I couldn’t help but wonder what she’d think of how Frankenstein and his monster have outlived her and evolved and how amazed she’d be that a tale born out of her time has come to represent so much about generations since.

Mary Shelley, Richard Rothwell (1840)

Which NYC exhibitions should the Secret Victorianist visit next? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.