So19 Reads: REBECCA MEAD'S My Life in Middlemarch

Why do we fall profoundly, passionately, perhaps permanently in love with one book and not another? How does our immersion in that single story help us understand life in general and our own life in particular? Rebecca Mead offers a luminous exploration of such questions in this skillful blend of memoir, literary analysis and biography. 

Mead is 17 when she encounters George Eliot's Middlemarch, and it's love at first read. "This book, which had been published serially in eight volumes almost a hundred years before I was born, wasn't dull or dusty, but arresting in the acuteness of its psychological penetration and the snap of its sentences...I couldn't believe how good it was. And I couldn't believe how relevant and urgent it felt." Middlemarch continues to speak to Mead over the years, revealing new aspects of itself—and herself—as she reads and rereads it. 

In her forties, now a successful journalist, she finds herself uncomfortably aware of the "resignations that attend middle age, the paths untrodden and the choices unmade." Her self-cure for melancholy is to return to Middlemarch once more, more fully, immersing herself in the stories of Eliot, the novel, and her own life. Though My Life in Middlemarch might inspire you to reconsider the novel and its author if, like me, you have struggled to enter Eliot's fictional worlds, Mead's book is not merely a paean to that author. Rather, it's a love letter to reading itself, to the power of books and stories and our own curious, shape-shifting selves. As Mead writes, “There are books that seem to comprehend us just as much as we understand them, or even more. There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree. This kind of book becomes part of our own experience, and part of our own endurance." 

Buy My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead on Bookshop and Amazon. Crown, 2014.

So19 Reads: FIVE RECENT MYSTERIES

Catching up on five recent mysteries with nineteenth-century settings and stories...

The Whitechapel Mystery by Tessa Harris. It's lovely to see this new edition of Harris's first Constance Piper mystery. In this initial outing, Constance, a smart and warm-hearted flower girl, is worried by the growing list of women being murdered in London's grimy and impoverished East End. She's also working to find Emily Tindall, her former teacher and mentor, who seems to have disappeared. The emergence of a helpful guide who speaks through Constance's intuition gives the grittier aspects of the plot an interesting spectral dimension and creates intriguing possibilities that Harris mines deftly in later installments. Buy The Whitechapel Mystery by Tessa Harris on Bookshop or Amazon. DP Books, August 2026.

Miss Morton Takes the Waters by Catherine Lloyd. Bath turns out to be an unhealthy destination in Lloyd’s smart and lively fifth Miss Morton mystery. Caroline Morton accompanies her employer, the inimitable Mrs. Frogerton, to the ancient city to restore the older woman’s health and spirits. There, the pair is introduced to a circle of women who meet to chat and play cards. After they learn that the ladies are being plagued by poison pen letters, Lady Greatmere, arguably the group's least pleasant member, is found dead in her locked drawing room with an incomplete poison pen letter beside her. Did a poison pen target the victim, or did one of Lady Greatmere's other enemies kill her? Just as puzzling, how did the culprit get in? The amateur murder investigation Morton and Frogerton conduct offers both sleuths plenty of scope to display their particular gifts as well as their complementary personalities. Lloyd's evocation of 1838 Bath and its denizens, both permanent and temporary, is vivid throughout, and the locked-room aspect of the plotting adds an enjoyable dextra dimension to the puzzle. But I must confess: my favorite part of this installment, like every book in this series, is the funny and feisty Mrs. Frogerton.  Buy Miss Morton Takes the Waters by Catherine Lloyd on Bookshop or Amazon. Kensington, August 2026.

So19 Reads: HANNAH WEBSTER FOSTER'S The Coquette

What a gift to have this meticulous edition of a fascinating but (to most of us, at least) long forgotten book. 

Hannah Webster Foster (1758 or 1759 - 1840) published The Coquette anonymously in 1797. Her epistolary novel became a bestseller, though it wasn’t attributed to Foster until almost twenty years after her death. Foster based her story on the real-life case of Elizabeth Whitman, an accomplished and attractive woman who was twice engaged but never married. After she became pregnant by a lover (his identity is still unknown), she traveled to a roadside tavern under the name “Mrs. Walker” and died after giving birth to a stillborn child. While her personal story was generally viewed as a tale of well- (or ill-?) deserved moral consequences rather than a relatable human tragedy, Foster’s revision of events takes a more nuanced view. 

In this meticulously produced edition, the full text of the novel is accompanied by its 1855 Preface and an 1875 response, which provide invaluable context. The book showcases a complex narrative, its literary afterlife, and the way stories are told and retold, interpreted and reinterpreted. 

Hannah Foster Webster was also the author of a 1798 novel called The Boarding School; or, Lessons of a Preceptress to Her Pupils, which explores education for women and its application in their adult lives. Like The Coquette, its author was credited simply as "A Lady of Massachusetts." The author's daughters, Harriet Vaughan Cheney and Eliza Lanesford Cushing, both became popular 19th-century authors.

The publisher of this edition of The Coquette, P-Wave Press, also publishes excellent editions of historic texts by Charlotte Lenox, Thomas Holcroft, and Thomas Love Peacock among others.

The Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster is internationally on the P-Wave Press website and also, in America, on Amazon. P-Wave Press Classics, April 2026.

So19 Reads: ADITI BHIDE'S Secrets of the Monsoon Sky

In Bhide's vividly evoked debut novel, a young woman seeks family connection amid the cultural collisions and constraints of World War I-era India. 

Eartha Rae is raised in a British orphanage, becomes a hospital nurse during the first World War, and accepts a private nursing job in Winchcombe, England after the mental distress (we'd call it PTSD) of military nursing grows too great. When she receives a letter from a woman claiming to be her aunt, she's both wary and intrigued. It's possible that the letter is a scam—but if the writer is actually her aunt, she might be able to provide the family information and connection Eartha has has always longed for. 

Their meeting leaves Eartha convinced that Mary S. Martin is just who she claims, and, though she doesn't yet learn how she ended up in a British orphanage, she relishes even the snippets of information her aunt shares in their initial conversation. After her employer dies, Eartha accepts Martin's invitation to join her in Chandangudi, India, where her husband Angus works as a civilian administrator in the Indian Army. By the time she arrives in Bombay weeks later, Mrs. Martin is dead of fever, leaving no one but Eartha's devastated uncle and the community's Englishwomen to help her adjust to the life of the British in India.

So19 Reads: AMY AZZARITO'S Secret Language of Victorian Jewelry

Organized alphabetically from "Acorn" to "Wreath," Azzarito's beautiful book explores the symbolism and lore that gave deeper meaning to the gems and jewelry of the Victorian period. Largely forgotten today, this symbolism would have been readable —and significant—to those who made, sold, bought and wore jewelry at the time. "In this world of repressed emotion, symbolic meaning was everywhere. There was floriography, which uncovered the secret meanings behind flowers; there was a secret language of stamps, where the placement of postage could convey a coded meaning; colors had symbolic meanings; and then there was jewelry," the author writes. "Consider this volume your code breaker," she concludes. Copious illustrations of jewelry from the era are paired with period images depicting pieces or the tales that infused them, brief histories of the symbolism involved, and snippets of age-old lore; high quality reproductions and lively design make the pages a visual treat. Secret Language of Victorian Jewelry offers a rich, fun and useful overview of not just what the Victorians wore, but also the way they thought.

If you, like me, are a person fascinated by the meaning of objects, I also recommend Azzarito's excellent The Elements of a Home: Curious Histories Behind Everyday Objects, from Pillows to Forks.

Buy Secret Language of Victorian Jewelry by Amy Azzarito on Bookshop or Amazon. Clarkson Potter, August 2026.

So19 Reads: MARGARET WALLER'S Napoleon's Closet

Margaret Waller takes a deeply researched but unconventional look at fashion conventions in this engaging study of the way dress reflects and constructs identity, class and masculinity. Her book illuminates, and interrogates, the period (roughly 1760 to 1830 in France) fashion historians call "the great male renunciation," a time during which men's fashion garb moved from the flamboyant peacockery of earlier eras into the darker, simpler and less varied types of garments that remain the norm for men today. To explore the issues involved, she focuses on two men: Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), who became the Emperor of France, and Pierre Antoine Le Boux La Mésangère (1761-1831), a defrocked priest who became a celebrated fashion arbiter—an emperor, so to speak, of fashion. Different as the men seem superficially, Waller perceives crucial similarities, noting that "both were provincial outsiders from the lower nobility who had to learn to look and behave like insiders," and "each wielded the power to tell others what to wear while breaking their own rules."

Waller had me at the first line of the Preface: "'What if I told you I don’t have a belly button?' Father McCrory asked. Some of my classmates shifted in their seats. Silence." While the book's main text is typically less surprising than that example, one of its great strengths lies in Waller's ability to marry scholarly research with ideas and queries that are anything but dull, dusty and drably "academic." The result is a book that has much to share about cultural history and also much to say about the construction of—and conflicts around—ideas of masculinity today.

Buy Napoleon's Closet: The Emperor, the Priest, and the Men Who Invented Modern Fashion by Margaret Waller at Bookshop or Amazon. Columbia University Press, 2026.

So19 Reads: DAVID CONRAD-PÉREZ's The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and the Origins of Modern Charity

"There have been few moments in American history that can be so specifically pinpointed as forever changing the character of the nation," the author writes in the Prologue to this marvelous study of the devastating 1911 factory fire and its consequences for American commercial and civic life. It's a huge claim, but Conrad-Pérez's book thoroughly supports it. Conrad-Pérez acknowledges that, as demonstrated in a number of existing works on the topic, the fire led to new labor laws and protections, "a calamity that became a catalyst, laws rising from smoke." "What is less known," he comments, "is that the fire also provided the definitive spark in the rise...of modern charity in the United States, a watershed moment that instantly recast a group of wealthy bankers and social elites as experts on social problems. And that long buried legacy—popularizing charity as a professionalized industry—has shaped the prevailing path through which the country meets issues of social crisis and poverty ever since, leading it away from the true drivers of its most persistent challenges. It's a more complicated story but, in our moment, as consequential." Conrad-Pérez mines previously unknown, unused or overlooked records, from private diaries to interviews with the descendants of those involved, to inform his work. The result is an intricate, detailed, and deeply researched book that is also a vivid and riveting story. It's a heartbreaking narrative, but a profoundly rewarding one. 

Buy Fire in the Heart of the City: The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and the Origins of Modern Charity by David Conrad-Pérez on Bookshop or Amazon. NYU Press, September 2026.