Deerbrook has been on a shelf in my office at home for decades! I finally picked it up this winter. It's 500 pages long and a bit of a snoozer at times, but I found it fascinating. Martineau was a reformer, not so much a novelist, and she has created (1838, I think?) two highly intelligent young wom

Quite a lot like Austen and Eliot, with a swirl of Trollope for good measure. For the first half of this very long book, I thought it might be a perfect, hidden treasure from the 19th century. I read it on tenterhooks, hoping against hope that the novel could sustain that level of excellence. The ch

3'5 ⭐️
Las hermanas Ibbotson, Margaret y Hester, llegan al tranquilo pueblecito de Dreebrook después de quedarse huérfanas y en espera se arreglen sus asuntos económicos después de hacer efectiva su herencia. Vienen de Birmingham y su talante refinado pone en duda su adaptación a la campiña. Sin emba

I absolutely loved this - such a powerful, moving read, beautifully written with a fascinating plot and thoroughly real characters. This is definitely an underrated Victorian gem and I highly recommend it!

If you're disappointed by my rating, think about how much I'm disappointed myself to give only two stars to this classic. Deerbrook has been described as the gap between Jane Austen and George Eliot, as one of the first Victorian novels of English domestic life, as an important novel that must be re

Me ha sorprendido para bien esta novela, porque aunque Harriet Martineau era contemporánea de Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot o las Bronte (Jane Austen fue un poco anterior), no es tan conocida como ellas y sin embargo en esta novela se tocan temas que las anteriores tocaron, por ejemplo en Middlema