Literature and Language
Inseparable: Desire between Women in Literature
Emma Donoghue
Knopf
May 2010
Emma Donoghue examines how desire between women has been portrayed in western literature - from schoolgirls and vampires to runaway wives, from cross-dressing knights to contemporary murderesses.
Inseparable is a landmark exploration of love between women from Chaucer to Sarah Waters.
Dictionary of Languages
Andrew Dalby
Bloomsbury
January 2006
Approximately how many languages compose the Bantu language group of central and southern Africa? What is the name of the language spoken in Hawaii by an estimated two thousand people? What Western European language is not known to be related to any other language family in the world - and is considered by linguists to be one of the most difficult to learn?
These are only a few of the simple and obscure questions that readers will be able to answer with the Dictionary of Languages. Here is an easy-to-navigate, authoritative guide to the world’s languages and language groups in existence today.
We Are Michael Field
Emma Donoghue
Absolute Press
October 1998
Emma Donoghue’s literary biography of two eccentric Victorian spinsters, Katherine Bradley (1846−1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862−1913), poets and lovers, who wrote together under the name of 'Michael Field'. They wrote eleven volumes of poetry and thirty historical tragedies. But their best work– richest in emotional honesty and wit - was the diary that they shared for a quarter of a century.
The Fields lived in a contradictory world of inherited wealth and terrible illness, silly nicknames and religious crises. They preferred men to women, and yet their greatest devotion was saved for their dog.
Snobbish, arrogant eccentrics who faced bereavement and death with great courage, and never lost their appetite for life or their passion for each other.