A Wife Now Living

The Queer Terror Of 'The Haunting Of Hill House' “To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. Horror defies our boundaries and illuminates our souls.” written by Ollie Largely regarded as one of the greatest horror novels of all time Shirley Jackson's 'The Haunting Of Hill House' perfects and modernises the conventions of haunted-house stories. Jackson masterfully blurs the lines between 'the haunted house' and 'the haunted housed'. The house itself is 'not sane' but neither are its inhabitants, which allows Jackson to explore the deepest shadows of the human psyche.   However, beyond the banging doors and blood-written messages of Hill House an even darker terror resides, the terror of realising you are queer in a world where queerness means isolation. exploring the genuine fear experienced by individuals who identified as queer during the 1950s. A time when being gay was at best a life sentence of exclusion and at worst a death sentence. 

  On Dancing By Margaret After the absolute TRAUMA of the actual Oxford ELAT (English Literature Admissions Test), I thought I'd upload this practice I did a few days before. Whether it's any good or not, I don't know, but I really enjoyed writing it and it was a cute topic– Text a was a lovely extract from John Davies' poem 'Orchestra/ a poem of dancing' where Penelope's Suitor Antinous tries to convince her to dance, which I LOVED reading and writing about, and Text b was an extract from Frances Burney's 'Evelina' which I have not read, but I liked it and it was giving Jane Austen so that was fun. Obviously with the ELAT, there's no actual essay question, so I had a great time exploring a lot of ideas, especially as the topic was so girl-core. I hope you enjoy it<3   In Texts (a) and (b), Davies and Burney each present an impression of dancing, though they are very different, perhaps even opposites. While Davies’ poem glorifies dancing a

The Prince Book Review by Margaret Niccolo Machiavelli Rating: 6/10 Date read: 24 May to 8 June The Prince was written in 1513 by Niccoló Machiavelli, an Italian diplomat and political theorist. It is intended to be an instructional guide for those in power, namely, princes. It is perhaps well known for its controversial theory that sometimes a prince would have to commit immoral, even cruel acts, in order to have a successful rule.  I read this book out of pure curiosity, and while some of the subject matter was new and interesting to me, I can’t say much of it seemed very likely. I’m no political theorist, but I do have a fair bit of common sense, and much of what Machiavelli claimed here seemed to be a bit far-fetched. Indeed, I would actually go so far as to call some of the principles suggested by Machiavelli as morally outrageous. ‘Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than to be loved’. What would this mea