Miller, Florence Fenwick

"Harriet Martineau is one of the most prolific and well-connected Victorian writers to have fallen off the literary map in the century following her death. This eclectic collection of letters ranges from the 1820s through 1870s and includes private and professional correspondence, from brief notes to long discourses, addressing topics from domestic minutiae and personal health to national and international affairs with people like Maria Weston Chapman, Jane Welsh Carlyle, James Martineau, Elizabeth Jesser Reid, and Henry Atkinson"--

In simplest terms, it is a house tour, but Praz's Roman apartment was no ordinary house it was a wunderkammer, a house of wonders, rooms replete with objects d'art and sculpture, walls hung with paintings and prints, bureaus overflowing with postcards and ephemera. And Praz is no ordinary guide; he leads you, the reader, through each room lecturing on the objects therein. What emerge are his passions, his immense erudition, his insatiable curiosity, his undeniable amiability, his infectious enthusiasm. What might have been a predictable didactic exercise is transformed and expanded into a multi-layered disquisition on the nature of art, on the challenge of investigation and discovery, on the idiosyncrasies of personalities, on the serendipitous way in which art and the objects we choose to surround us tell stories that go far beyond their purely physical attributes.