A Bluestocking Knits

It has been a long time since I took part in the “Six Degrees of Separation” meme, but I came across an old collage of mine buried somewhere in my computer, and thought, “hey, that was fun, is it still going on?” And it is, so here is mine —

This month’s book is Wuthering Heights.  Never read it, can’t be bothered.  Thus also, Moby-Dick.  Big fish — well, sea creature at least, whales aren’t fish — leads to The Big Six, in which a huge pike plays an important role.  The epithet “The Big Six” is a nod to Scotland Yard’s The Big Five, but since I don’t know off the top of my head of any book or novel featuring those real-life detectives specifically, I can only proffer that Ngaio Marsh’s detective hero Roderick Alleyn is in the CID.  Patrick Malahide played Alleyn in the BBC series, and he also played Rev. Casaubon in the 1994 BBC adaptation of “Middlemarch” — an adaptation which, by the way, I liked better than the book.  I was thinking of going in the direction of film adaptations I like better than the books, but those are pretty rare, and so I went with Victorian paintings used on the covers of modern paperback editions of Victorian novels (Middlemarch‘s is William Powell Frith’s “The Lovers” of 1855), thus leading (via Goodreads’ handy list, though that is specifically Pre-Raphaelite paintings) to an Italian translation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, here with John William Waterhouse’s “Boreas” of 1903 (lovely but not Victorian! you say, and you are correct on both counts).  Also on Goodreads’ list is another Victorian novel re-issued with a cover featuring a Waterhouse painting, this time Jane Eyre, with “Windflowers”. And of course a bonus is that this leads very neatly, I thought, with the Brontë connection, back to the beginning!