"if he were in a desert he would love some cypress"

I thought you might want the Biblical allusion behind Sterne's cypress that PBS references at the end of his essay, "On Love":

Isaiah 44:13-15 (New International Version)

13 The carpenter measures with a line
and makes an outline with a marker;
he roughs it out with chisels
and marks it with compasses.
He shapes it in the form of man,
of man in all his glory,
that it may dwell in a shrine.

14 He cut down cedars,
or perhaps took a cypress or oak.
He let it grow among the trees of the forest,
or planted a pine, and the rain made it grow.

15 It is man's fuel for burning;
some of it he takes and warms himself,
he kindles a fire and bakes bread.
But he also fashions a god and worships it;
he makes an idol and bows down to it. [emphasis added]

--Which, by the way, was easy enough to locate with one of the many free online concordances to the Bible.


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A bibliography of articles on MWS's Mathilda. Not a bad place to start if you're interested in writing on the work and want to launch some research. Too much ink has been spilled, in my humble opinion, on Godwin and MWS's relationship in light of the incestuous relationship between Mathilda and her father. You'll find a whole lot of that ink here.

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A 2006 interview with Julia Kristeva--in which you'll see I was wrong about her Catholicism (though not perhaps about its role in her work)--in case you're interested in pursuing more information about her writing:

Why is her latest novel so concerned with religion? Is she attracted by the Church? Or merely fascinated by it? "I am not a believer, I believe in words. There is only one resurrection for me - and that is in words. My novel is a kind of anti-Da Vinci Code. I'm not Catholic by background. My father was a very great believer, but in the Orthodox Church, in Bulgaria. As a young woman my Oedipus conflict was in a perpetual fight with that." She laughs. "Afterwards I tried to understand what Christianity is and my approach became more intellectual. On the one side, I'm very much interested in religion. On the other hand, I don't make any kind of spiritual - how shall I say - extrapolation or message. My idea is to link religion with politics and see how in both of them there were, and will be, a lot of crimes and human folly."

And here is a concise introduction to Kristeva's themes and a helpful bibliography of primary and secondary sources. For the feminist in you, scroll to the links at the bottom of the page. Here is a more comprehensive links page on more Kristeva.

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An MLA Bibliographic search on Mathilda (the link may not work here, but I'll try it anyway).

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