Worth a quick note: Every month, The University of Chicago Press makes available a free ebook, which you can read online. This month’s pick is Freud’s Couch, Scott’s Buttocks, Brontë’s Grave, by the University of Cambridge Classics professor Simon Goldhill, who doubles as the director of the Cambridge Victorian Studies group. The press describes the book as follows:
If you have toured the home of a famed writer, seen the desk at which they worked, or visited their grave, you are a literary pilgrim, partaking in a form of tourism first popular in the Victorian era. In our free e‑book for March, Freud’s Couch, Scott’s Buttocks, Brontë’s Grave, Simon Goldhill makes a pilgrimage to Sir Walter Scott’s baronial mansion, Wordsworth’s cottage in the Lake District, the Brontë parsonage, Shakespeare’s birthplace, and Freud’s office in Hampstead. He gamely negotiates distractions ranging from broken bicycles to a flock of giggling Japanese schoolgirls, as he tries to discern what our forebears were looking for at these sites, as well as what they have to say to the modern pilgrim. Take your literary pilgrimage in our free e‑book, Freud’s Couch, Scott’s Buttocks, Brontë’s Grave.
The book, which got a warm review in The Wall Street Journal, can be accessed via The U. Chicago site. Countless more free ebooks (downloadable ones!) can be found in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.
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As a curator in a history museum–a museum that often assumes that a picture of Susan B. Anthony’s teacup helps us understand women’s history–I loved every word of this book.