Professor Dinah Birch gives the concluding talk of our The Duke’s Children Big Read.

Professor Dinah Birch CBE, BA, MA, DPhil, FRSA, FEA

Professor Dinah Birch is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She chaired REF2014 Sub-panel 29 (English Literature and Language) and was Deputy Chair of Main Panel D (Arts and Humanities), and Chair of Main Panel D in REF 2021.

Dinah has published widely on Victorian fiction and poetry, and on the work of the critic John Ruskin. Her books include Our Victorian Education (2007), and she is the general editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (7th ed., 2009). She has published new editions of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (2011) and Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? (2012) and The Small House at Allington (2014) with Oxford University Press. Her interest in prose style is reflected in recent essays on George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and John Ruskin, and she has also published work on the Brontë family and 19c education. She served as a member of the Man Booker prize panel in 2012. She is a regular broadcaster and contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books.

We read the restored text of the first complete edition, which is available in several editions:

• Folio Society, published 2015
• Everyman’s Library, published 2017
• Oxford World’s Classics, published 2021

Resources

• Plot summary and character listing for The Duke’s Children
• Download The Duke’s Children free of charge from Project Gutenberg (Note this is not the restored text)
• The Duke’s Children Restored First Complete Edition – Explanatory notes