Lucy Sheehan is a PhD candidate in English literature at Columbia University. Her dissertation examines the relationship between representations of slavery in nineteenth-century Britain and the Victorian novel.
Lucy Sheehan
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Writing on Public Books
Flight Patterns
Colum McCann’s novel TransAtlantic revolves around two missives that reach unanticipated recipients. The first is an undelivered letter written by an American daughter, Emily Ehrlich, on behalf of her Irish mother, Lily Duggan, to the woman who helped Lily leave her life as a maid in 19th-century Dublin. The second is The Narrative of the […]
Up from the Shadows
“Aren’t archives supposed to be forever? Well, forever’s a meaningless concept in Asia. Here, only the present is eternal.” So we read early on in Sandi Tan’s debut novel, The Black Isle, a supernatural romance that spans 1920s Shanghai, a World War II–era South Sea island, and modern-day Japan. The novel opens in 2010 Tokyo […]
