A forgotten Victorian children’s book helped me grieve my father

The stories in Mrs Leicester’s School, written by a woman who killed her own mother, were suffused with grief, and finally triggered mine as I was teaching a class of students When my dad went into hospital for what would be the final time, shortly before Christmas last year, I had been finishing up a lecture series on early children’s literature for the university where I teach. My dad had had a drinking problem practically my whole life, but his alcoholism had worsened across decades. Then suddenly, after years of poor health, his liver just gave up on him. He was dead within days. Shortly a

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