New Term

Today is the first day of Hilary Term 2012 at Oxford.  (Well, technically the start of term was yesterday, but this is the first work day of term.)

To celebrate, I am shortly off to central Oxford where I will renew, return, and or take out a number of books from at least three different libraries and will attempt to read the 100 or so pages of Branwell Bronte's writing that I still need to read, plus a late novelette of Charlotte's and take a skim through her poetry.  I've also downloaded from JSTOR an edition of her early, incomplete novel Ashworth, which marks a transition from her early writing in the imaginary kingdom of Angria to her later, mature and more realistically grounded fiction.  Should be interesting reading.

While out and about, I'm also planning on posting my application for membership to the Bronte Society - perhaps it's about time.

This term will probably mark a move away from the exploratory reading and thinking I was doing back in Michaelmas, as I need to start work on my "transfer paper", a 10 k word essay that I will submit as part of my Transfer of Status in April.  Only once I pass my transfer (which also, nail-bitingly, involves an interview with two assessors), will I actually hold DPhil status.  At the moment, I am technically only a PRS or Probationary Research Student.  In any case, I need to do some actual thesis writing and soon and I need to start hammering out the approach I'll be using for the thesis and how I plan to structure thing.  Interesting times ahead in thesis-land, that's for sure.