Talk:Hypatia (novel)

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The citation [18] is made up. I have the Drabble Oxford Companion in front of me, and neither under the novel (very short entry pointing to the entry for Kingsley) nor under Kinglsey, is the book described as 'ferociously racist'. (May well be, likely is, but the OCEL does not say so). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2003:FB:E710:CF77:98EE:528E:E5C5:C867 (talk) 20:38, 1 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Despite the objection of the user above, not having direct access to the book, I'm still leaning towards finding the citation credible. The reason is that searching for "kingsley" "ferociously racist" on Google Books brings up the following snippet in Google's own preview on the results page: "... Roman classical setting , along with * Pater's eccentric * Marius the Epicurean ( 1855 ) and Charles Kingsley's ferociously racist Hypatia ( 1853 ) ." (It's the Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, from 2007, though, not the OCEL – the 5th and 6th editions, from 1985 and 2000 respectively, edited by Margaret Drabble.)

On checking the Google Books preview, however, the page is given as 337 rather than 465, and what's worse, I cannot see any text in the snippet given there – only empty rectangular yellow selections. (Usually, Google Books snippets do give a small excerpt from the scan of the page, in the original font etc., so it's puzzling that the text is apparently invisible here.)

That's a very strong indication, but I admit some remaining doubt because I cannot check the book more directly right now (not in print, of course, but also not even in the form of a full-page Google Books excerpt at least, or at least a properly displayed snippet). For this reason, I've tagged the citation as needing verification – but not as failed verification, because appearances support it.

Oh! I just found a copy of the 6th edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature online, and the quotation in question is found on p. 483, in the overview article "Historical fiction"! I've corrected the citation and removed the tag. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 00:11, 19 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]