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But if you can pull yourself together and might like to be our new Penguin Press Community Manager in London, then here's your chance to Impress a Penguin.

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Finally, try not to let Victorian novels spoil you for anything else. Sure, the work of hip contemporary novelists with promotional billboards may seem thin and reedy once you get used to the rich symphony of the great Victorians, and you’ll be forever comparing mystery novels unfavorably to The Moonstone and muttering “but he’s just not Mr. Thornton” at the end of every romance. But as Henry James (who, frankly, would have benefited from this how-to guide) pointed out, “the house of fiction has not one window, but a million.” 

Looking at the biography of Mary Elizabeth Braddon in our edition of Lady Audley's Secret, we see that she got her start in much the same way as Samuel Johnson before her and Hemingway since.