Eleanor Bourg Nicholson

In addition to scholarly pursuits, Mrs. Nicholson occasionally strays into fiction, including her epistolary novella, The Letters of Magdalen Montague (Kaufmann Publishing, 2011), and her Victorian vampire novel, A Bloody Habit (Ignatius Press, 2018). A former assistant executive editor for Dappled Things, she is assistant editor for the Saint Austin Review (StAR). She is the editor of several Ignatius Critical Editions volumes and has collaborated with other editors to provide footnotes for numerous others. Her work has appeared in the National Catholic Register and Touchstone, as well as with First Things and The Catholic Thing. 

By day, Mrs. Nicholson is the Director of Religious Education at St. Thomas Aquinas University Parish, serving the University of Virginia (her alma mater), and with her husband, Homeschool Connections' philosophy instructor Dr. Sam Nicholson, homeschools their four children. By night, she reads the Victorians, writes Gothic novels, and cares for small children. 

Fun piece of trivia: Mrs. Nicholson's younger brother is married to middle school writing instructor, Mrs. Bonnie Donlon.  




Mrs. Nicholson teaches the following courses:
(Click on hyperlinked titles to view a video about the course.)

Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897) (Victorian Classics) 
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847) (Victorian Classics) 
The Nineteenth-Century Novel (Mansfield Park, Oliver Twist, & North and South)
The Victorian Detective (Victorian Classics)
The Golden Age of Mystery Fiction
Middlemarch
The Literature and Mastery of Jane Austen
The Literature and Mastery of Charles Dickens in His Novel, Our Mutual Friend
Literature Independent Study

Student testimonials
"Mrs. Nicholson was very enthusiastic about the class material. She made class very interactive and interesting and you could tell she put a lot of time and preparation into it. She was very easy to contact if you had a problem and resolved them quickly. I already signed up for her class next semester!" ~Lily H.

"Mrs. Nicholson is my favorite teacher ever!! I never realized the amount of depth behind almost every sentence! The amount of symbolism in this story was amazing and eye opening!" ~Student of Jane Eyre

"The class really helped me dig deeper into the meanings of literature instead of just skimming the surface. We also learned interesting facts about the Victorian era and not just the books themselves. Mrs. Nicholson was an amazing animated teacher." ~Student of The Nineteenth-Century Novel