An anti-romance, this fictional memoir must be one of the most accurate chronicles of boyhood ever written. The young protagonist carries messages he doesn’t fully understand to and from the daughter of a wealthy landed family and her paramour, a local farmer. While The Go Between‘s insightful realism never quite attains the heights of Jamesian… Continue reading The Go Between, L.P. Hartley, 1953
Category: Lit Crit
A Lost Lady, Willa Cather, 1923
Writing with her usual meticulous care, employing deceptively simple narrative constructions to create characters as powerfully present as figures in a Giotto, Cather brings us Mrs Forrester, a wealthy socialite whose ultimate decline parallels the end of the western frontier. [This novel influenced the writing of The Great Gatsby: “the lost lady” embodies both the… Continue reading A Lost Lady, Willa Cather, 1923
Darkness Visible, William Golding, 1979
Given the amount of original thought and feeling in the works of Nobel prize winner William Golding, it’s hard to know where to begin. Free Fall, The Inheritors, Pincher Martin – each of these is unique and dazzling, and we’re lucky to have The Spire and Lord of the Flies, too. Like the latter novel,… Continue reading Darkness Visible, William Golding, 1979
Sybil, or the Two Nations. Benjamin Disraeli 1846
As a Victorian prime minister, Disraeli may not have thought highly of the working classes, but he reveals a considerable sympathy for them here. Sybil, a romance, includes excoriating descriptions of the “tommy” or company store system (in which workers were forced to buy poor-quality goods at crippling prices), of the young women toiling in… Continue reading Sybil, or the Two Nations. Benjamin Disraeli 1846
Aurora Leigh Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1857
For its original theme and voice, especially, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse novel, Aurora Leigh, should be better known. When two fond cousins fall out, one of them, Aurora Leigh, pursues her calling of poetry with great critical success. The other, the rich and high-born Romney, attempts to improve social conditions around and about his manorial… Continue reading Aurora Leigh Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1857
Shadow Dance, Angela Carter 1966
Angela Carter’s first novel, like Walter Scott’s The Fair Maid of Perth, owes its unsparing darkness to a theme of mutilation. A frail, lovely young woman is slashed with a knife. Her disfigurement haunts the narrator, as it does us. The otherwise intensely-realised world of early 60’s bohemia, as seen from an antique shop run… Continue reading Shadow Dance, Angela Carter 1966
Lady Susan, Jane Austen 1794
Is Lady S. fiction’s first genteel anti-heroine? I adore Lady Susan. I’m not able to care, in the airy salons of the imagination, about Mrs. Mainwaring, the wealthy woman whose handsome, “bought” husband Lady Susan effectively steals. The smug and boorish patriarchy may hold all the aces, but Austen’s dashing protagonist takes it on regardless.… Continue reading Lady Susan, Jane Austen 1794
Nothing Like the Sun, Anthony Burgess 1964
Little goes well for WS in Burgess’s novel, of course. (By such means biographers and poets slake their envy!) As he navigates the treacherous London streets the playwright knows himself to be a cuckold, ruined by women. Less celebrated than A Clockwork Orange, Nothing Like the Sun is a similarly bravura offering, rife with colour… Continue reading Nothing Like the Sun, Anthony Burgess 1964