Nava Atlas's Blog, page 24
July 11, 2022
Marguerite Duras, author of The Lover
Marguerite Duras (April 4, 1914 – March 3, 1996), born Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu, was a French novelist, screenwriter, playwright, filmmaker, and essayist.
Her work was largely shaped by her childhood in present-day Vietnam and received several awards, including the Prix Goncourt for her novel The Lover, and an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay of Hiroshima Mon Amour.
Early life and education
Duras was born in Gia Định, just north of Saigon in Vietnam (then known as French Indochina) in 1914. Her mother Marie was headmistress of the local girl’s school, and her father Henri was a math teacher. She also had two older brothers, Pierre and Paul.
Soon after the family had settled there, her father became ill with amoebic dysentery and returned to France, where he died shortly afterward. Her mother decided to stay to raise her children in Indochina, but the family struggled financially: a bad investment in a rice farm that flooded regularly left them in poverty (something Duras later wrote about in her novel The Sea Wall).
Her childhood in Vietnam and the experience of colonial living was a profound influence on her later writing: in a 1985 interview, she said, “It’s as if I had no birthplace — I did have one, but it’s far away. I’ve never been able to go back … But the past is perhaps here in the present. This place is already in the past. I can use it to say exactly what I want, about life, I mean.”
Duras attended the French lycée (high school) in Saigon, then moved to France at the age of seventeen to complete her education. She started by studying math, then switched to law and politics. She earned her degree in public law from the Sorbonne in 1937 and found a job working for the Ministry of the Colonies.
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Photo: Le Temps
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In 1939, she met and married her first husband, Robert Antelme, also a writer. Their only child was stillborn in 1942.
During World War II, Duras worked for the Vichy government, then, from 1943 both she and Robert were active members of the French Resistance. They were part of a small group called Richelieu which included the future president François Mitterand, who remained a lifelong friend.
In 1944, her husband was arrested for his Resistance activities and was sent to Buchenwald and Dachau. He survived, but barely: according to Duras, he weighed a terrifying 38 kilos (84 pounds) when he returned to France. She nursed him back to health but was already in love with Dionys Mascolo, who became her second husband and father of her only child, Jean. She divorced Robert not long after the war.
It was around this time that Duras also became a member of the French Communist Party. She was later expelled in 1950 for protesting against the Prague Uprising but remained a politically active Marxist throughout her life.
She protested against the Algerian War, and later, in 1971, signed the Manifesto of 343, a petition signed by that number of French women stating that they’d had an abortion. At the time, when abortion was illegal in France, signing was considered an act of political and civil disobedience. The text of the manifesto, written by Simone de Beauvoir, read:
“One million women in France have abortions every year. Condemned to secrecy, they do so in dangerous conditions, while under medical supervision, this is one of the simplest procedures. Society is silencing these millions of women. I declare that I am one of them. I declare that I have had an abortion. Just as we demand free access to contraception, we demand the freedom to have an abortion.”
The manifesto was published in Le Nouvel Observateur and influenced a change in the law that legalized abortion in 1975.
Writing, and The Lover
Duras’s true passion lay in writing. Her first novel, Les Impudents, was published in 1943, and it was then that she began using the name Duras, after the town that her father originated from in the region of Lot-et-Garonne.
Her most famous novels include The Sea Wall, Moderato Cantabile, The Ravishing of Lol Stein, and The Lover. The latter, published in 1984, is the story of a teenager falling in love with a Chinese man. It became her most well-known novel, winning the Prix Goncourt and selling over three million copies in France alone. It was translated into forty languages.
The Lover is an elusive, hazy story, like faded snapshots of the past, and Duras’s claim that it was almost entirely autobiographical cemented its notoriety. But the New York Times noted that “truth, in the Durasian universe, is a slippery entity.”
Truth is perhaps blended with fiction: Duras did most likely have a Chinese lover at the age of fifteen, but it was not the sexual and romantic awakening that the novel portrays, and she was writing the book at the age of seventy when the details may have been (deliberately or otherwise) blurred.
Duras often claimed to be surprised at the praise the book received, saying that she herself never liked it that much. She even went so far as to rewrite it, in the form of notes to a film, as The North China Lover.
“The Lover is a load of sh–,” she once said. “It’s an airport novel. I wrote it when I was drunk.” This, however, could be taken with a pinch of salt and as another example of the “slipperiness” of her version of the truth: later she would claim, “People who say they don’t like their own books, if such people exist, do so because they haven’t learned to resist the attraction to humiliation. I love my books. They interest me.”
For Duras, writing was both a substitute for living and a way of engaging with the world. “In my life,” she once said, “I am more of a writer than someone who lives.” Things happened to her “that she never experienced.” She often spoke and wrote about herself in the third person, particularly in her journals.
She resisted labels for her writing and dismissed trends in literature: instead, much of her work is focused on human sexuality, the erotic, and the nature of desire.
Film adaptations and filmmaking
Many of Duras’ books were made into films. The Sea Wall was first adapted as This Angry Age in 1958 directed by René Clement, and then again in 2008 as The Sea Wall directed by Rithy Panh.
Moderato Cantabile was the inspiration for the 1960 film Seven Days… Seven Nights by Peter Brook, while The Lover was made into a film in 1994, a decade after it was published, directed by Jean Jacques Annaud.
Duras was also a screenwriter and filmmaker herself, and during her life directed a total of eighteen films. She wrote the play India Song and directed the film of it in 1975.
She also wrote the screenplay for the 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour, directed by Alain Resnais, which tells the story of a French woman’s relationship with a Japanese man during World War II. It was nominated for an Oscar, but the critics were not convinced: the New York Times called it a “Proustian tour de force,” but Films in Review lamented: “That a film so amateur should receive so much critical acclaim is a sad commentary on the state of Western culture…”
Duras’ fluidity between novel and film, prose and screenplay, was an important part of her style and her work. Rachel Kushner, in The New Yorker, wrote that “all of Duras’s work is novelistic in its breadth and profundity, and all of it can be poured from one flask to another, from play to novel to film, without altering its Duras-ness.”
She was much admired by many twentieth-century intellectuals. Jacques Lacan (the noted French psychoanalyst) wrote about her work, and Samuel Beckett said that her radio play, “The Square,” was a significant moment in his own creative life.
Her style was not always appreciated. Particularly in the 1950s, Duras encountered misogyny in publishing, with male critics calling her writing “masculine,” “hardball,” and “virile” (meant as insults, though we might not take them as such today). Even she freely admitted that her natural boldness and forthrightness could be difficult to deal with, saying “I’m not sure I could put up with Duras.”
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Marguerite Duras page on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
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Duras had a difficult personality, which was compounded by health problems. She suffered from alcoholism and claimed that it had been a problem since she tasted her first alcoholic drink as a teenager. This was exacerbated by her second husband, Mascolo, who also drank to excess.
By the time The Lover was published in 1984 she had separated from him and was living with a much younger man, Yann Andréa Steiner. He had sought her out after reading many of her novels, and despite his homosexuality, became her lover and secretary. It was Steiner who encouraged her to seek treatment for her alcoholism, and who wrote about the rehab experience in a book titled M.D.
Duras was honest and shrewd enough to realize that her alcoholism would have been less of a problem in social terms had she been a man:
“Alcoholism is scandalous in woman … it’s a slur on the divine in our nature.” She could also be honest with herself about the nature of the condition, saying, “It’s always too late when people tell someone they drink too much. You never know yourself that you’re an alcoholic. In one hundred percent of cases, it’s taken as an insult.”
Duras died in Paris on March 3, 1996, and is buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery. Bertrand Poirot-Delpech wrote in Le Monde: “When this diminutive character with the large spectacles and a morning-after voice gets involved … she does so with guts, without restraint.”
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Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online, and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find her online at Elodie Rose Barnes.
More about Marguerite DurasMajor works (Duras’ complete works, including her fiction, essays, and theatrical works is vast; link to her full bibliography here)
The Lover The Ravishing of Lol SteinThe DarkroomDestroy, She Said Wartime Notebooks & PracticalitiesWritingMe & Other WritingThe North China Lover The Impudent OnesBiography
Marguerite Duras: A Life by Laure Adler (W&N, 2000)More information
Marguerite Duras: Worn Out with Desire To Write (video) “On Marguerite Duras” by Rachel Kushner (The New Yorker, 2017) Reader discussion on Goodreads 10 Interesting Facts About French Writer Marguerite Duras. . . . . . . . . .
*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post Marguerite Duras, author of The Lover appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
July 10, 2022
Books by Rachel Carson: Before and After Silent Spring
Through the gracefully written books by Rachel Carson (1907 – 1964), the noted American marine biologist, conservationist, the public was gifted with a view of the natural world. Undoubtedly, her research and writings shaped the environmental movement.
She wrote eloquently in her nonfiction works, conveying how every living entity interacts with the broader web of life. Though Rachel Carson is known more as a scientist and environmentalist than as a writer, there’s no question that her passion for literature fueled her impassioned writings.
Silent Spring (1962) was her best known work, boldly opening awareness of the harmful use of pesticides. She also wrote three volumes about the oceans, which became known as the “Sea Trilogy” and a book that encouraged families to discover the wonders of nature together.
In addition to her five major works of nonfiction (all of which were bestsellers), a posthumous collection titled Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson was published in 1998.
Here, in order of publication, are books by Rachel Carson; all are as relevant as ever, if not even more so.
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Under the Sea Wind (1942)
Under the Sea Wind was Carson’s first book and the first of what was known as her “Sea Trilogy.” Even in her debut publication, reviewers noted the lyrical quality of prose that she applied to scientific concepts to make them compelling and readable. One such review observed:
“In beautiful lyrical prose, Rachel Carson in Under the Sea Wind stirs the imagination with her portrayal of the endlessness of life and death in the sea. For the sea was the cradle of all life, and still is a shelter for an endless array of living forms in the most eternal cycle of life that is to be found on earth.
… A true lover of the sea, she tells with scientific accuracy of the life of the Atlantic coast, from the soaring gulls on high to the forms that creep over the continental slope and down into the perpetual darkness of the ocean’s abyss.”
Learn more about Under the Sea Wind.
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The Sea Around Us (1951)
First serialized in The New Yorker, by July of 1951, the entirety of The Sea Around Us was published. It made its appearance on The New York Times’ bestseller list, where it stayed for 86 weeks. It won the National Book Award, in January 1952. It was the second book in Carson’s “Sea Trilogy.”
Oxford University Press reissued the book in 2018, providing this description:
“The Sea Around Us is one of the most influential books ever written about the natural world. Rachel Carson’s ability to combine scientific insight with poetic prose catapulted her book to the top of The New York Times best-seller list, where it remained for more than a year and a half.
Ultimately it sold well over a million copies, was translated into twenty-eight languages, inspired an Academy Award-winning documentary, and won both the National Book Award and the John Burroughs Medal.”
Learn more about The Sea Around Us.
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The Edge of the Sea (1955)
The Edge of the Sea was the last book of Carson’s “Sea Trilogy.” A description of The Edge of the Sea from the publisher of the 1998 edition, Mariner Books:
“With all the hallmarks of Rachel Carson’s luminous prose combined with a scientifically accurate exploration of the Atlantic seashore comes a hauntingly beautiful account of what one can find at the edge of the sea.
‘The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place.’ Focusing on the plants and invertebrates surviving in the Atlantic zones between the lowest and the highest tides, between Newfoundland and the Florida Keys, The Edge of the Sea is a book to be read for pleasure as well as a practical identification guide.”
Learn more about The Edge of the Sea.
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Silent Spring (1962)
Silent Spring is the most enduring work of nonfiction by Rachel Carson. In this book, Carson made a passionate argument for protecting the environment from manmade pesticides.
Written with grace as well as passion, it’s an indictment of the pesticide industry that arose in the late 1950s. It lays out a disturbing view of the damage these chemicals can cause to birds, bees, wildlife, and plant life.
Rachel Carson’s official website recognizes how prescient she was: “Silent Spring inspired the modern environmental movement, which began in earnest a decade later. It is recognized as the environmental text that changed the world.”
Learn more about Silent Spring.
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The Sense of Wonder (1965)
Rachel Carson’s last full-scale book was published a year after her death. Intended to be enjoyed by children and parents together, it was designed to inspire families to explore and appreciate the wonders of nature together.
The book was originally embellished with black & white as well as color photographs by Charles Pratt, many of which were taken along the Maine coast, where Carson enjoyed spending summers. Republished in 2017, the book is as fresh and relevant as it ever was — perhaps even more so, given the alarming state of the environment.
Learn more about The Sense of Wonder.
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Rachel Carson page on Amazon*
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*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post Books by Rachel Carson: Before and After Silent Spring appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson (1955)
The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson (1955), was the last book of what became known as her “Sea Trilogy,” preceded by Under the Sea Wind (1942) and The Sea Around Us (1951). Her meticulously researched nonfiction writing was known for its graceful and poetic style.
Carson (1907 – 1964) was a noted American marine biologist, conservationist, and writer whose research and graceful writing about the natural world shaped today’s environmental movement.
Her best-known book, Silent Spring (1962), raised awareness about the use of pesticides and contributed to the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
A description of The Edge of the Sea from the publisher of the 1998 edition, Mariner Books:
“With all the hallmarks of Rachel Carson’s luminous prose combined with a scientifically accurate exploration of the Atlantic seashore comes a hauntingly beautiful account of what one can find at the edge of the sea.
‘The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place.’ Focusing on the plants and invertebrates surviving in the Atlantic zones between the lowest and the highest tides, between Newfoundland and the Florida Keys, The Edge of the Sea is a book to be read for pleasure as well as a practical identification guide. Its appendix and index make it a great reference tool for those interested in plant and animal life around tide pools.
A new generation of readers is already discovering why Rachel Carson’s books have become cornerstones of the environmental and conservation movements.”
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See also: Under the Sea Wind
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From the original review of The Edge of the Sea in The Virginian-Pilot, October 30, 1955: It’s hard to imagine anyone on the face of this earth not being enthralled by Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea.
We say the face of the earth advisedly, for while her earlier book, The Sea Around Us, opened up a whole fascinating new world, it was a world only a few could penetrate by actual experience.
The edge of the sea we do know, or may think we know, until we have read her book; for it is marginal land. But, as she herself points out, “For no two days is the shore line precisely the same … always the edge of the sea remains an elusive and indefinable boundary.”
Specifically, she writes of our own Atlantic coastline, which she divides into The Rocky Shore at the north, The Rim of Sand from Cape Cod southward, and The Coral Coast, with its jagged reefs, mangroves, and brilliant sea gardens, off Florida.
She calls into account not only the differing physical realities of the coast, but the biological role played by the sea: “The ocean currents are not merely a movement of wanter; they are a stream of life, carrying always the eggs and young of countless sea creatures.”
Carson writes in detail of the teeming, complex lives of these millions of creatures, many of whom you will recognize — crabs, whelks, moon snails, coquinas, conches, seahorses, and even jellyfish.
Many you will never have dreamed of live as close to home as Virginia Beach, Nags Head, Myrtle Beach, and Sea Island.
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See also: The Sea Around Us
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Throughout there is a sense of the ancient oceanic past, the flow of time — to what unknown future? With these creatures who surge against the shifting shore, “seeking a foothold, establishing new colonies,” the pattern changes constantly, along with the inexorable drive for life.
Sand, seaweed, and the creatures of the shore will never seem the same to you again.
Drawings are abundant in this book and add immeasurably to its charm. In black and white by Bob Hines of the Fish and Wildlife Service, they more than overcome their lack of the colors Miss Carson so vividly conveys with words. They are sensitive, powerful drawings.
The Edge of the Sea is a handbook of knowledge, beautifully written — and a new insight into the enormous, mysterious life around us.
With all the hallmarks of Rachel Carson’s luminous prose combined with a scientifically accurate exploration of the Atlantic seashore comes a hauntingly beautiful account of what one can find at the edge of the sea.
“The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place.” Focusing on the plants and invertebrates surviving in the Atlantic zones between the lowest and the highest tides, between Newfoundland and the Florida Keys, The Edge of the Sea is a book to be read for pleasure as well as a practical identification guide.
Its appendix and index make it a great reference tool for those interested in plant and animal life around tide pools. A new generation of readers is already discovering why Rachel Carson’s books have become cornerstones of the environmental and conservation movements.
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The Edge of the Sea on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
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*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson (1955) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
July 9, 2022
The Six Brilliant Novels of Jane Austen (plus Sanditon)
It’s a testament to an author when a relatively small body of work endures through the ages. The six brilliant novels of Jane Austen have not only stood the test of time, but have continued to be adapted for film and television (not to mention fanfiction by other authors, a list far too vast to enumerate).
With six exquisite novels displaying compassion, humor, and insight into the travails of the sexes and social classes, Jane Austen’s place in literary history is forever secured.
Despite the popular portrayal of her as all charm and modesty, she was a writer and observer of human nature with full mastery of her gifts. She cared deeply about getting published and being read, despite myths to the contrary.
Here is an overview of her six classic novels of Jane Austen (plus Sanditon, which was unfinished at the time of her death. At the end of each title’s entry, you’ll find a link to a full plot summary and analysis.
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Sense and Sensibility (1811)
There can be little doubt that in Sense and Sensibility we have the first of Jane Austen’s revised and finished works. In several respects, it reveals an inexperienced author.
The action is too rapid, and there is a want of dexterity in getting the characters out of their difficulties. Mrs. Jennings is too vulgar, and in her, as in several of the minor characters, we see that Jane had not quite shaken off the turn for caricature, which in early youth she had possessed strongly.
Sense and Sensibility was originally called Elinor and Marianne, but it might as appropriately have been named The Dashwood Family, for it is really the history of one family, of whom two sisters are nominally the chief characters, but by no means the most interesting; and the other personages of the story, as was so usual with Jane Austen, only revolve round the central characters.
The disagreeable story of Willoughby’s earlier life is unnecessary to the plot, Colonel Brandon is too shadowy to be interesting, and Margaret Dashwood, the third sister, is an absolute nonentity.
Nevertheless, there is much in it that is good. The John Dashwoods; Elinor, Marianne, and their mother; the Middletons, and Mrs. Palmer are all excellent, and, remembering it as the work of a girl of twenty-one, its promise for her future success was very great.
It can never be put aside by anyone as wholly unworthy of her powers; all that the most severe critic could say is that it is not quite up to the mark of her later, more matured writing, and this is, indeed, a faint condemnation which would be praise for almost any other author.
Read more about Sense and Sensibility.
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Pride and Prejudice (1813)
No admirer of Elizabeth Bennet will wonder that her delineator could not find a satisfactory portrait of her, for she is a vary rare type of character; indeed, it is a distinguishing characteristic of Pride and Prejudice that both the hero and heroine are uncommon in every respect, and yet thoroughly lifelike.
A shade more of gaiety would have made Elizabeth a flippant, amusing, commonplace girl, just as a degree less intellect would have made Darcy as intolerable as Mrs. Bennet thought him. But Jane Austen had shaken off all tendency to exaggeration by the time she brought out Pride and Prejudice, and henceforth her characters are kept well within bounds.
We see in Darcy the man who has had everything to spoil him yet is really superior of being spoilt. He is handsome, wealthy, well-born, and of powerful intellect, and the adulation and submission he has always had from everyone about him wearies him into receiving such homage with cold indifference and apparent haughtiness. Yet under this repellent exterior is a warm, generous, and tender heart, which is capable of great sacrifices for anyone he really loves.
Elizabeth Bennet is exactly the right wife for him, for, with a nature as capable of tenderness and constancy as his, she has all the simplicity, brightness, and playfulness which are wanting in him.
Yet from the day that she and Mr. Darcy first meet they take a mutual aversion to each other, and long after he has succumbed, and fallen in love with her, she is unconscious of his feelings, and continues to dislike him.
Read more about Pride and Prejudice.
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Mansfield Park (1814)
Mansfield Park is the story of Fanny Price, sent by her impoverished family to be raised in the household of a wealthy aunt and uncle. The story follows her into adulthood and is a commentary on class, family ties, marriage, and the status of women.
The novel went through two editions before Jane Austen’s death (1817) but didn’t receive any public reviews until 1821. Critical reception for this novel, from that time forward, has been the most mixed among Austen’s works.
In an introduction to a contemporary edition, Kathryn Sutherland portrays Mansfield Park as a darker work than Austen’s other novels, because it challenges “the very values (of tradition, stability, retirement, and faithfulness) it appears to endorse.”
Mansfield Park is lengthy, but this can hardly be considered a blemish, as it was the deliberate intention of the author, and, after all, it is “readable from cover to cover.” The only part that could appear to anyone unnecessary is Fanny’s visit to her relations at Portsmouth, and no one would wish to lose so good a picture of the home mismanaged by the incapable wife and mother.
From first to last Fanny Price is charming, and, seeing how admirably her character is worked out, Mansfield Park cannot be considered too long for art, as it certainly is not too long for enjoyment.
Read more about Mansfield Park.
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You may also enjoy …
Jane Austen’s Childhood and Glimpses as a Young Woman
First Attempts at Publishing
Jane Austen’s Final Days — Illness, Courage, and Death
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Emma (1815)
Many readers of Jane Austen will agree in thinking that in Emma she reached the summit of her literary powers. She has given us quite as charming individual characters both in earlier and later writings, but it is impossible to name a flaw in Emma; there is not a page that could with advantage be omitted, nor could any additions improve it.
The story, as usual with Jane Austen, is a mere thread of the most everyday kind: the loves, hopes, fears, and rivalries of a dozen people, with all their home lives and surroundings. But every one of the characters stands out clearly from the canvas, and all are life-like and delightful.
It has all the brilliancy of Pride and Prejudice, without any immaturity of style, and it is as carefully finished as Mansfield Park, without the least suspicion of prolixity.
In Emma, too, as has been already noticed, she worked into perfection some characters which she had attempted earlier with less success, and she gave us two or three, such as Mr. Weston, Mrs. Elton, and Miss Bates, which we find nowhere else in her writings.
Moreover, in Emma, above all her other works, she achieved a task in which many a great writer has failed; for she gives us the portrait of a thorough English gentleman, drawn to the life.
Read more about Emma.
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Northanger Abbey (1817)
The first novel intended for publication by Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey was originally titled Susan. Completed in 1803, it wasn’t published until 1817, the year of the author’s death. This coming-of-age novel’s heroine, Catherine Morland, at first young and rather naïve, learns the ways of the world in the course of the narrative.
Set in Bath, England, the fashionable resort city where the Austens lived for a time, Jane Austen critiques young women who put too much stock in appearances, wealth, and social acceptance. Catherine values happiness but not at the cost of compromising one’s values and morals.
Sarah Fanny Malden, the 19th-century critic whose detailed plot summaries and analyses of Jane Austen’s works are reprinted on this site, felt that Northanger Abbey is inferior to the author’s other novels:
“I think that Catherine Morland, though in many respects attractive, is the most uninteresting of Jane Austen’s heroines, and betrays the writer’s youth. Emma Woodhouse (of Emma) Fanny Price (of Mansfield Park), and Elizabeth Bennet (of Pride and Prejudice) are all women we should like to have known. For Anne Elliot (of Persuasion), what words of praise are high enough?
But Catherine Morland is an obvious copy of Evelina: a good-hearted, simple-minded little goose … Perhaps Jane Austen felt this herself, for she closes the story with a playful account of their marriage, and makes no attempt to picture their future life together.”
Read more about Northanger Abbey.
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Persuasion (1817)
Persuasion, the last novel Jane Austen wrote, along with Northanger Abbey, her first completed novel, were both published six months after her death in 1817.
In approaching Persuasion, we have to deal with the last, and, in my opinion, the greatest of Jane Austen’s works, for though Emma usually holds the first place in her writings, and although there are unquestionably one or two weak points in Persuasion from which Emma is free, I cannot but heartily state that “Persuasion is the most beautiful of all Jane Austen’s stories.”
Dear, charming Anne Elliot! We rejoice to feel that we are leaving her in the midst of such a tender, radiant Indian summer of happiness; and we safely predict a married life at blessedness for her and her husband; but even in this crowning hour of their felicity, there is the same tinge of pathos visible as throughout the book.
It does not seem intentional; it is rather as though the writer could no longer treat her subject with the bright gaiety of former days, and it is not wonderful that a dying woman could not.
Persuasion is the swan song of Jane Austen’s authorship, and, true to its character, the saddest and sweetest of her works. When she finished it, only a few months before her death, she had in fact laid down the pen for ever; and doubtless it was the consciousness of this which shaded the story to a more autumnal tone than anything she had yet written.
We could not wish it otherwise, for the group of novels would have been incomplete without some such story of comparatively late happiness.
Read more about Persuasion.
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Sanditon: An unfinished novel
Contributor Adam Burgess begins his musing on Jane Austen’s unfinished novel as follows: Sanditon, though unfinished, is perhaps Jane Austen’s most exciting, unusual, and promising piece of literature. Unlike The Watsons, whose plot and ending can be relatively inferred, Sanditon, the novel she worked on in 1817, the year of her death, is quite different from any of her other stories.
The narrative of Sanditon could probably have followed a variety of paths, so predicting its resolution is difficult to do.
The story’s heroine, Charlotte Heywood, is a somewhat-exaggeratedly sensible young woman. She comes to the small coastal tourist town of Sanditon upon the urgings and guardianship of its proprietor, who is attempting to build the town’s reputation.
The rest of the story’s cast are also exaggerated, but in different ways, most of them being comic caricatures – folks obsessed with false ailments, shoddy business ventures, tourism, and the like.
Read more about Sanditon.
More about the novels of Jane Austen Complete Works of Jane Austen Austen’s Novels: An Overview Ranked: The Novels of Jane Austen
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July 1, 2022
Anita Brookner, author of Hotel du Lac
Do you know of anyone who wrote twenty-six novels after a successful career as a professor and art historian? Or who won the prestigious Booker Prize for her fourth novel? All that is true of British author Anita Brookner (July 16, 1928 – March 10, 2016), which is why I enjoy her books so much — she entertains as well as educates.
I liken Brookner’s beautifully crafted stories to fine needlework, and I’ve recently started collecting her books, as I know I will reread them over the years.
Surprised by the Booker Prize; a prolific career
I discovered Anita Brookner in 1984 when she won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac, the story of a romance writer who commits an indiscretion and heads to Switzerland to sort herself out.
In researching Brookner’s life, one favorite moment was watching the BBC clip from the award ceremony where she sat at a table with other nominees, including J.G. Ballard (whose book Empire of the Sun was favored) and Julian Barnes.
When Brookner’s name was announced, she seemed utterly gobsmacked, made a short acceptance speech, and sat down again. Many critics thought her book was undeserving; however, the judges found her prose stellar, the plot ironic and witty. In all, the novel was deemed “a work of perfect artifice.”
For someone who was born at a time when females were judged by whom they married and what kind of mothers they were, she left a different mark. Brookner was an eminent art historian and professor who also wrote three respected tomes on the painters Greuze, Watteau, and David.
To this list, Brookner added more than two dozen novels (some romans a clef) numerous articles, and an e-book written near the end of her life.
She produced a novel a year for two decades, won many awards, including a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (one tier down from knighthood), and was nominated for a second Booker Prize for her novel The Next Big Thing (2002). (An elderly man is trying to decide on the final chapters of his life — should he travel? Should he marry?)
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Photo: Tyler Scott
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Anita Brookner was born in Herne Hill, a suburb of London, to Polish Jewish emigres in 1928. The family surname of her parents, Newson and Maude, was originally Bruckner. Her father decided he didn’t want to have a Germanic name in the World War I era, hence the change.
Her mother, Maude, was a professional classical singer. Her father fought in World War I for Britain. After the war, he started his own businesses, none of which were successful; he ended up working for his wealthy father-in-law, who owned a tobacco factory.
The Brookners lived in a villa with various relatives as well as refugees they’d taken to work as family servants. Anita was an only child. Her parents had a rocky marriage — her mother felt she had married beneath her — perhaps why missed signals, angst between the sexes, and the outsider status of foreigners figure so prominently in Brookner’s canon.
Despite his business problems, her father ran a lending library for a time, introducing his young daughter to classic authors like Charles Dickens and H.G. Wells. From a young age, Anita understood the joy and power of the written word.
Anita attended a girls’ school in Dulwich, then earned a bachelor’s degree in history from King’s College of London. Disliking most of her courses, she attended lectures at the nearby National Gallery and was enthralled. A lecturer noticed her interest and suggested she switch her focus to art history, much to her family’s chagrin.
Remember that all this took place at a time when a woman’s goal was to find a suitable husband. But Anita Brookner had other ideas. She changed her studies to art history and pursued a doctorate for several years at the Sorbonne. Her parents’ response to their independent daughter was to cut her off.
A distinguished career teaching art history
Undaunted, she carried on. By 1959, Brookner was teaching art history at Reading University. In 1964, she joined the staff of the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she was considered an authority on 18th and 19th-century art. Much admired by her students, Brookner became the first female Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge.
As Brookner passed the age of fifty, she realized her life had taken a different turn, with no husband, no children, and much time spent taking care of her aging parents. When she began to write fiction at age fifty-three, she described it as having taken place “in a moment of sadness and desperation.”
“My life seemed to be drifting in predictable channels, and I wanted to know how I deserved such a fate,” she was quoted as saying in her New York Times obituary. “I thought if I could write about it, I would be able to impose some structure on my experience. It gave me a feeling of being at least in control. It was an exercise in self-analysis, and I tried to make it as objective as possible — no self-pity and no self-justification. But what is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere — it is an art form in itself.”
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Photo: Tyler Scott
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Her first novel A Start in Life, whose main character is a lonely academic looking for a new hold on life, was published in 1981. Within three years she had won the Booker, England’s most prestigious prize for fiction.
Brooker writes about women, mostly, that are strong and interesting, but unlucky in love. They forge ahead anyway; usually the object of their affections is beneath them so maybe they will be better off.
Brookner’s themes embrace the trenches of life, the pas de deux between the sexes, and the interior life of the lonely. Hers weren’t cozy domestic novels, yet she has been compared to Jane Austen and Barbara Pym (in addition to Henry James).
Jonathan Yardley, former book critic for The Washington Post (and Pulitzer Prize winner) wrote, “Anita Brookner’s novels are miniatures containing within their brief space worlds of feeling, wisdom, and compassion, not to mention quiet, understated wit and seamless prose.”
In his book, Second Reading, Notable and Neglected Books Revisited (2011), Yardley says Brookner’s Look at Me was one of the finest novels written during the last 25 years.
One of the passages he cites in this book describes a lonely reference librarian who works in a medical research laboratory. She befriends a glamorous couple, to her detriment:
“What interested me … was their intimacy as a married couple. I sensed that it was in this respect that they found my company necessary: they exhibited their marriage to me, while sharing it only with each other. I soon learned to keep a pleasant noncommittal smile on my face when they looked into each other’s eyes or caressed each other; I felt lonely and excited. I was there because some element in that marriage was deficient, because ritual demonstrations were needed to maintain a level of arousal which they were too complacent, perhaps too spoilt, even too lazy, to supply for themselves, out of their own imaginations. I was the beggar at their feast, reassuring them by my very presence that they were richer than I was. Or indeed could ever hope to be.”
Added Yardley, “Brookner’s style of narrative – reflective, measured, expository – is, in her hands, exactly right; her prose alone, is quite simply, exquisite. I cherish her novels almost without reservation and I cherish Look at Me above all.”
An often misunderstood novelist
Julian Barnes, the novelist and a friend of Brookner’s, believes the critics and press, mostly males, seem to have misunderstood her work.
Dubbing her “Modest Anita” they decided to pigeonhole her as a lonely spinster whose life had not worked out and who consoled herself by writing novels, once a year, as a regular act of comfort. They also tended to ignore her brilliant career as an art historian.
“There is often a moral antithesis in her fiction,” observed Barnes, “opposing those who are virtuous, truthful, genteel, and stylish to those who are monied, course, and careless.” He also wondered if the press would not have been kinder to Brookner if she had published novels every two years rather than each year.
According to Barnes, Brookner refused to live the life of a literary celebrity. She wasn’t an aggressive self-promoter; if she went to a book signing event, she was more inclined to sign several copies and then leave before too many people showed up.
Her novels tend to be short, usually around two hundred pages. They engage the reader from the first line. Fraud (1992) begins, “When Anna Durrant disappears, it is months before anyone notices. . . “) Yet her plots are neither formulaic nor depressing. Some of her novels are written from a male point of view.
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Anita Brookner page on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
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Anita Brookner was a talented writer, a monument to hard work and discipline. She smoked a lot, read five newspapers a day, wrote in longhand, and her favorite novel was Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, a satiric story about a ne’er-do-well nobleman.
She didn’t ascribe to any religion; she had been raised in a secular Jewish family at a time when it was perilous to be Jewish in Europe. A stoic, she kept her private life to herself. She admitted that there had been marriage proposals over the years, just not the right ones. She always regretted not having children.
She once said of writing fiction, “I don’t like writing fiction much; it’s like being on the end of a bad telephone line – but it’s addictive.”
An excerpt from Hotel du Lac, arguably her best-known work:
“You are wrong if you think you cannot live without love. I cannot live without it. I do not mean that I go into a decline, develop odd symptoms, become a caricature. I mean that I cannot live well without it. I cannot think or act or speak or write or even dream with any kind of energy in the absence of love. I feel excluded from the living world. I become cold, fish-like, immobile. I implode. My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home safe to me in the evening. Every evening.”
To read and enjoy Brookner, you have to be on alert: Don’t read her when you’re tired; you need to pay attention. The sentences are expertly laid out and she writes for smart readers who may yet have to look up the occasional word in the dictionary. Her characters may read Proust, think about Stendhal, wonder about Freud, or climb in bed with The Great Gatsby. If a character happens to be in Paris, she may even throw in a few simple French phrases.
Over the years Brookner has been called “the mistress of doom,” and was once asked if she was in love with melancholy. She responded, “I don’t think it’s melancholy. I think it’s seriousness. I think there’s a difference. I think people are frightened of seriousness.”
Anita Brookner died peacefully in her sleep in the spring of 2016 at the age of eighty-seven. She left money and paintings to her friends (she even owned a Manet sketch) and instructed her agent to keep any books, letters, and manuscripts, finished or unfinished, and to destroy the rest. She left the bulk of her estate to Doctors Without Borders, and her final wish, after donating her body to science and cremation, was not to have a funeral.
Contributed by Tyler Scott, who has been writing essays and articles since the early 1980s for various magazines and newspapers. In 2014 she published her novel The Excellent Advice of a Few Famous Painters. She lives in Blackstone, Virginia where she and her husband renovated a Queen Anne Revival house and enjoy small town-life. Her website is Tyler Scott | Pour the Coffee, Time to Write.
More about Anita BrooknerMajor Works
Find Anita Brookner’s complete, prolific bibliography here .More information
Julian Barnes Remembers His Friend Anita Brookner (The Guardian) In Praise of Anita Brookner (NY Times) Encyclopedia of Jewish Women Anita Brookner, the Art of Fiction (Paris Review) Wikipedia Reader discussion of Brookner’s books on Goodreads. . . . . . . . . . .
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June 29, 2022
Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall (1959)
Brown Girl, Brownstones was the first novel by Paule Marshall, a semi-autobiographical story about the Barbadian immigrant community in 1930s and 1940s Brooklyn. Published in 1959, it remained the best-known work in Marshall’s distinguished career.
Paule Marshall (1929 – 2019) was born Valenza Pauline Burke. As a young teen, she became enamored of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poetry and changed her name to reflect his. Her long career was marked by major awards, including the Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships; she taught at several universities as well. In the end, her renown circled back and landed at the place where she began — in her first, and very fine novel.
A brief plot summary
The 2009 reprint edition of Brown Girl, Brownstones encapsulates the book:
“Selina’s mother wants to stay in Brooklyn and earn enough money to buy a brownstone row house, but her father dreams only of returning to his island home. Torn between a romantic nostalgia for the past and a driving ambition for the future, Selina also faces the everyday burdens of poverty and racism.
Written by and about a daughter of Barbadian immigrants, this coming-of-age story unfolds during the Great Depression and World War II. Its setting — a close-knit community of immigrants from Barbados — is drawn from the author’s own experiences, as are the lilting accents and vivid idioms of the characters’ speech.
Paule Marshall’s 1959 novel was among the first to portray the inner life of a young Black female, as well as depicting the cross-cultural conflict between West Indian immigrants and African Americans. It remains a vibrant, compelling tale of self-discovery.”
A 1959 review of Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall
From the original review in the Tampa Bay Times (St. Petersburg, FL, September 2, 1959: “Brooklyn Author’s Novel is Certain Bestseller”: Like another tree that famously grew in Brooklyn, a new, vigorous and generally captivating one takes root and eventually blooms over there in this first novel titled Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall. If a prediction is in order this day, we may all be delighting in it for a long time to come.
Paule Marshall is Brooklyn-born and bred, but in a special world within that tumultuous world of numerous races, many churches and the shades of departed trolleys and Dodgers. The Barbadian colony is her province, to which her parents came from the West Indies sometime before her own first look at this or any other part of the world thirty years ago.
How much of this tender, smoldering tale is her own and her family’s story is not a matter of public report. A good deal of it, one must guess offhand, since she like the remarkable heroine of her novel learned about life in the roar of Fulton St., and went on from there to build a career of her own as a first-generation American. But the parallel doesn’t really matter, except as it stamps these pages with that special conviction of experience truly recaptured.
The first thing about “Brown Girl, Brownstones” that matters, and it strikes you as early as page one, is style. Mrs. Marshall has it. It is a fine, flexible one, relaxing into the rhythms of Barbadian American speech, tense and driving when the Barbadian blood stirs into action, an instrument always under the full control of one to whom the use of language seems as natural as breathing.
“In the somnolent July afternoon the unbroken line of brownstone houses down the long Brooklyn street resembled an army massed at attention,” the story begins. Long ago, in one of those stately, mirrored homes, old Dutch and English families lived. Now it is 1939, and times and tenants have changed.
Dust lies over the faded grandeur, the faucets shudder and groan, and emigrants from the Barbados Islands struggle for a foothold. In this particular brownstone there are, notably, the Boyces: Deighton Boyce, charming and improvident; his wife, Silla, wary, fierce, possessive and loving: their two daughters, Ina, just coming into adolescence, and Selina, aged ten.
Just about everybody in the house and the neighborhood has a strikingly individual character, but Selina is the one to keep your eye on. Indeed, you could hardly help it. She is large-eyed, long-legged, flat-bodied, and a fighter.
Selina loves her lazy, poetic father, who dreams the days away, toying with such improbable devices as correspondence school courses in trumpet playing and radio repairing to avoid the horror of getting a job. In temperament she is her mother’s daughter and that is the heart of Mrs. Marshall’s story of love that often wears the mask of hatred, and a girl moving away from her people even when she knows the bond is unbreakable.
The years drift by, and this Brooklyn tree, like that earlier one named Francie Nolan, grows in the hard soil of reality. Good and evil, strength and weakness are not so far apart as they frequently seem, she learns. She acquires a lover. She becomes an artist. She goes to a city college and for the first time encounters the white world.
At that point the narrative falters, its self-sustained flow yielding to studied, polemical patches about the Race Question. But it picks up again and goes on to an ending at once poignant and triumphant. As a matter of fact, the book as a whole is Mrs. Marshall’s triumph, a quiet but assured one.
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Brown Girl, Brownstones on
Bookshop.org
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How Mary Ann Evans Became George Eliot
In September 1856, the 36-year-old woman heretofore known as Mary Ann Evans (alternatively Marian) wrote in her journal that she had “made a new era” in her life, “for it was then I began to write fiction.”
It was a new era in another way, as well, because it was soon after this that Mary Ann Evans began to transform herself into the author we know as the eminent British novelist and essayist, George Eliot (1819 – 1880).
Mary Ann Evans was in the process of reinventing herself in several ways. A few months after she began writing fiction, she sent a letter to her beloved brother Isaac in which she announced, “You will be surprised to learn … that I have changed my name and have someone to take care of me in the world.”
She was not referring to her pen name when she announced this name change. In the same envelope with the note to Isaac was another to her sister Fanny, in which she spoke of her de facto husband, George Lewes.
Liberal-minded Lewes, a religious skeptic actively engaged in the scientific and philosophic debates of the day, had tolerated one instance of adultery on the part of his legal wife and having done so, had no legal grounds for divorce when his wife’s relationship with the other man continued, eventually resulting in four children whom Lewes adopted as his own.
Despite the legal impediments to her marriage, it was important to Eliot that she be known socially as Mrs. Lewes. A year or so later, Eliot urged a friend not to call her Miss Evans anymore. “My name is Marian Evans Lewes.”
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“Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”
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As she began work on “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” the first of the three novellas that would constitute Scenes of Clerical Life, she was very aware of her goals in writing fiction. Just a few days before beginning this new project, she had finished writing “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” an essay in which she denounced popular fiction with predictable plots and superficial heroines—well-educated, privileged women who failed to use their advantages to accomplish anything but to find a husband.
Perhaps it was fear of being dismissed as a “lady novelist” that led Eliot to hide her identity, or perhaps it was fear that her fiction would be rejected by publishers and readers because of her relationship with Lewes.
After Isaac Evans learned that his sister’s life with Lewes did not involve a legal marriage, he cut off all communication, and then directed her sisters to do the same. With both her parents dead, the loss of contact with her siblings was deeply wounding to Evans.
Eliot may also have wanted to protect her standing as a serious essayist and translator. Writing unsuccessful fiction could threaten that reputation. Furthermore, Eliot’s goals for her fiction were ambitious. It wasn’t just that she did not want to write something silly. Eliot saw fiction as a vehicle for grappling with the largest questions of her day.
The idea that human beings had arisen through natural selection, rather than divine creation, challenged conventional religious thought. If God was not in charge, as Eliot came to believe, how were human beings to make ethical choices? Only a few months earlier, Eliot had completed her translation of humanist philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics.
Philosopher Clare Carlisle states that Eliot had “an affinity with [Spinoza’s] thinking, and particularly with his insight into the vast, intricate, ever-shifting constellation of emotion, action, and interaction that shape each human life.”
Though Eliot began her career of writing fiction with strong convictions about why she would write, she was filled with doubt about whether she could create scenes that would elicit the emotional responses from her readers that would motivate them to sympathize with the very ordinary and flawed people she planned to portray in her work.
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Learn more about George Eliot
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To protect Mary Ann’s anonymity, Lewes approached his friends the Blackwood brothers, publishers of Blackwood’s Magazine as well as of books, on her behalf. Initially he led the publishers to believe that the mysterious author was a friend of his, a shy male cleric. In later correspondence he clarified that the author was not actually a clergyman but did nothing to correct the assumptions regarding gender.
The serialized version of Scenes of Clerical Life appeared anonymously in the magazine. At the end of 1857, when Scenes was about to come out in book form, the publishers pressed for an author’s name. “I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito,” Eliot responded. Recognizing that there would be “curious inquiries” on the part of readers, she announced that “accordingly I subscribe myself … George Eliot.”
In effect, she took the name of the man she regarded as her husband—George—despite their inability to marry. While Eliot liked people to refer to her as Mrs. Lewes, not everyone accepted her under that name. She took Eliot, she said, because “it was a good, mouth-filling, easily pronounced word,” and it’s worth noting that the sounds of the first two syllables name the first two letters of Lewes’s surname.
If Eliot had simply wanted to guard her fiction from judgment based on disapproval of her relationship with Lewes, or if she had wanted to shield her reputation as an essayist from any shortcomings in her abilities as a fiction writer, she could have taken a feminine name as her pen name. Instead, she chose a masculine name, reflective perhaps of her feeling that her ambitions required a masculine identity.
“You may try,” Eliot writes in Daniel Deronda, “but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s force of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.” Charles Dickens famously saw through the ruse. In a letter thanking “George Eliot” for sending him a copy of Scenes of Clerical Life, he said, “I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself so mentally like a woman.”
It may have been the complex emotional lives that Eliot portrayed in Scenes of Clerical Life that prompted Dickens’s comment. The collection included “The Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton,” which describes the plight of an Anglican priest falsely slandered by villagers; “Mr. Gilfil’s Love-Story,” about a clergyman who aids the woman he loves after she is accused of murder, even though his love is unrequited; and “Janet’s Repentance,” the story of an alcoholic woman who escapes an abusive husband with the support of a cleric whose theology she does not share.
While now regarded as somewhat awkward in style compared to her later work, Scenes received “discerning applause” and readers of Blackwood’s wondered about the identity of George Eliot. But it wasn’t until the tremendous success of Eliot’s first novel, Adam Bede, that the nom de plume became a problem.
Growing curiosity about the identity of George Eliot
Adam Bede, published in February 1859, attracted far more attention than Scenes of Clerical Life. Like Scenes, it first appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine in serial form before being published as a book. The Blackwoods’ enthusiasm for the story provided Eliot with significantly more money for her first novel than she had received for her series of novellas.
The story of a love rectangle that culminates in the death of a child born out of wedlock and the conviction of its mother for murder, Adam Bede attracted the admiration of many readers, including Dickens and Queen Victoria. The glowing reviews increased public curiosity about the author.
Lewes and Eliot had revealed her identity to publisher John Blackwood in December of 1857. He kept the secret, but as time went on, people around Eliot began to guess that she was the mysterious author of Scenes and Adam Bede. In February of 1859, Lewes flatly denied that his wife was George Eliot when John Chapman, publisher of many of Evans’s essays, confronted him.
Chapman, who was used to Evans sending articles on a regular basis due to her need for money, was suspicious because she had sent him nothing in eighteen months. Other friends noticed that Lewes and Eliot had recently moved into a larger house and purchased linens and china, middle-class luxuries that had previously been beyond their means.
Even Eliot’s estranged brother Isaac bragged that the popular Adam Bede could have been written only by his sister, based on the novel’s depictions of places and situations familiar to his family. When Barbara Bodichon, a friend of Eliot’s who had read an excerpt of Adam Bede, guessed her identity, Eliot asked her to “keep the secret solemnly till I give you leave to tell it,” and her friend complied.
Complications and revelations
The situation soon became more complicated. A man named Joseph Liggins denied rumors that he was the author George Eliot. After his denials were brushed aside, he began to complain that he had not received a penny for Adam Bede. At first, Eliot and Lewes found this somewhat funny, but when a group of men planned a fundraising campaign on his behalf, Eliot became concerned about well-meaning people being caught up in the fraud.
Despite the Liggins rumors, more and more people who knew her began to suspect that Evans was George Eliot. An article denouncing George Eliot as a woman who refused to reveal her identity because of her shame regarding her private life infuriated Eliot. Worse, the article claimed that George Eliot herself had promulgated the Joseph Liggins rumor to sell more books.
It became clear that Eliot’s “incognito,” as she had termed it, had run its course. Blackwood announced his intention to reveal Eliot’s identity. Before his public revelation, Evans and Lewes shared the news that Evans herself was author of Adam Bede, first with an inner circle of close friends (some of whom were deeply offended at having been kept so long in the dark), as well as with Lewes’s adopted sons, whose school fees were paid by Eliot. The boys were delighted to learn that their father’s new wife was a celebrated author.
The secret was officially disclosed in July 1859. By this time Eliot was writing her second novel, The Mill on the Floss. When that novel was published in April of 1860, her identity was widely known, and yet her public continued to refer to the novelist as George Eliot.
Sales of Mill did not suffer from any scandal attached to her relationship with Lewes, and her public continued to refer to the novelist as George Eliot. Her transformation, in fact, was complete. The novelist George Eliot had triumphed over the social limitations Mary Ann Evans Lewes faced as a woman.
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Contributed by Lynne Weiss: Lynne’s writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review; Brain, Child; The Common OnLine; the Ploughshares blog; the [PANK] blog; Wild Musette; Main Street Rag; and Radcliffe Magazine. She received an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has won grants and residency awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Millay Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. She loves history, theater, and literature, and for many years, has earned her living by developing history and social studies materials for educational publishers. She lives outside Boston, where she is working on a novel set in Cornwall and London in the early 1930s. You can see more of her work at LynneWeiss.
SourcesCarlisle, Clare, ed. Spinoza’s Ethics translated by George Eliot. Princeton University Press, 2019.Eliot, George and J.W. Cross. George Eliot’s Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals, Everyman’s Library, 1910 (Project Gutenberg, 2013; updated 2021).Harris, Margaret and Judith Johnston, eds. The Journals of George Eliot, Cambridge University Press, 1998.Hughes, Kathryn. George Eliot: The Last Victorian Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.Nestor, Pauline George Eliot. Palgrave Critical Issues, 2002.Eliot, George Scenes of Clerical Life. Everyman’s Library, 1910. (Project Gutenberg, 2006; updated 2021)
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June 28, 2022
The Door of Life by Enid Bagnold (originally titled The Squire)
It’s surprising to discover that Enid Bagnold, the author best known for the classic horse story National Velvet, wrote what is considered one of the first novels centered on pregnancy and childbirth. Oddly titled The Squire when first published in England in 1938, it was retitled The Door of Life for the American audience.
This semi-autobiographical novel is an almost meditative reading experience from the perspective of an expectant mother who is soon to give birth to her fifth child. A review from the time of its publication observed:
“Those to whom the act of giving birth to a new human is fraught with terror and dread will see here that it is possible for it to be a wonderful and moving experience. We have never before read of the birth of a baby where all anguish was removed and a deep, fundamental joy was put in its place.”
Even by today’s standards, that sounds so refreshingly positive!
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Learn more about Enid Bagnold
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From the original review in The Charlotte Observer, November 6, 1938; “Her Writing is Different”: Enid Bagnold, English novelist, is gifted with a very special genius
We can recall no one of her contemporaries who writes at all like her, whose talent coincides with hers at any point. She isn’t whimsical as was James Barry, nor is she full of tricks, as is Gertrude Stein.
She writes with no self-consciousness of being original or different, yet she is that. And much more than that.
A year or so ago her novel National Velvet was being talked about. We were interested then to observe that the book was praised or condemned with equal enthusiasm. Many persons considered it enchanting and “not-to-be-missed,” others thought it “precious,” and “unrealistic.” It had a great success. and it certainly made a lasting impression on many persons, for we still her it talked about.
All this leads up to Mrs. Bagnold’s new book, The Door of Life. It is about an English woman who lives with her young children in a big house with the usual number of servants — butler, kitchen maids, nurses, cooks, gardeners, and so on.
The husband never appears, and his total absence from the story, even in spirit, suggests that Mrs. Bagnold knows more about the childish ways of children than of husbands and fathers.
Not much, that is externally, happens. The core of the story is hidden and must be got at by use of the imagination and quiet consideration. But it is worth the effort. To get the most from this book the reader must put himself into its reading, for its meaning is not obvious, but subtle and faintly concealed. It is delicate, exquisite rather than bold and broadly indicated.
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See also:
Pregnancy in Classic Novels by Women Authors
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Women who are inclined to consider motherhood a chore which must be got through quickly will see a new light in this mother’s love and intelligent consideration for her children in The Door of Life.
And those to whom the act of giving birth to a new human being is fraught with terror and dread will see here that it is possible for it to be a wonderful and moving experience. We have never before read of the birth of a baby where all anguish was removed and a deep, fundamental joy was put in its place. This is a relief.
“Her mind went down and lived in her body, ran out of her brain and lived in her flesh. She had eyes and nose and ears and senses in her body, in her backbone. living like a spiny woodlouse, doubled in a ball, having no beginning and no end. Now the first twisting spate of pain began.
Swim then, swim with it for your life. If you resist, horror and impediment! If you swim, not pain but sensation! Who knows the heart of pain, the central bellows of child-birth which expels one being from another?
None knows it who, in disbelief and dread has drawn back to the periphery, contradicting the will of pain, braking against inexorable movements. Keep abreast of it, rush together, you and your violence which is also you! Wild movements, hallucinated swimming! Other things exist than pain!”
Set off against the mother is her friend whose life still depends upon the admiration and love of men. Their difference is astonishing-the security of the mother, the helplessness of her friend, for she was a woman meant to walk from man to man and never to look back. The five children are as lovable and mischievous a group as we have ever met in a book or in life. They are real children, not the sole product of the imagination.
What is the secret of Mrs. Bagnold’s understanding of children? The answer is simple and inevitable: Enid Bagnold herself. Her publisher tells us that she has had five children of her own and adopted another for each one that she has had “in order that two of the same age may grow up together.”
Add to this talent for children a gift, if not genius, for writing and it is no wonder that she can write such extraordinarily good books. They spring straight out of her own life.
It is our opinion that all young people, married or contemplating marriage, would enjoy and really benefit from reading The Door of Life. It certainly is not a practical course in marriage but its message is meaningful, encouraging, and enlightening.
More about The Door Of Life by Enid Bagnold Reader discussion on Goodreads 1938 review in the NY Times
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June 27, 2022
Reading (and Watching) Pride and Prejudice in India
Like most teenagers in India who enjoyed the English classics, Pride and Prejudice came into my life. It prompted me to borrow the Complete Works of Jane Austen from the library and to read all her novels. But if you were to ask me to recall the plots today, Pride and Prejudice is the one that has etched itself most clearly in my mind.
This could also be because I had to study this novel as part of my English Honors program in college. I recall the name of the teacher who took up this book but can’t remember many insights that she left me with.
What comes to mind is that she spoke of it as a “drawing room novel,” as a lot of the action indeed takes place in these various home settings, starting with that of the Bennet family in Pride and Prejudice.
But can one fault the teacher? Jane Austen did write the book in something of a bubble, after all. If there is a historical context to a novel, a teacher can probably reference it for students to think about it. Pride and Prejudice was devoid of any such allusions, except for being referred to as a novel of manners and satire.
Jane Austen wrote with her powers of observation about the world around her, with a subtle critique of the prevalent social mores of her time.
Studying the history of English Literature in India was a very important part of my Honors program. An entire paper was devoted to this, and Legouis and Cazamian’s History of English Literature almost became like a Bible for me throughout those years.
Though many of us didn’t particularly care for having to delve into British history, as it was linked with those periods, it was clear that the writers were influenced by their times. For many of us, Pride and Prejudice is primarily a romance, and interestingly, it was written in the Romantic Period.
Elizabeth Bennet, as the protagonist, is my favorite character, as she was for Jane Austen (and legions of Jane Austen aficionados). Fitzwilliam Darcy is a close second; the fact that after all the pride and the prejudice, they’re able to get together is such a relief to the reader.
The famous opening lines of the novel, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” is still adapted by writers across the world to convey multiple meanings, including political ideas.
The Big Fat Indian Wedding
In a country like India where marriages are still arranged, the Big Fat Indian Wedding is very much a part of the culture. In a land of many languages, communities, and creeds, parents are always keen that their offspring choose within their station, though no one minds upward mobility — just like Mrs. Bennet.
Matrimonial websites are now replacing family matchmakers and wedding bureaus, and many have mushroomed online, based upon community, religion, caste, and perhaps even sub-sect. The amount of information provided for matchmaking is mind boggling.
Some amount of subterfuge does form part of the experience, as families are probably reluctant to share job details, especially the salary, more so when it comes to girls.
A friend told me about how she had pegged down her daughter’s position and emoluments for fear of boys and their families being daunted by a woman, who will expect equality in the marriage, which in India’s patriarchal society, is still a distant dream.
Luckily for the daughter, the deception didn’t have to continue for long, as she met and fell in love with a European colleague while on a foreign posting and they lived happily ever after, but not before the groom’s family came down and celebrated the Big Fat Indian wedding in her hometown.
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Miniseries & Film Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice
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Is it little wonder then that TV serial makers and filmmakers saw the potential of Pride and Prejudice and opted for remakes to suit an Indian audience?
When India’s national channel, Doordarshan, got into commercially broadcasted serials and movies, a black-and-white (color television was yet to make its entry) adaptation of Pride and Prejudice slipped into our living rooms and charmed the nation.
Called Trishna and made in Hindi, the serial kept to the storyline of the original novel. I was completely enamored of Rekha, the Indian Elizabeth Bennet (played by Sangeeta Handa) and even more so by the dishy Tarun Dhanrajgir, who is called Rahul. The essence of Darcy was so well captured by this actor that one can almost imagine that Austen had created her character for this Indian Rahul.
The serial ran for just one season of 13 episodes, each eagerly awaited and subsequently discussed in detail with other fans.
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Bride & Prejudice is available for streaming on Amazon*
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Later in 2004, the British Indian filmmaker, , released an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice titled Bride and Prejudice, filming the story in English.
Buoyed by the success of her soccer film, Bend It Like Beckham, the director ambitiously cast Aishwariya Rai, the famous actress and one-time Miss World as Lalita Bakshi, the Elizabeth Bennet character. The American actor Martin Henderson played the role of Will Darcy, a Los Angeles hotelier.
Sparks fly when the couple meets at a wedding in Amritsar, India. As she did it with the very successful Bend It Like Beckham, Chadha used her exposure to the East and the West to make a heady blend of the two, with the characters moving from India to London to Los Angeles.
The picture captures all the pageantry, fanfare, and colors of India in exaggerated fashion, with the characters breaking into song at the slightest provocation — the film is styled as a musical. I found the televised serial Trishna much more interesting, but many enjoyed Chadha’s interpretation of the novel. It may have even contributed to tourism, inspiring Western viewers to experience Indian culture firsthand.
Though ostensibly simple, even the mere title of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, packs a wealth of meaning. In addition to romantic entanglements, pride and prejudice — governed by the ego — are responsible for the many complications of human relationships.
Contributed by Melanie P. Kumar: Melanie is a Bangalore, India-based independent writer who has always been fascinated with the magic of words. Links to some of her pieces can be found at gonewiththewindwithmelanie.wordpress.com.
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June 22, 2022
Under the Sea Wind by Rachel Carson (1942)
Under the Sea Wind by Rachel Carson was the noted naturalist’s first book, published in 1942. Even in her debut publication, reviewers noted the lyrical quality she applied to scientific prose to make it compelling and readable.
Not nearly as renowned as Carson’s classic Silent Spring (1962), Under the Sea Wind has in its quiet way also stood the test of time, having been reissued in several editions by various publishers since its debut. The 2007 Penguin Classics encapsulated it:
“Rachel Carson—pioneering environmentalist and author of Silent Spring—opens our eyes to the wonders of the natural world in her groundbreaking paean to the sea.
Celebrating the mystery and beauty of birds and sea creatures in their natural habitat, Under the Sea-Wind—Rachel Carson’s first book and her personal favorite—is the early masterwork of one of America’s greatest nature writers.
Evoking the special mystery and beauty of the shore and the open sea—its limitless vistas and twilight depths—Carson’s astonishingly intimate, unforgettable portrait captures the delicate negotiations of an ingeniously calibrated ecology.”
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Learn more about Rachel Carson
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From the original review of by Rachel Carson in The Louisville Courier-Journal, January 11, 1942: “The Sea’s Eternal Drama”
In beautiful lyrical prose, Rachel L. Carson in Under the Sea Wind stirs the imagination with her portrayal of the endlessness of life and death in the sea. For the sea was the cradle of all life, and still is a shelter for an endless array of living forms in the most eternal cycle of life that is to be found on earth.
Miss Carson is by training a zoologist; yet, unlike most scientists, she is a talented writer as she so thoroughly proves in this, her first book. A true lover of the sea, she tells with scientific accuracy of the life of the Atlantic coast, from the soaring gulls on high to the forms that creep over the continental slope and down into the perpetual darkness of the ocean’s abyss.
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See also: The Sense of Wonder by Rachel Carson
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Her style is as readable as that in any animal story, but without most of the anthropomorphism of which so many writers are guilty. She has tried to present the activities of typical oceanic animals from what may be imagined to be their point of view.
Upon reading the book one has the feeling of being an invisible spectator of an eternal drama that began million of years ago and which promises to continue indefinitely, heedless of man and his exploitation of the continents. It is the same feeling one achieves when alone on a starry night he gazes upward into the immensity of space.
Some biologists may scorn Miss Carson’s practice of writing particularly about one individual of a species of Scomber the mackerel, of Blackfoot the sanderling, and Anguilla the eel-but the reviewer believes that in so doing she has been better able to leave herself out of the picture.
Incidentally, it may be remarked that in recent years biological study has shifted largely from that of preserved specimens to that of animal communities, and Under the Sea Wind is one of the first popular books to present this newer knowledge to the layman. Included in the book are several artistic plates and an illustrated glossary with descriptions of more than a hundred plants and animals of the sea.
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Under the Sea Wind on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
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