Kit Whitfield's Blog, page 5

Opening Line: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

This site is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of Opening Line posts can be found here.

My name, in those days, was Susan Trinder.

To take on the Victorian novel is no small challenge for a modern author. Nowadays we like to think of ourselves as liberated from the fusty formality of the Victorian age, with its apocryphal covered piano legs and its improving moral pap, but if we look at the actual history, we see something else. It was in the Victorian era that recreation became ser...

Opening Line: Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

This blog is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of Opening Line posts can be found here. 

A reader request:

Request: You mentioned, back in the Opening Lines index post, that you might be open to the idea of doing some bad literature. So how about the quintessential bad opening line? It was a dark and stormy night. Could be fun.

In his essay on Yeats, T.S. Eliot observed: 'One of the most thrilling lines in King Lear is the simple, "Never, never, never, never, never," but apart f...

Opening Line: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling

So, a break from the usual choices of book: I put up a two-post series about critical terminology, mentioned J.K. Rowling by way of an example, and everybody abided by my request not to derail the discussion into a Harry Potter fan thread! Thank you all very much. By way of appreciation for anyone who had to restrain themselves, here: an Opening Line post on Harry Potter. Which is, in fact, an interesting subject. No slagging off Rowling as a person, please, we don't do that here, but I hope...

Deconstruction means 'not a not-deconstruction'

In my last essay, I talked about the phrase 'Death of the Author', a structuralist essay that's somehow wound up a pop-culture catchphrase without retaining very much of its original meaning. Critical theories, like many other cultural movements, tend to have a trickle-down effect, and  last century's radical innovations become this century's popular conventions - or at least, an approximation of them does. But those approximations sometimes bear little resemblance to the original; so it...

The Death of The Death of the Author

Okay, so I've been on holiday, I've been ill, and now I'm in the middle of a freelance project as well, so the ever-open maw of the blog has gone unfed for a while. In the name of providing some kind of content in line with the literary theme here, I'm therefore going to put up a couple of old essays on literary theory. (The first, this one, has been published elsewhere in a different form; the next, I never put up before. I'll follow it shortly, as this one isn't new: it'll be on Derrida and...

Opening Line: Beloved by Toni Morrison

124 was spiteful.

Ordinarily I try to stay fairly impersonal on these posts, because on the whole I'm less interesting than the books we're discussing. In this case, though, it seems only right to begin with a personal confession: I've been putting off doing this one.

Why put it off? If you're going to do a series on famous novels, and especially if, as I do, you focus on modern classics, you really cannot leave out Toni Morrison. Pulitzer Prize winner, Nobel Laureate, and now, since 2012, bear...

Opening Line: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

This blog is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of this series can be found here. 

It was love at first sight.

Sometimes, first sentences do not contain much of a clue.

Catch-22 is one of the most famous war novels of all time, a work of satire so precise and burning that its very title achieved the status of a cultural landmark, a phrase we didn't know we needed until we heard it. A 'catch-22' is often defined as a no-win situation, but it's more than that: a situation that rests on...

First sentences: I, Claudius by Robert Graves

I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles), who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as 'Claudius the Idiot', or 'That Claudius', or 'Claudius the Stammerer', or 'Clau-Clau-Claudius', or at best as 'Poor Uncle Claudius' [a marginal note here adds the date 'A.D. 41'], am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and contin...

First sentences: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. 

Scratch the surface of To Kill a Mockingbird and you'll find a controversial book. On the one hand, it's a novel of evangelical tolerance, promoting the soothing message that 'most people are [nice] when you finally see them' even in an environment bitterly divided by prejudice, that makes a hero of the white lawyer who defends a black client unjustly accused, and a tragedy of the childhood loss of innocenc...

First sentences: Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

This site is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of first sentence posts can be found here.

I take requests, or at least some of them; a post on Graham Greene was requested by Anonymous, so I chose Brighton Rock because it's the work of Greene's I'm most familiar with. Hope that pleases you, Anonymous. 

Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.

Beat that for a strong opening. Crisp, pacy and ruthless, the first sentence slices straight into o...