The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910 discussion
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So, What's On the Bedside Table these Days? -- Part 2
I will be starting the following over the next couple of days:1 - The Two Dianas by Alexandre Dumas;
2 - Honore de Balzac in Twenty-Five Volumes: The First Complete Translation Into English, Volume 4... containing Beatrix; The Atheist's Mass; Honorine; Colonel Chabert; The Commission in Lunacy; and, Pierre Grassou; and,
3 - The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings by Marquis de Sade
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Currently reading:Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790's by Eleanor Ty;
Memoirs of Emma Courtney by Mary Hays;
The Macdermots Of Ballycloran by Anthony Trollope;
Pamela by Samuel Richardson;
The History Of Miss Betsy Thoughtless byEliza Fowler Haywood; and,
Shirley by Charlotte Brontë.
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Right now I'm reading the collected novels of George Orwell. Animal Farm and 1984 are rereads for me, but the rest are new. Currently in the middle of Burmese Days, and it's difficult to read since the characters are so horribly racist. Orwell evidently intended this to be sympathetic to the Burmese as he was disillusioned by the British Empire (and that would have been clear at that time), but still, it was published in 1934 and the least racist character in the book still makes pretty racist observations. And the most racist character in the book uses the n-word a lot - he, however, is overtly presented as a despicable character.
Yes, most enjoyable, particularly the Eleanor Ty text book (?). I find more in the novels from the 18th and 19th century English and French women writers than one might think.
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Great! I haven't read her yet. Will have to add one of her books to the list.
Starting: The Nether World by George Gissing;The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford; and,
Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
Starting: Consuelo: A Romance of Venice by George Sand and Villette by Charlotte Brontë.Still working on: Daniel Deronda byGeorge Eliot and Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
I'm rounding the corner on _De Brief voor de Koning_, and then I'll start _Shirley_, unfortunately a couple of weeks after the group read has finished.
@Gilbert, what did you think of _Pamela_?
Pamela was very interesting and well worth the effort.Samuel Richardson's epistolary style was one of the first to brring the "novel" into a format more closely resembling what weare accustomed to today.
The only thing that you may, or not, find difficult is understanding early 19th century English idiom.
Next will be his "Clarissa".
I listened to _Pamela_ on Librivox a few years ago. I don't think the language was much of a problem, as I have been going further back in literary history for a while. It was interesting from an historical perspective; but to me, the whole thing felt a bit repetitive. Did you enjoy the spoofs?I felt that Burney's _Evelina_ was much tighter.
_Clarissa_ is still somewhere on my TBR. I had added it a long while back for the reason you mentioned: that it was considered one of the earliest examples of the novel. Will be interested to hear your thoughts when you've finished it.
Gilbert wrote: "Pamela was very interesting and well worth the effort.Samuel Richardson's epistolary style was one of the first to brring the "novel" into a format more closely resembling what weare accustomed to..."
If you have not already read it, I would recommend Amelia by Henry Fielding, Fiction, Literary which also features in the ‘paper war’ between Richardson and Fielding (and others.) The female protagonist is said to be partly based on Fielding’s first wife.
I read the Pamela, Shamela, Clarissa, and Amelia novels as a set which helped to achieve some balance across the themes of righteousness, villainy, fulfilment and despair.
LiLi wrote: "I listened to _Pamela_ on Librivox a few years ago. I don't think the language was much of a problem, as I have been going further back in literary history for a while. It was interesting from an h..."The spoofs were enjoyable. I found the Haywood "Anti-Pamela" more so than "Shamela".
Trev wrote: "Gilbert wrote: "Pamela was very interesting and well worth the effort.Samuel Richardson's epistolary style was one of the first to brring the "novel" into a format more closely resembling what wea..."
Will get to Amelia maybe next year. Already have most of next year's reading scheduled, which of course, can change.
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Still working on: Daniel Deronda ..."
Sand is a favorite of mine
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I'm currently reading "The Story of My Life" by Casanova! It's insanely entertaining!
Adria wrote: "I read Clarissa in college in an Eighteenth century British Literature class and truly enjoyed reading it. I enjoyed learning about the precursor novels to my favorite Jane Austen novels."If you want to learn more about the precursors to Jane Austen, as well as a few who came after, you might be interested in the following:
Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen by Dale Spender;
Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790's by Eleanor Ty; and,
Not Just Jane: Rediscovering Seven Amazing Women Writers Who Transformed British Literature by Shelley DeWees.
I've read the first two and just started the third. Very well written and so to the point. All the great and, unfortunately, largely forgotten, British women writers from the 17th century through the 19th.
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The book I've read is the 3rd one, which I found very interesting, as all the women had compelling life stories. I believe one of them is Mary Elizabeth Braddon, who we have read in this group, but I had never heard of any of the others.
Adria wrote: "I enjoyed reading Mary Wollstonecraft in college. the name Charlotte Smith rings a bell too. thank you again for these suggestions."Oh neat, the last essay I wrote was on Wollstonecraft! It was pretty short though, we didn't study her for long.
Right now I'm reading Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, Book 1 of In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past. I'm only ~50 pages in but I'm really liking it. The prose is so descriptive and rich, and the first person perspective contributes a lot to the sad, longing narration.
I see that I posted in this thread when I was a member several years ago. I took a long hiatus from all groups, but now I’m giving it another go. As always, I read too many books “at once”. One that I’ll be reading in today is William Dean Howells’ The Landlord at Lion's Head.
With Howells, it is very reasonable to begin with the most famous novels - The Rise of Silas Lapham, A Hazard of New Fortunes, A Modern Instance. The sly blandness of those titles (there are many other such) is a deliberate de-melodramatizing strategy. Howells is kind of American Trollope, although he doesn’t write at such length.
A Modern Instance is, along with George Gissing’s The Whirlpool a few years later, one of the first fictional explorations of a failed marriage, and Howells is more than up to it. In the twilight of the 19th Century, the “happily ever after” concept was starting to buckle.
Howells famously was good friends with both Mark Twain and Henry James, which is kind of a neat trick.
Of the 19th Century British novelists who figure in the standard histories, Charles Reade (1814-1884), a good friend of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, is one of the least-read today. He is best known for an uncharacteristic production, the historical novel The Cloister and the Hearth, but essentially he was a contemporary social fiction writer who was all over the hot-button issues of his day, and quite a bit of a muckraker. I greatly admired the first Reade that I read, It is Never Too Late to Mend, which achieves considerable power in its pictures of English prison life and the Australian goldfields. I just started Put Yourself in His Place, an industrial labor novel set in Sheffield (“Hillsborough”).
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I don’t think we’ve ever read him. Why not put a book or two of his on our bookshelf. You can do that in the books I want to read thread
^ I have done so, although I’m no good at group reads myself. But if you did It is Never Too Late to Mend, I could certainly comment!No one seems to read Reade, I don’t know why. The second chapter of Put Yourself in His Place which I just read last night contains a bit of intensity - I’ll be vague - that is unusual in Victorian fiction.
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No one seems to read Reade, I don’t know why. T..."
I’m a Wilkie Collins fan and never heard of the author you mentioned. You don’t have to worry about group reads. The moderators always lead the discussion
Dickens and Collins and Reade were a famously chummy trio!
Robert Smith Surtees has been pigeon-holed as a fox-hunting novelist, and perhaps partly because of that, has never "boomed," as the critic Edward Wagenknecht once pointed out. But Wagenkecht also astutely notes that it is easy to enjoy Surtees even if one thoroughly disapproves of hunting, because he excels at comic characterizations.Surtees' slangy language is very dense for us and takes some getting used to; some references will be missed by non-specialists. But he is a joyously high-spirited writer, which is immediately noticeable and sustained me through the early going while I was getting used to the style. By the 100-page mark, I was reveling in the entire performance.
The book I chose for my initiation was Surtees' first, Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities. The Hunting, Shooting, Racing, Driving, Sailing, Eccentric and Extravagant Exploits of That Renowned Sporting Citizen Mr. John Jorrocks, not a novel but a collection of fictional sketches that first started appearing in the New Sporting Magazine (which Surtees co-founded) in 1831, and that were gathered between hard covers in 1838. (The Pickwick Papers, very obviously influenced by Jorrocks' adventures, had made Charles Dickens' reputation in the meantime.)
John Jorrocks is a rumbustious Cockney grocer whose character develops over a number of Surtees' fictions, but at the beginning he is pretty much a flat-out idiot, though not lacking in a certain crude charm. At his social level, he is clubbable; his friends enjoy him, for his inanities as much as anything else. And every now and then amidst much foolish chatter he comes out with a bit of down-home wisdom: " - so come without any ceremony - us fox-hunters hate ceremony - where there's ceremony there's no friendship."
Only the first few of the 13 sketches in JJ & J are really hunting pieces; after that, Surtees starts to vary the game, so that we get Jorrocks at the seaside, Jorrocks on excursion in France, Jorrocks throwing a dinner party, and so on. Abundance of ingestion is a running theme; the man eats like one of his horses. He also dandies himself up as much as possible, doing his best to be a "man of mode" despite having (to put it mildly) no gentlemanly or intellectual qualifications.
But elan vital, now that he's got. And if Surtees can't help satirizing Jorrocks, he also admires him for the sheer life-force he represents; appetite for hunting, for food, for nice togs translates easily into appetite for life in general.
Like many a vigorous fellow, Jorrocks feels himself hobbled by his wife, which lends a good deal of marital comedy to the book's later passages: " - wish to God I'd never see'd her - took her for better and worser, it's werry true; but she's a d----d deal worser than I took her for."
In short, if you have any winking fondness for vulgarity at all, Jorrocks is your man, and you ought to make his acquaintance.
Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno / Sylvie and Bruno Concluded is not exactly a work you recommend so much as point out, because honestly, one in 500 people is going to care for this level of extreme eccentricity. Melville’s Mardi: and a Voyage Thither and Robert Browning’s Sordello are two other productions in this same WTF? class. However, it should go without saying by now that I am very fond of all these and similar demented creations. 😏Sylvie and Bruno uneasily combines a daft fantasy with a realistic late Victorian novel, and ladles on the sentimentality in a way that many now find unappealing. But all that said, it is QUITE an experience. I even find Bruno’s oft-criticized baby talk very funny. ("I never talks to nobody when he isn't here! It isn't good manners. Oo should always wait till he comes, before oo talks to him!")
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I had never heard of it but picked it up at a used book store or library sale, but I haven't actually read it yet.
Oh man. You thought Ulysses was difficult, but I assure you it has NOTHING on Robert Browning’s knotty narrative poem Sordello (1840), about 13th Century Italian politics and troubadouring. I used Arthur J. Whyte’s 1913 annotated edition - very helpful it was and very grateful I was for the help. But still, a tough go, lightened by beautiful lines and passages, but the difficulties always remain in view: Like, what is going on, what IS he talking about? Nonetheless, for true hardcore littérateurs, I unhesitatingly recommend.Browning interrupts his narrative at the mid-point for a 400-line digression discussing whether he will finish it, which is not merely a modern but indeed a post-modern gesture, and has to be considered one of the most striking such oddities in any 19th Century text.
Years ago I was supposed to read the entirety of Boswell’s Life of Johnson for a course, but I was taking four graduate-level English classes and one education class that semester, plus teaching part-time, so I only managed excerpts. But I promised myself that I would get back to the text, and so I have, now halfway through the Oxford unabridged edition. A complete joy.I will always be grateful that I got an excellent grounding in 17th and 18th Century British literature as an undergrad at Yale, so I have a head start on Boswell because the context and personalities are familiar.
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George Crabbe (1754-1832) is famed for bringing a new realism and down-to-earthness to English poetry, and indeed The Borough (1810), which I am reading just now, embodies those characteristics. The rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter give the book an easy readable “swing”. As usual, the sections about the religious controversies of the day are the least penetrable. * The sections pertaining to the village and the seaside are wonderful, and the latter famously provides the basis for Britten’s opera Peter Grimes.* Matthew Arnold’s famed essay sequence Culture and Anarchy offers similarly difficult passages for anyone but a specialized religious historian.
Robert Louis Stevenson was a persistently sickly and convalescent individual who famously died young at age 44, but in reading his Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson one is struck by the fact that he simply could not stay in one place for long. He was constantly on the move at a time when travel was far more arduous than it is today. Some of that travel was to generate material for books, but a lot of it was intended for recuperation (spa towns, places with better weather, and so on).It is hardly a deep insight to suggest that his chances of improving health would have been far better if he had just stayed somewhere, anywhere, instead of frenziedly pursuing well-being like a chimera. Yet this elementary point seems to have been ignored / resisted by both RLS and the people around him. Stevenson was obviously intelligent, a great writer, and heroic in his summoning of what little energy he had; but the need for novelty functioned in him self-destructively, like a substance abuse problem. One waits in the letters for a glimmer of realization: “Maybe I should just calm down.” It doesn’t come.
Adria wrote: "in regards to Matthew Arnold, I wont feel guilty now for never quite appreciating the "enrichment"of his work. his writings often seemed esoteric."I wound up liking Culture and Anarchy a lot, but there is no doubt that his references to the contemporary situation can seem frightfully esoteric today. There is a warning in that, I think, against over-topicality when one is trying (as he clearly was) to make lasting philosophic points.
Not all of Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires are science-fictional in nature; many are straight adventures, such as The Archipelago on Fire aka Islands on Fire, about the Greek War of Independence, which I am reading in the excellent new translation by Chris Amies. As always with Verne, there is a lot of factuality, specifically geography, and I am really brushing up on my Greek islands, let me tell you. Quiz me on the Cyclades versus the Sporades, I’m ready. Recent decades have been good ones for English-reading Verne fans, with many untranslated works appearing for the first time, and new authoritative translations of the more famous works replacing older abridged, expurgated, or inaccurate ones. There are some of the novels, though, that you have to dig up in the old 19th Century versions because that is still all that exists. But Verne was prolific, we are lucky to now have just about everything in English, one way or another.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea was the first adult novel I ever read, in the summer between second and third grades. I became such a Verne fanatic that my mom special-ordered I.O. Evans’ Jules Verne and His Work for me, since our town library didn’t have it.
Midway through Emilia Pardo Bazán’s brilliant 1886 novel The House of Ulloa, a member of the decayed Galician landed gentry and his new bride visit an even grander and more decrepit family and mansion, and when the bride is offered seating in the alarming-looking drawing room, the worm- and insect-eaten ceremonial chair crumbles to dust beneath her. Now this is the power of fiction in a nutshell. You should have heard my intake of breath. I might add that Spanish fiction of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, so neglected in the English-speaking world, abounds in moments of such force.
I have a bit of a problem now, though. Pardo Bazán wrote a sequel to this novel, Mother Nature (La madre naturaleza), which was translated and published by Bucknell University Press in 2010. There is no paperback or ebook. The list price of the hardcover is $114.00. Amazon has it new for $85.65; the cheapest price in the used book market appears to be $71.70.
Now I ask you, is this kind of punitive pricing any way to treat lovers of literature? I could see Bucknell slapping a $35.00 or even $45.00 price on the hardcover, with a paperback at 2/3 of that, but $114.00 is just ridiculous.
I am eager to read the sequel, but at these prices I simply don’t have access to it, and living outside the US, inter-library loan is not an option. I wish my reading in Spanish were up to tackling the original text, which I could have at a reasonable price, but I’m not quite that advanced.
Ah well, I guess the book just goes on my long “Challenges to Obtain” list.
The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910
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Lol I love this. I read my kindle in bed because I don’t have to turn on the light.