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The Common Reader second series

December 10, 2015 by Roy Johnson

essays and reviews on literary and cultural history

The Common Reader second series (1935) is a collection of essays by Virginia Woolf, the second to be published in her own lifetime. It followed on the success of The Common Reader first series which was published in 1925. Sales of the first volume had surprised both Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard working together at their own enterprise, The Hogarth Press.

Common Reader second series

first edition – cover design by Vanessa Bell

The amazing thing is that whilst Woolf was producing all her great novels of the English modernist period, she was also a very productive journalist. This collection includes critical essays, journalism, and book reviews that had previously appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Life and Letters, The Nation, Vogue, The New York Herald, The Yale Review, and Figaro.


The Common Reader second series – commentary

Following the pattern established in The Common Reader first series the essays are arranged in chronological order by subject. The volume begins with a study of Elizabethan writers and ends with an appreciation of Thomas Hardy – who was a friend of Virginia Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen. This collection also includes the much-quoted essay “How Should One Read a Book?” in which Woolf offers some profound reflections on the relationship between reader and text. In the first instance her advice appears deceptively simple:

“The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions”.

But it turns out that these instincts and this reason are to be based on a very wide reading experience indeed – of novels, biography, history, and poetry. And the experience itself will be multi-layered, for each book must be compared with others of the same kind, and will finally be judged against the best of its kind. And this is not offered in any spirit of elitism – because she fully realises that much of what we consume as readers will be fairly trivial:

The greater part of any library is nothing but the record of … fleeting moments in the lives of man, women, and donkeys. Every literature, as it grows old, has its rubbish heap, its record of vanished moments and forgotten lives told in faltering and feeble accents that have perished. But if you give yourself up to the delight of rubbish reading, you will be surprised, indeed you will be overcome, by the relics of human life that have been cast out to moulder.

At their best these essays combine a high degree of erudition with the enthusiasm of a writer who is a great lover of literature but who also wants her opinions to be read. Her study of John Donne is part biography, part practical analysis and also an explanation of why he is so ‘modern’ after three hundred years. She explains the relationship between the subjects of his poems and the audience or individual patrons for whom he was writing. She also traces his acceptance of contradictions in himself and life in general which makes him appeal to modern sensibilities.

An essay written on the occasion of the death of Thomas Hardy in 1928 is a survey of his entire work as a novelist. It reveals her deep appreciation of his talent as a creator of powerful human dramas, a countryman and self-taught scholar with poetry at his fingertips, Even though Hardy was a friend of Virginia Woolf’s family she is not at all sycophantic in her judgements. She sees flaws in Jude the Obscure (overly pessimistic) and is even critical of his style.

Her article on Robinson Crusoe is not only an appreciation of the novel in the context of a history of the English novel, but also a meditation on fiction and biography. She takes a topic, brings a great deal of literary erudition to bear upon it, but then relates the topic to a much larger cultural context – as well as generating sparkly digressions that show her to be a passionate reader herself.

The range of her interests is quite breathtaking. There are articles on Swift, on Laurence Sterne, Lord Chesterfield, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Gissing, and on George Meredith, who in her own lifetime had sunk from untouchable fame to a writer who nobody read any more. [Today his critical reputation is more or less extinct.]

It is certainly true that the pace and tone of the literary essay was significantly different one hundred years ago when these examples were composed. Writers even as well informed and technically skilful as Woolf were given license to ramble and generalise in a manner that would not generally be permitted today. But in the essay form she demonstrates a profound cultural intelligence to which the occasional flights of fancy are an acceptable and very stylish bonus extra.

© Roy Johnson 2015


The Common Reader second series – study resources

The Common Reader second series The Common Reader second series – Amazon UK
The Common Reader second series The Common Reader second series – Amazon US

The Common Reader second series Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon UK
The Common Reader second series Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

The Common Reader second series The Common Reader second series – free eBook formats – Gutenberg

The Common Reader second series


Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader second series, London: Mariner Books, 2003, pp.336, ISBN: 0156028166


The Common Reader second series – contents
  • The Strange Elizabethans
  • Donne After Three Centuries
  • “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia”
  • “Robinson Crusoe”
  • Dorothy Osborne’s “Letters”
  • Swift’s “Journal to Stella”
  • The “Sentimental Journey”
  • Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son
  • Two Parsons
    1. James Woodforde
    2. The Rev. John Skinner
  • Dr. Burney’s Evening Party
  • Jack Mytton
  • De Quincey’s Autobiography
  • Four Figures
    1. Cowper and Lady Austen
    2. Beau Brummell
    3. Mary Wollstonecraft
    4. Dorothy Wordsworth
  • William Hazlitt
  • Geraldine and Jane
  • “Aurora Leigh”
  • The Niece of an Earl
  • George Gissing
  • The Novels of George Meredith
  • “I Am Christina Rossetti”
  • The Novels of Thomas Hardy
  • How Should One Read a Book?

Virginia Woolf – the complete Essays

The Common Reader first series 1925 — The Common Reader first series

The Common Reader second series 1932 — The Common Reader second series

The Death of the Moth 1942 — The Death of the Moth

The Moment 1947 — The Moment and Other Essays

The Captain's Death Bed 1950 — The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

Granite and Rainbow 1958 — Granite and Rainbow


More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group


Filed Under: Virginia Woolf Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, The essay, Virginia Woolf

The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf

November 26, 2014 by Roy Johnson

The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf is a series of tutorials and guidance notes on all Woolf’s shorter fiction. She wrote many of these stories as experimental sketches or exercises in which she developed new techniques for prose fiction and the art of story-telling. The majority of the stories were written between 1917 and the early 1930s – a period which also saw the creation of her most famous modernist novels. The series is an on-going compilation and is shown here in alphabetical order. Dates given are for first publication.

The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   A Haunted House   — (1921)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   A Simple Melody   — (1925)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   A Summing Up   — (1944)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   An Unwritten Novel   — (1920)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   Ancestors   — (1923)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   Happiness   — (1925)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   In the Orchard   — (1923)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   Kew Gardens   — (1917)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   Moments of Being   — (1925)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   Monday or Tuesday   — (1921)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   Phyllis and Rosamond   — (1906)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   Solid Objects   — (1920)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   Sympathy   — (1919)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The Evening Party   — (1920)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The Introduction   — (1925)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The Lady in the Looking-Glass   — (1929)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The Legacy   — (1940)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The Man who Loved his Kind   — (1944)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The Mark on the Wall   — (1917)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The Mysterious Case of Miss V   — (1906)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The New Dress   — (1927)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The Shooting Party   — (1938)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The String Quartet   — (1921)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The Symbol   — (1930s)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   The Watering Place   — (1941)
The Complete Short Stories of Virginia Woolf   Together and Apart   — (1944)


Mont Blanc pen - Virginia Woolf edition

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition


Other works by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf To the LighthouseTo the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse Buy the book at Amazon US

Woolf - OrlandoOrlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Orlando Buy the book at Amazon US
 

Kew GardensKew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon US
 


Virginia Woolf: BiographyVirginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
Virginia Woolf - A Biography Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - A Biography Buy the book at Amazon US


Virginia Woolf – web links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

© Roy Johnson 2014


More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group


Filed Under: Short Stories, The Short Story, Virginia Woolf Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, The Short Story, Virginia Woolf

The Complete Tales of Joseph Conrad

November 24, 2014 by Roy Johnson

The Complete Tales of Joseph Conrad is a series of tutorials and guidance notes on all the shorter fiction of Joseph Conrad. The stories are commonly given the name ‘tales’ or ‘shorter fiction’ because hardly any of them are now what would be considered traditional short stories. Some of them were originally published as serials in magazines, as was common with novels at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, one or two (such as The Secret Sharer and The Shadow Line) are now commonly regarded as novellas. The series is shown here in alphabetical order.

The Complete Tales of Joseph Conrad   A Smile of Fortune — (1911)
The Complete Tales of Joseph Conrad   Amy Foster — (1901)
The Complete Tales of Joseph Conrad   An Anarchist — (1906)
The Complete Tales of Joseph Conrad   An Outpost of Progress — (1897)
The Complete Tales of Joseph Conrad   Because of the Dollars — (1915)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   Falk: A Reminiscence — (1903)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   Freya of the Seven Isles — (1912)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   Gaspar Ruiz — (1906)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   Il Conde — (1908)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   Karain: A Memory — (1897)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   Prince Roman — (1911)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   The Black Mate — (1908)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   The Brute — (1906)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   The Duel — (1908)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   The End of the Tether — (1902)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   The Idiots — (1896)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   The Informer — (1906)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   The Inn of the Two Witches — (1915)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   The Lagoon — (1897)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   The Partner — (1915)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   The Planter of Malata — (1915)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   The Return — (1898)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   The Secret Sharer — (1910)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   The Shadow Line — (1917)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   The Tale — (1917)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   The Warrior’s Soul — (1917)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   To-Morrow — (1902)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   Typhoon — (1902)
The Tales of Joseph Conrad   Youth — (1898)


Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

© Roy Johnson 2015


More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
More on Joseph Conrad tales


Filed Under: Joseph Conrad, Short Stories, The Short Story Tagged With: English literature, Joseph Conrad, Literary studies, The Short Story

The Custom of the Country

July 20, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Custom of the Country (1913) presents a central character who ignores any positive influences which surround her, and always does the wrong thing with the worst possible motives. The novel deals with issues which now seem amazingly contemporary – the striving for wealth, fashionability, and a nouveau riche lifestyle which is something like an early twentieth century version of Hello magazine. And yet because these issues are connected so closely with class and wealth the narrative also has its ideological roots in Balzac.

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton

When Jane Austen wrote Mansfield Park she created a heroine (Fanny Price) who is increasingly difficult for readers to tolerate – because she never puts a foot wrong. No matter that all the other characters around her have human weaknesses and failings, Fanny Price suffers in silence and always does the Right Thing. This makes her tediously self-righteous and insufferably priggish. Edith Wharton’s Undine Spragg is the opposite: she is insufferably self-seeking and obnoxious, and she claws her way to success by trampling on anyone who gets in her way.


The Custom of the Country – critical commentary

This is a study of ruthless social ambition, material greed, and self-indulgence which seems almost to presage the bitchy anti-heroines of contemporary television soap operas. Undine Spragg has almost no redeeming characteristics whatsoever, and in some senses it is a mystery why Edith Wharton shoud have spent so much of her creative energy documenting such a negative example of American social life.

Undine Spragg claims that her ambition is simply “amusement with respectability”, and a number of commentators have been happy enough to take her at face value. But this simple formula is neither truthful not sufficiently comprehensive. Her notion of ‘amusement’ also includes constant change. For instance, she is married four times within a decade. It also includes an extravagant standard of living and self-indulgent expenditure on an almost industrial scale. Needless to say, it also includes egotism writ large and no effort on her part to play any constructive part in creating the ‘amusement’.

The term ‘respectability’ is in fact her portmanteau term for both fashionability and high class – and she is incapable of making the necessary distinction between the two. She mistakes Ralph Marvell’s class for wealth which he doesn’t have, and Raymond de Chelles’s class for fashionability, of which he and his family are the antithesis.

The only accurate assessment she makes is to see that she and her ex-husband Elmer Moffatt are two of the same kind – new world fortune seekers who wish nothing to stand in the way of their ambition.

It’s a mystery why Edith Wharton should have them both triumphant in the end. The only disappointment Undine Spragg faces is the recognition that there are some echelons of society which will remain forever shut off to her. As a divorced woman, she can never become an ambassador’s wife. Oh dear.


The Custom of the Country – study resources

The Custom of the Country The Custom of the Country – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Custom of the Country The Custom of the Country – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Custom of the Country The Custom of the Country – Bantam Classics – Amazon UK

The Custom of the Country The Custom of the Country – Bantam Classics – Amazon US

The Custom of the Country The Custom of the Country – Penguin classics – Amazon UK

The Custom of the Country The Custom of the Country – Penguin classics – Amazon US

The Custom of the Country The Custom of the Country – eBook formats at Gutenberg

The Custom of the Country The Custom of the Country – audioBook version at LibriVox

The Custom of the Country The Custom of the Country – audio CD (unabridged) – Amazon UK

The Custom of the Country The Custom of the Country – Kindle eBook edition

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Custom of the Country


The Custom of the Country – plot summary

Undine Spragg is an ambitious and visually attractive young woman with decent but indulgent parents who she has persuaded to move from their mid-western province to upper class New York. This is to enable her to realise her dreams of becoming a fashionable socialite. She is uneducated, gauche, and snobbish, and everything she does is motivated by vanity, greed, laziness, and self-interest.

Edith Wharton - The Custom of the CountryBy mixing with what she thinks are the right sorts of people, she manages to secure a husband from ‘old money’ New York society – not realising that he has no personal wealth and very few social prospects. She quickly becomes bored with him, and even though he takes up a job to provide them with additional income, she overspends, ‘borrows’ money from one of her married admirers (Peter Van Degan), and even neglects her own child.

Elmer Moffatt, a shady figure from her past keeps appearing in the story. He agrees to remain silent about a previous engagement in her past if she will introduce him to people of influence. She is eventually instrumental in facilitating a business venture between Moffatt and her own husband. They both profit from the deal – but she uses the money to leave her husband and child whilst she goes on an extended trip to Paris, where she hopes to secure a richer new husband in the form of Van Degan.

Whilst her husband looks after their child and works hard to pay her bills, she goes on a tour of European pleasure resorts with Van Degan. She receives messages that her husband is desperately ill, but chooses to ignore them. Van Degan takes her to out-of-the-way spots where they will not be seen, and when she returns to the United States in order to secure a divorce, he abandons her.

As a divorced woman, Undine fails to reconnect with New York society, so she returns to Paris using her parents as a social smokescreen, When they return to the USA she stays on, mixing with minor aristocracy, and re-meeting Raymond de Chelles, a former admirer.

Still living beyond her means, she asks Elmer Moffatt for money, which he refuses, In order to marry Raymond de Chelles (who is a french Catholic) she needs a papal annulment of her marriage, which costs a lot of money. So she claims custody of her child Paul (who she has abandoned) hoping that Ralph will buy back from her the right to keep his son. Ralph borrows money and invests it in a speculative business deal with Elmer Moffatt to raise the funds.

The scheme fails to materialise, at which point it is revealed that Undine had previously been married to Moffatt (which explains the pact of confidence between them). In desperation at his predicament, Ralph shoots himself – which leaves Undine a widow rather than a divorced woman. She inherits Ralph’s money, and the portion allotted to her own son, and marries Raymond de Chelles. A year later the business deal with Moffatt pays off, and she receives that money too.

However, she feels stifled and trapped in the marriage with de Chelles and his very traditional family, and when Moffatt turns up yet again to buy some of the de Chelles family antiques heirlooms, Undine can see that he has become a very rich and even influential man. She proposes a secret affair with him – which he refuses, insisting on a proper marriage.

As the novels ends, Undine is re-married to Moffatt and lives at the pinnacle of New York society – but she is already becoming bored with her fourth husband and realises that there are some echelons of society to which she will never be able to aspire.


Principal characters
Undine Spragg a social climber from midwest USA
Abner Spragg her indulgent father, a financier
Leota Spragg her indulgent mother
Ralph Marvell poetic aspirations, lightweight son of old New York family
Mrs Heeny manicurist, masseuse, and confidant to Mrs Spragg
Elmer Moffatt business man from Undine’s provincial past
Peter Van Degan rich, loud, boorish socialite
Clare Van Degan his wife, who is in love with Ralph
Raymond de Chelles a French aristocrat with a traditional family
Paul Marvell Undine and Ralph’s son, who lives with his father, then his stepfather
Claud Washingham Popple a society artist who paints Undine’s portrait

Edith Wharton at her desk

Edith Wharton at her writing desk


Further reading

Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman of her Time, New York: Viking, 1971,

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1982, pp.222. ISBN: 0820305138

Janet Beer, Edith Wharton (Writers & Their Work), New York: Northcote House, 2001, pp.99, ISBN: 0746308981

Millicent Bell (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.232, ISBN: 0521485134

Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (eds), Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, New York: Garland, 1992, pp.329, ISBN: 0824078489

Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, ISBN: 0810927950

Gloria C. Erlich, The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, California: University of California Press, 1992, pp.223, ISBN: 0520075838

Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals, UPNE, 1990, pp.220, ISBN: 0874515246

Irving Howe, (ed), Edith Wharton: A collection of Critical Essays, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986,

Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.240, ISBN: 0521830893

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, London: Vintage, new edition 2008, pp.864, ISBN: 0099763516

R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975, pp.592, ISBN: 0880640200

James W. Tuttleton (ed), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.586, ISBN: 0521383196

Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991,

Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Work, Fact on File, 1998, pp.352, ISBN: 0816034818

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, New York: Perseus Books, second edition 1994, pp.512, ISBN: 0201409186


Other works by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton - Ethan FromeEthan Frome (1911) tells the story of a poor farmer, lonely and downtrodden, his wife Zeena, and her cousin, the enchanting Mattie Silver. In the playing out of this novella’s powerful and engrossing drama, Edith Wharton constructed her least characteristic and most celebrated book. In its unyielding and shocking pessimism, its bleak demonstration of tragic waste, it is a masterpiece of psychological and emotional realism. Every detail of the story contributes to a shocking and powerful conclusion you will never forget. This book is now regarded as a classic of the novella genre.
Edith Wharton - Ethan Frome Buy the book at Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - Ethan Frome Buy the book at Amazon US

Edith Wharton - The Age of InnocenceThe Age of Innocence (1920) is Edith Wharton’s most famous novel, written immediately after the end of the First World War. It’s a brilliantly realized anatomy of New York society in the 1870s. Newland Archer is charming, tactful, and enlightened. He accepts society’s standards and abides by its rules, but he also recognizes its limitations. His engagement to the impeccable May Welland assures him of a safe and conventional future – until the arrival of May’s cousin Ellen Olenska puts all his plans in jeopardy. Independent, free-thinking, and scandalously separated from her husband, Ellen forces Archer to question the values and assumptions of his narrow world. As their love for each other grows, Archer has to decide where his ultimate loyalty lies.
Edith Wharton - The Age of Innocence Buy the book at Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The Age of Innocence Buy the book at Amazon US

Edith Wharton - The House of MirthThe House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book at Amazon UK
Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth Buy the book at Amazon US


Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

Edith Wharton Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith WhartonEdith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

Edith WhartonThe Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

Edith WhartonThe Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith WhartonEdith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith WhartonEdith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

© Roy Johnson 2011


More on Edith Wharton
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories


Filed Under: Edith Wharton Tagged With: American literature, Edith Wharton, Literary studies, The Custom of the Country, The novel

The Dean’s December

April 24, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Dean’s December (1982) was Saul Bellow’s first novel after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. Like many of his other works it has a strongly autobiographical basis. Between 1975 and 1985 Bellow was married to Alexander Ionescu Tulcea, a mathematician from Bucharest in Romania. Both of her parents were distinguished academics – as are those of Minna, the fictional wife in the novel.

The Dean's December

The events of the narrative move back and forth between Bucharest and Chicago – two cities about which Bellow draws a number of subtle parallels. The totalitarian oppression of the ultra-Stalinist state in Romania results in corruption and inefficiency of one kind. The wild anarchy of free-market capitalism in the USA results in desperation and horrors of a different order. Bellow’s protagonist Albert Corde attempts to find an accommodation with both systems whilst struggling to retain his humanitarian system of values.


The Dean’s December – critical comment

Historical background

In the period covered by the events of the novel, Romania was in the ‘sphere of influence’ of the Soviet Union, and was ruled by the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The country was a police state, with extensive corruption, spying on its own citizens by the secret police (the ‘Securitate’) and a ‘cult of personality’ around the dictator and his wife. The country was depleted by food shortages, and both press and broadcasting media were state controlled. It was reputed to be the most totalitarian all the Eastern Block countries.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ceausescu was eventually overthrown in 1989. He and his wife escaped by helicopter but were captured fleeing the country. They were tried, found guilty of embezzlement of state funds and genocide, then executed on Christmas Day in 1989.

Chicago at the same time was governed by what is called ‘machine politics’. That is, political power and decision-making was controlled by a small elite who relied on a corrupt system of patronage, bribes, and collusion between political appointees, the police, trades unions, and gangsters. The city had a very high rate of violent crime, extensively related to the control of drugs amongst rival gangs.

The city was governed for twenty-one years by mayor Richard J. Daley. Many of the members of his administration were charged and convicted of corruption. He was notorious for his manipulation of the democratic process, and is remembered for the cynical piece of political wisdom: “Vote early—and often”.

Narrative style

Saul Bellow is renowned for his novels which have fast-talking first person narrators. They are fictional characters who deliver the events of the story, an amusing commentary on contemporary society, and quasi-philosophic reflections – all at the same time.

Technically. The Dean’s December has an outer third person omniscient narrator – who introduces Albert Corde as a character. But the truth is that the majority of the novel is taken up with Corde’s thoughts, his observations, and his first-person reflections on life in Bucharest and Chicago.

Bellow moves very skilfully from third to first-person narrative mode and back again. The following extract starts in third person omniscient narrative mode. It then moves into interior monologue, and switches to Corde’s point of view. It then goes back to an objective account of Corde’s thoughts – including comments on his own reflections – and ends in a first person narrative mode.

She gave him a fully open look. But he didn’t have the confidence he had once had in these open looks. It wasn’t that he distrusted Vlada, but people were never as sincere as they revved themselves up to be. They couldn’t guarantee that their purposes were fixed and constant. Yes, constancy. Love is not love which alters where it alteration finds. What did love have to do with it? She only wanted to show that he could really trust her. And what he thought was, I’m pale, I look unwell, I look rotten, I’m skittish and jumpy—I’m all over the place (quoting Shakespeare out of context). She wants to be nice to me. I had an especially blasting morning. It’s still with me. All right, I trust you, Vlada, but you want to get me to take on this job. Probably she’s somewhat surprised that I don’t jump at the chance.

The Dean’s dilemma

The novel can be seen as a series of discussions that Albert Corde conducts with the other characters in the novel – including an ongoing debate with himself, He finds himself at odds with the other figures in the narrative – even those who are close to him and with whom he shares what he thinks of as ‘core values’.

He is devoted to his new younger wife Minna, but she is a scientist, an astro-physicist dealing with issues he does not understand. He deals in literature and the humanities, and although she respects his standing as an academic and journalist, their intellectual worlds are foreign to each other.

He is very sympathetic to his sister Elfride, but her wayward son Mason puts a barrier between them. Mason represents a part of contemporary society that is very much at odds with Corde and all he stands for. Mason is the spoiled child of rich parents who has decided to be contrarian. He identifies with the black ghettos (whilst robbing his own mother) and challenges Corde’s defence of a young white woman whose husband has been murdered.

Mason claims that Corde is out of touch with Chicago reality – and so does the boy’s father, the tough lawyer Zaehner who accuses Corde of taking the soft option of a tenured academic professorship – comparing him with ‘an unmarried mother on welfare with ten kids’.

The implication is that Corde, for all his protestations of concern, is hiding in a privileged sector of society whilst others face up to the problems of modern capitalistic democracy and some of the horrors it creates. There is a certain amount of truth in this claim – which is partly why Corde renounces his professorship at the end of the novel and decides to help the scientist Beech with his work on environmentalism.

Corde is also not without a sense of self-criticism. He worries about his articles in Harper’s which have exposed unpleasant details about life in modern Chicago. Everybody is telling him that he has gone ‘too far’ and exposed too much unpleasantness. This criticism is brought to its most subtle and exquisite pitch in the character of Alec Witt, the college Provost. Witt appears to be sympathetic to Corde with his brilliant wife and a mother-in-law who is dying, yet he wraps all his supportive conversation in an invisible film of veiled threats.

It is quite clear that the novel is inviting us to accept Corde’s traditional, humanistic, and sceptical set of values. It contrasts those with the attitudes of time-serving bureaucrats – in both eastern Europe, where the difference is almost grotesque, and the West, where the differences are more nuanced.

It is worth noting that Corde is sympathetic to the socialist values of his relatives in Bucharest – even showing a degree of understanding to those who have been forced to become police informers in order to survive. He also appreciates the sacrifices and deprivations suffered by those who have been former Party members but kept their old allegiances and beliefs alive. He reflects on the elderly figure of Gigi, who is facing the death of her sister

She was studying her death, that was for sure. Corde thought of her with extraordinary respect. Her personal humanity came from the old sources. Corde had become better informed about these sources in Paris and London.

Those ‘old sources’ are the heart of what the novel wishes to promote – and they are the moral and social values based upon the canon of western philosophy and literature. This was something Bellow defended in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and the reason why he is regarded by some as holding conservative political values and by others as a defender of liberalism.

The essence of our real condition, the complexity, the confusion, the pain of it, is shown to us in glimpses, in what Proust and Tolstoy thought of as ‘true impressions’. This essence reveals and then conceals itself. When it goes away it leaves us again in doubt. But our connection remains with the depths from which these glimpses come.


The Dean’s December – study resources

The Dean's December The Dean’s December – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Dean's December The Dean’s December – Penguin – Amazon US

The Dean's December The Dean’s December – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Dean's December The Dean’s December – Library of America – Amazon US

The Dean's December Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Dean's December Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Dean's December Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz UK

The Dean's December Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz US

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

The Dean's December


The Dean’s December – chapter summaries

i. Albert Corde is an American college dean and a professor of journalism. He and his Romanian wife Minna are in Bucharest, visiting her mother Valeria who is in hospital following a heart attack. They are confronted by bureaucratic intransigence, and the city is in the grip of shortages and the secret police.

Corde recalls his appreciative relationship with his mother-in-law, who has been a distinguished doctor. She has read his articles on Chicago, and he has escorted her on holidays in London, where he has sensed that she is getting too old for such trips.

ii. Corde and Minna devise strategies to circumvent the punitive rules denying them access to her mother. They think of employing a corrupt brain surgeon who was once her father’s student. They also hope for support from friends in Chicago.

iii. The previous summer Corde was called to identify a dead white student who was involved in an inter-racial murder. Corde raises a reward for information, and black suspects are arrested. His student nephew Mason accuses him of prejudice and misunderstanding. Corde tries to consider the evidence from the boy’s point of view, but fails. Corde is writing about Chicago, but Mason claims he doesn’t really understand the unpleasant truths of modern society.

iv. Corde is well looked after by Gigi, but they battle against rationing, shortages, and primitive social conditions. He is invited to the US embassy where he asks the ambassador for help in gaining access to Valeria. The. Ambassador reveals that a childhood friend and rival of Corde’s is in Bucharest on a journalistic assignment.

Receiving news from home, Corde recalls his last meeting with his sister. She seeks to defend her son Mason who has threatened trial witnesses and gone on the run. Corde also reflects on his cousin Max , a crooked lawyer who has cheated him out of a lot of money.

v. The hospital will allow only one further visit, for which bribes will be needed. Corde meets his old college friend Dewey Spangler who is now a well-connected reporter They reminisce about Chicago and Corde reflects on his own ethical values which have been formed by traditional literary culture.

vi. Corde and Minna bribe their way into a hospital visit where Valeria is clearly dying. Corde reflects on how his westernised values and behaviour must seem to his socialist relatives.

vii. Corde reads through the scientific proposal from geologist Beech. It is an environmental warning about lead poisoning. Corde’s secretary Miss Parsons sends a bundle of mail that rakes up all the problems back in Chicago. His defence of former county jail governor Rufus Redpath is held against him.

viii. Corde reviews some of the horrible crimes and court scenes he has reported in his articles. He also reads his own gruesome account of patients on kidney dialysis machines in the county hospital.

ix. Valeria dies in the hospital Corde and Minna are caught up in the bureaucratic procedures for the funeral. A telephone call from the college provost pretends to be supportive, but is full of veiled threats Corde recalls visiting a poor neighbourhood community centre run by two former drug addicts.

x. Corde re-reads his interview with a public defence lawyer in a particularly savage case of rape and murder. They discuss the philosophic basis of a criminal underclass in society and what can be done about it.

xi. Corde, Minna, and friends attend Valeria’s funeral. Many of her old comrades turn out to pay their respects, despite the Party’s disapproval.

xii. Corde and his friend Vlada discuss the Beech proposal on environmentalism. She tries to persuade him to collaborate: he remains sceptical and explains his reservations. This leads to global philosophies and her news that Corde’s sister is marrying judge Sorokin.

xiii. Corde and Spangler reminisce about their Chicago boyhood together. Spangler has been impressed by Corde’s articles, but he criticises him for hiding away as a tenured professor. He also reveals that he has medical problems and is using a colostomy bag.

xiv. The family are assembling heirlooms to smuggle out of the country. Minna is angry about her mother’s death. Conflicts of opinion arise with Corde, despite his wish to protect her. He reflects on differences between his own ideology and that of the business-based world of Chicago commerce.

xv. Minna becomes ill. Corde attends the interment of Valeria’s ashes at the cemetery. He discusses American and eastern European values with Vlada. The Chicago trial has found the defendant Lucas Ebry guilty.

xvi. Back in Chicago Minna goes into hospital. Corde hides away from the urban squalor and violence he has written about and which still surrounds him.

xvii. When Minna recovers they attend a swanky party given in honour of a dog’s birthday. It is revealed that his friend Dewey Spangler has written an embarrassing article about Corde.

xviii. Spangler’s article is a friendly stab in the back. He has used material Corde gave him during their conversations but has put it into a very negative context.

xix. Corde and Minna travel to Mount Palomar where she is doing research. He has been reproached by the college Provost and has resigned from the college. He decides to help Beech with his environmental work.


The Dean’s December – principal characters
Albert Corde an American college dean and professor of journalism
Minna his wife, a Romanian astro-physicist
Valeria Minna’s dying mother,
Tanti Gigi Valeria’s sister
Elfrida Zaehner Corde’s sister
Mason Zaehner Elfrida’s wayward son, a student
Dewey Spangler Corde’s childhood friend, a rival journalist
Alec Witt Corde’s college provost
Vlada Voynich a Chicago scientist
Fay Porson Corde’s secretary, a cougar

© Roy Johnson 2017


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Filed Under: Saul Bellow Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, Saul Bellow, The novel

The Death of the Moth

January 4, 2016 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature, reading, and cultural history

The Death of the Moth (1942) is the third volume of Virginia Woolf’s essays to be published after the success of her earlier collections The Common Reader first series and The Common Reader second series. Early preparations were made by Virginia Woolf herself, and then it appeared one year after her death, edited by her husband Leonard Woolf.

The Death of the Moth

He explains in his introduction that the essays had previously appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman & Nation, the Yale Review, the New York Herald Tribune, the Atlantic Monthly, the Listener, the New Republic, and Lysistrata. He also goes on to point out that Virginia Woolf took immense care with even the shortest and least important of her essays and book reviews – often producing up to eight versions of a text before she was satisfied.

At the point of assembling this collection Leonard Woolf thought that the totality of Virginia’s finished essays and reviews had been located, edited, and published. But subsequent researches and retrievals from newspaper archives were to produce the later collections The Moment and Other Essays (1947), The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (1950), and Granite and Rainbow (1958).


The Death of the Moth – critical commentary

The brief essay that gives this volume its title illustrates perfectly her gift for spinning literary gold out of straw. The subject is trivial and mundane – a moth fluttering against a window pane. But she observes it as a philosopher who uses the image to reflect on the most fundamental force of nature – the struggle between life and death.

She also draws out the complexities in apparently simple things – such as the words we use to speak and write. In an essay called ‘Craftsmanship’ – which was built from a radio broadcast for the BBC in a series called ‘Words Fail Me’ – she reflects on the volatility of language and our difficulties in pinning down meaning. The following Youtube illustrated audio clip gives an extract from the broadcast:

In some pieces, such as ‘Evening Over Sussex’ she not only explores the complexities of expressing her appreciation of the countryside but she also weaves into the verbal landscape her reflections on the nature of multiple personalities which construct the individual sensibility making such observations.

Three reviews of Henry James – two memoirs and the letters – almost take on the famous style of her author-subject – the long sentences, baroque syntax, and complex metaphors that his fans so admire and his detractors bewail. She dwells mainly on his relationship with England and his not-uncritical admiration for its traditions, through which she expresses her own reverence for James as a figure representing a bygone age.

Her literary criticism is of a kind that hardly exists any more. In an extended study of E.M. Forster’s novels she is lofty and magisterial, but she evaluates the works using bafflingly abstract metaphors:

there are moments — and his first novel [Where Angels Fear to Tread] provides several instances — when he lays his hand on the prize.

She believes that one of his greatest novels is Howards End – it ‘mark[s] his prime’, yet when she gets round to looking at it in detail exclaims ‘we may wonder in what mood of the moment we can have been prompted to call it a failure … the book as a whole lacks force’.

In ‘The Art of Biography’ she points out that fiction and biography cannot be easily combined because they have different goals – one towards factuality, the other towards invention. As a novelist and biographer herself, she resolves this contradiction by suggesting that biography is a young genre, that it should explore new methods, and that it acts as a modest handmaid to the work of truly imaginative and great artists.

Her reflections on the condition of young English poets in 1931 are cast in the form of a letter to ‘John’: (this is John Lehmann, who worked for Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press). Against his despair that poetry was ‘dead’ she invokes the great English tradition – of Shakespeare, Donne, Crabbe, Hopkins – urges him and his friends to stop looking inward and write about other people, and implores him ‘for heaven’s sake, publish nothing before you are thirty’.

The volume ends with some vivacious polemics – a critique of lectures as a teaching method in the university education system (sixty years ahead of its time); an account of how she was forced to kill the Victorian notion of ‘The Angel in the House’ (the ideal woman) in order to become a professional author; and what might be the best antidotes to the clamour for aggression and war.

These essays are a wonderful reminder of how Woolf managed to successfully combine serious and profoundly new ideas about everyday life (particularly the lives of women) with both the wit and the erudition of someone who was truly steeped in the traditions of English literary culture.

© Roy Johnson 2016


The Death of the Moth – study resources

The Death of the Moth The Death of the Moth – Amazon UK

The Death of the Moth The Death of the Moth – Amazon US

The Death of the Moth Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle -Amazon UK

The Death of the Moth Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

The Death of the Moth The Death of the Moth – free eBook formats – Gutenberg

The Death of the Moth


The Death of the Moth – complete contents
  • The Death of the Moth
  • Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car
  • Three Pictures
  • Old Mrs. Grey
  • Street Haunting: A London Adventure
  • Jones and Wilkinson
  • “Twelfth Night” At the Old Vic
  • Madame de Sévigné
  • The Humane Art
  • Two Antiquaries: Walpole and Cole
  • The Rev William Cole
  • The Historian and “The Gibbon”
  • Reflections at Sheffield Place
  • The Man at the Gate
  • Sara Coleridge
  • “Not One of Us”
  • Henry James: 1. Within the Rim
  • Henry James: 2. The Old Order
  • Henry James: 3. The Letters of Henry James
  • George Moore
  • The Novels of E. M. Forster
  • Middlebrow
  • The Art of Biography
  • Craftsmanship
  • A Letter to a Young Poet
  • Why?
  • Professions for Women
  • Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid

Virginia Woolf – the complete Essays

The Death of the Moth 1925 — The Common Reader first series

The Death of the Moth 1932 — The Common Reader second series

The Death of the Moth 1942 — The Death of the Moth

The Death of the Moth 1947 — The Moment and Other Essays

The Death of the Moth 1950 — The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

The Death of the Moth 1958 — Granite and Rainbow


More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
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Filed Under: Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Cultural history, English literature, Literary studies, The essay, Virginia Woolf

The Defence

April 26, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, plot, study resources,  web links

The Defence was Vladimir Nabokov’s third novel. It was written in the French Pyrenees and Berlin during 1929, then first serialized as Zashchita Lubina in the Russian emigre quarterly Sovremennye Zapiski. This was followed by publication as a single volume novel by Slovo in Berlin (1930).

The Defence

Nabokov had composed chess problems and various puzzles (as well as short stories) for the Russian emigre newspaper ‘Rul that his father had established in Berlin in the early 1920s. All of these contributions were composed under the pen name of ‘V. Sirin’ which he adopted to distinguish himself from his father, whose name was also Vladimir Nabokov. The novel was later serialized in The New Yorker and then appeared simultaneously in the UK and the USA in 1964, translated by Michael Scammell in collaboration with the author.


The Defence – critical commentary

Autism?

In a typically tongue-in-cheek, semi-boastful introduction to the novel, Nabokov congratulates himself on the complex structure of the novel and the compositional chess references and allusions he weaves into his narrative:

the chess effects I planted are distinguishable not only in these separate scenes; their concatenation can be found in the basic structure of this attractive novel. Thus toward the end of Chapter Four an unexpected move is made by me in a corner of the board, sixteen years elapse in the course of one paragraph, and Luzhin, suddenly promoted to seedy manhood and transferred to a German resort, is discovered at a garden table

It is certainly true that the moving backwards and forwards in the chronology of events is handled in a masterful fashion, but Nabokov’s more remarkable achievement is the creation of a narrative related largely from the perspective of someone we would now call autistic.

Young Alexandr Ivanovich Luzhin is sullen, withdrawn, and uncommunicative. He fails to recognise social norms and does not respond to the positive efforts and signals of those around him, including his own parents. He isolates himself from his peers at school, and has obsessive compulsive disorders such as stepping on the cracks between paving stones and memorising car number plates in case they will come in useful at a later date .

Later he is unable to distinguish between dream fantasies and reality, he clings to ‘favourite books’ (Jules Verne and Sherlock Holmes) and he rejects replacements because they are ‘the wrong edition’ – that is, they are not visually identical to the volumes he read as a child. In the medical jargon of autism, this is called ‘sameness’ – a pathological clinging to what is already known.

Luzhin is emotionally detached from both his mother and father, feels only a glimmer of interest in his aunt because she shows him the rudiments of chess, and he lives in a parallel universe of abstract metaphors and tapping every tree he passes with his walking stick. These are all classic symptoms of autism, which at the time of the novel’s composition in 1929 was not as widely recognised as a psychological disorder as it is today.

Leo Kanner of the Johns Hopkins Hospital first used autism in its modern sense in English when he introduced the label early infantile autism in a 1943 report of 11 children with striking behavioral similarities. Almost all the characteristics described in Kanner’s first paper on the subject, notably “autistic aloneness” and “insistence on sameness”, are still regarded as typical of the autistic spectrum of disorders. [Wikipedia]

Nabokov’s skill is to create Luzhin’s sense of detachment and failure to understand or empathise with what is going on around him, whilst the same time giving the reader enough information to see both Luzhin’s point of view and that of the other characters.

Names

Nabokov appears to have been making some strange and not always successful experiments regarding the naming of his characters in this novel. His protagonist Luzhin is referred to by his surname (family name) throughout – even by his fiancée and then wife, which would not be at all likely or realistic. Apart from this distancing effect reflecting the character’s emotional isolation from other characters, the device doesn’t seem to be much more than a literary mannerism on Nabokov’s part. This is underlined by the fact that Luzhin’s birth name and patronymic are dramatically revealed in the very last lines of the novel – to no apparent purpose.

Even more strangely, and for no evident dramatic reason, we never learn the name of his fiancée and bride at all. She is referred to as his fiancée and ‘Mrs Luzhin’. Yet on the other hand, Nabokov does name completely inconsequential characters who have no importance in the development of the novel. They are named, only to disappear a few pages later after making their brief appearances.


The Defence – study resources

The Defence The Defence – Penguin Classics- Amazon UK

The Defence The Defence – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Defence The Luzhin Defence – DVD of 2000 film – Amazon UK

The Defence The Luzhin Defence – DVD of 2000 film – Amazon US

The Defence Zaschita Luzhina – Russian original version – Amazon UK

The Defence Zaschita Luzhina – Russian original version – Amazon US

The Defense


The Defence – chapter summaries

1   Young Alexandr Ivanovich Luzhin is a shy, sullen, and awkward boy – possibly what would now call autistic. When his parents take him home from summer holiday back to St. Petersburg, he runs away and goes to hide in a wood shed.

2   His father is a writer who hopes that his backward son is specially gifted. But young Luzhin is not happy and is undistinguished at school, where he is bullied by the other boys. He has two favourite books – by Jules Verne and Conan Doyle. He develops an interest in jigsaw puzzles and number games.

3   Luzhin sees a chess set for the first time and immediately wants to play. There is friction between his father and mother regarding relations with her more attractive sister. Luzhin watches a game played at school then starts playing truant to learn the game from his aunt.

4   He learns more about chess from an elderly admirer of his aunt, then he advances to learn chess notation and replays games in his head. He plays against his father and beats him. He stops going to school, loses track of time, and eventually has a breakdown. His parents take him to an Adriatic resort where, after his mother returns to St Petersburg, her sister joins his father.

5   His mother dies. Luzhin tours Russia as a chess prodigy. His father plans to write a novel about a child chess champion. Luzhin goes go on a European tour with his tutor-manager Valentinov, and when the first world war breaks out he refuses to go home. Valentinov acts in a suspicious and unprofessional manner. His father has difficulty writing the novel and dies before it is produced.

6   Luzhin meets a young woman at a German spa where he is playing exhibition matches. Valentinov has kept him on a Spartan regime, and when he is no longer a youthful prodigy, abandons him. Luzhin announces to the woman that she must become his wife. She introduces him to her mother, who thinks Luzhin is an ill-mannered boor.

7   The mother cannot take Luzhin seriously, but she is mildly impressed when he asks for her daughter’s hand in marriage in a gentlemanly manner.

8   In Berlin he meets the woman’s father, who he bamboozles with chess arcana. The mother continues to be hostile and rude. His fiancée is worried about his ‘illness’. He begins to confuse dreams and reality, and he develops spatial dislocation. He engages in a stressful chess tournament against his rival Turati. There is an adjournment, after which he has another nervous breakdown and imagines he is back in his Russian childhood.

9   Luzhin is found unconscious in the street by some drunks and taken to his fiancée’s house. He is placed in a sanatorium and the chess competition is considered ‘unfinished’.

10   His psychiatrist says that he will recover, but that chess is forbidden for the time being. The fiancée’s parents angrily try to forbid the marriage to ‘this penniless crackpot’. Luzhin gradually emerges from his breakdown. He recaptures childhood memories with great difficulty.

11   Luzhin leaves the sanatorium, and preparations are made for the marriage. A flat is rented, he gives up chess, and he begins to behave more normally. After the marriage ceremony he and his new bride return to the flat, where Luzhin immediately falls asleep.

12   He amuses himself in a desultory manner with an office typewriter and a phonograph. At a charity ball he meets someone from his old school who quizzes him about the past in a way that is disturbing.

13   There are further discussions about making a journey abroad. Mrs Luzhin has a lady visitor from the Soviet Union who is mindlessly patriotic about the Stalin regime. Luzhin thinks he has discovered a hidden pattern in the events of his life. He finds a pocket chess set in the lining of his jacket and recreates his game against Turati at exactly the point it was abandoned.

14   Luzhin gradually rejoins the world of chess and believes his life is a contest being played against an invisible opponent. His wife invites Russian emigres to the home, but Luzhin ignores them all and thinks about a plot to beat his unknown opponent. He wants to devise an unbeatable ‘defence’ Valentinov reappears and invites him to appear in a seedy film that involves chess, but Luzhin thinks this is a trap to lure him back into competitions. He decides that the ultimate defence against his antagonist is to ‘leave the game’ – and following the logic of this notion he commits suicide.

The Defence


The Defence – further reading

The Defence The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Amazon UK

The Defence Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years – Biography: Vol 1

The Defence Vladimir Nabokov: American Years – Biography: Vol 2

The Defence Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Defence The Paris Review – Interview with Vladimir Nabokov

The Defence Nabokov’s first English editions – Bob Nelson’s collection

The Defence Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

The Defence Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

The Defence Vladimir Nabokov – Routledge Critical Heritage- Amazon UK

The Defence Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels – Cambridge UP- Amazon UK

The Defence Women in Nabokov’s Life and Art – paperback- Amazon UK

The Defence Strong Opinions (Essays) – Penguin Classics paperback- Amazon UK

The Defence Vladimir Nabokov – Writers and their Work- Amazon UK


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Filed Under: Vladimir Nabokov Tagged With: Literary studies, The novel, Vladimir Nabokov

The Diary of a Man of Fifty

June 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, web links, and study resources

The Diary of a Man of Fifty first appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and Macmillan’s Magazine for July 1879. The first English book version appeared later the same year in the collection The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales published by Macmillan.

The Diary of a Man of Fifty

The setting – Florence


The Diary of a Man of Fifty – critical commentary

This tale is one of James’ least-known stories, and he didn’t even include it in the twenty-four volume New York Edition of his Novels and Tales (1907-09). It’s also rather unusual, because it’s written in the form of a journal. James normally liked to keep the narrative and the point of view tightly under his own control in the form of a first person or omniscient third person narrator. The only other instances of his using the diary and journal forms in his tales were A Landscape Painter (1866), A Light Man (1869), and The Impressions of a Cousin (1883).

The General is very forcibly struck by the parallels between his own situation and Stanmer’s. The General was in love with the beautiful Countess twenty-five years previously, and now he meets young Stanmer who is enchanted by her equally alluring daughter, and who bears the same name – Bianca. The General felt betrayed by the Countess when she married his rival, Count Camerino, and he feels that Stanmer is likely to be ill-treated by Bianca in the same way – though he has no evidence to support this notion.

Stanmer feels that the General is pursuing the ‘analogy’ too far, and resists the attempts to persuade him of any danger. And in the end, Stanmer does marry Bianca, and he is happy according to his own report. So for once in these cautionary tales about the dangers of marriage, the protagonist’s fears seem to be overturned. The General is left wondering what might have been, and the reader is left wondering if he is another candidate for James’s collection of unreliable narrators – a man who is so blinded by his own past experience and lack of real perception that he is unable to correctly interpret the world he inhabits.

It is difficult to form a clear judgement on this issue – because we do not have sufficient independent evidence. But it is worth noting (in the balance of its being a ‘cautionary tale’) that both the Countess and her daughter Bianca ‘lose’ three husbands between them – all of whom die in duels brought about because of rivalry and jealousy. So no matter what we think in the choice between Stanmer and the General, the state of matrimony is depicted as a zone of conflict and potential death.


Study resources

The Diary of a Man of Fifty The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Diary of a Man of Fifty The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Diary of a Man of Fifty Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Diary of a Man of Fifty Complete Stories 1874—1884 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Diary of a Man of Fifty The Diary of a Man of Fifty – Classic Reprint edition

The Diary of a Man of Fifty The Diary of a Man of Fifty – Kindle edition

The Diary of a Man of Fifty Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition

The Diary of a Man of Fifty The Diary of a Man of Fifty – eBook formats at Gutenberg

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Diary of a Man of Fifty


The Diary of a Man of Fifty – plot summary

An English army general of fifty-two returns to Florence twenty-five years after a romance with Countess Falvi, a woman who has died ten years previously. He revisits the places they used to frequent together.

He then meets Edmund Stanmer, a young English traveller of twenty-five who is acquainted with the Countess’s daughter Bianca. The General takes a liking to him, feeling that he is a reminder of his younger self.

Stanmer arranges a meeting between Bianca and the General, who is at first reluctant to follow it through, because his memories of her mother are that she was a dangerous woman.

However, when he goes to see Bianca the next day she is charming and attractive. They reminisce about her mother. Bianca lost her own father when she was young; her mother re-married, and she also lost her own husband three years previously.

The following day the General warns Stanmer that Bianca is an actress and a coquette, just like her mother. Stanmer resents the comparison and wants to know what the mother did to hurt the general – but he initially passes up on the opportunity to hear what it was.

Next evening at the Casa Salvi the General learns that Bianca’s stepfather was killed in a duel. They discuss Stanmer together , and Bianca asks the general to ‘explain’ her to his young friend.

The General continues to warn Stanmer about Bianca, but admits that he finds her fascinating. He then stays away from the Casa Salvi for a while, uncertain about his intentions regarding Stanmer.

But then Stanmer demands to know what happened between the General and the countess. The General reveals that he was jealous of Count Camerino, who was a suitor to the Countess, and who killed her husband in a duel caused by jealous rivalry – though another man (acting as his second) was deemed responsible. The General was horrified when the Countess married the man who had killed her own husband, and he left Florence, never to see her again.

The General takes his leave of Bianca, who reproaches him for having deserted her mother at a time when she needed a protector.

The general later hears that Stanmer married Bianca. The two men meet again in London some time later, where Stanmer tells the General that he was wrong about his account of the Countess, and that maybe she really did need his protection. This causes the general to doubt his own judgement, and he thinks it might be possible that he has made a mistake.


Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant


Principal characters
General — an un-named former soldier from the English army in India (52)
Edmund Stanmer a young Englishman (25)
Countess Salvi-Scarabelli the General’s former amorata
Bianca Scarabelli her beautiful daughter
Count Salvi the Countess’s former jealous husband
Count Camerino the general’s rival, and second husband to the Countess

Henry James's Study

Henry James’s study


Further reading

Biographical

Red button Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Red button F.W. Dupee, Henry James: Autobiography, Princeton University Press, 1983.

Red button Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, HarperCollins, 1985.

Red button Philip Horne (ed), Henry James: A Life in Letters, Viking/Allen Lane, 1999.

Red button Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

Red button Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

Red button F.O. Matthieson (ed), The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Critical commentary

Red button Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James London: Macmillan Press, 1983.

Red button Ian F.A. Bell, Henry James and the Past, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993.

Red button Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1993.

Red button Harold Bloom (ed), Modern Critical Views: Henry James, Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Red button Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Macmillan, 2010.

Red button J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks (eds), The Wings of the Dove, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978.

Red button Victoria Coulson, Henry James, Women and Realism, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Daniel Mark Fogel, A Companion to Henry James Studies, Greenwood Press, 1993.

Red button Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas, Madison (Wis): University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Red button Jonathan Freedman, The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976

Red button Roger Gard (ed), Henry James: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1968.

Red button Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Barbara Hardy, Henry James: The Later Writing (Writers & Their Work), Northcote House Publishers, 1996.

Red button Richard A. Hocks, Henry James: A study of the short fiction, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Red button Donatella Izzo, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James, University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Red button Colin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2009

Red button John Pearson (ed), The Prefaces of Henry James, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Red button Richard Poirer, The Comic Sense of Henry James, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Red button Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Merle A. Williams, Henry James and the Philosophical Novel, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Red button Judith Woolf, Henry James: The Major Novels, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Red button Ruth Yeazell (ed), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Longmans, 1994.


Other works by Henry James

Henry James The BostoniansThe Bostonians (1886) is a novel about the early feminist movement. The heroine Verena Tarrant is an ‘inspirational speaker’ who is taken under the wing of Olive Chancellor, a man-hating suffragette and radical feminist. Trying to pull her in the opposite direction is Basil Ransom, a vigorous young man to whom Verena becomes more and more attracted. The dramatic contest to possess her is played out with some witty and often rather sardonic touches, and as usual James keeps the reader guessing about the outcome until the very last page.

Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Henry James What Masie KnewWhat Masie Knew (1897) A young girl is caught between parents who are in the middle of personal conflict, adultery, and divorce. Can she survive without becoming corrupted? It’s touch and go – and not made easier for the reader by the attentions of an older man who decides to ‘look after’ her. This comes from the beginning of James’s ‘Late Phase’, so be prepared for longer and longer sentences. In fact it’s said that whilst composing this novel, James switched from writing longhand to using dictation – and it shows if you look carefully enough – part way through the book.

Henry James What Masie Knew Buy the book at Amazon UK
Henry James What Masie Knew Buy the book at Amazon US


Henry James – web links

Henry James web links Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

Henry James web links The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

Henry James web links The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

Red button A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

Henry James web links The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Henry James web links Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James web links Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

Henry James web links The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

Henry James web links The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James web links Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

© Roy Johnson 2005


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Filed Under: James - Tales Tagged With: English literature, Henry James, Literary studies, Short stories, The Diary of a Man of Fifty

The Diary of a Nobody

April 2, 2012 by Roy Johnson

comic classic of Victorian suburban life

The Diary of a Nobody (1888) is a minor classic of the late Victorian period. It combines the sort of elements of social realism found in George Gissing and H.G. Wells with the whimsy of Edward Lear and even Lewis Carroll (though without his surrealistic sense of the ridiculous). And it established its diarist and protagonist Charles Pooter as a comic archetype of lower middle class pretentiousness, class insecurity, and slavish devotion to social conventions. The wit is so understated, it might pass you by if you don’t read closely.

The Diary of a NobodyThe texts of George Grossmith’s diary entries were first published in Punch in 1888 then issued in a single volume with illustrations by his brother Weedon in 1892. They establish a strain of very English humour – a particularly lightweight, understated, affectionate type of poking fun at pretension that has continued ever since, surfacing in such mixed sources as Richmal Crompton’s William stories, Sue Townsend’s The Diary of Adrian Mole, and the television series Dad’s Army.

Pooter establishes his intentions in the mock-heroic introduction to the Diary:

Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never heard of, and I fail to see—because I do not happen to be a ‘Somebody’—why my diary should not be interesting.

But of course the joke is that his life is monumentally uninteresting. He lives in a humble London suburb working as a clerk in the City, and spends his leisure time applying paint to inappropriate surfaces in the house that he rents in Holloway. His long-suffering wife Carrie tolerates his enthusiasms, whilst his feckless and improvident son Lupin simultaneously patronises him and takes advantage of him – behaviour many parents will recognise.

His only friends, Gowing and Cummings are buffoons who drop into the house most evenings to drink his wine and play dominoes, and they quite flagrantly fail to reciprocate his hospitality. On summer holiday in Broadstairs, Pooter welcomes the bad weather as an excuse to go to bed early, and other domestic highlights include evenings spent reading Exchange and Mart to his wife.

All Pooter’s interactions with his neighbours, with tradesmen, and with servants result in slapstick and farcical confrontations. He writes to the newspapers to complain that he has been missed off the report of a function’s guest list; he makes feeble puns and record how amusing he thinks they are even if other people don’t; and he records events of mind-numbing triviality such as planting mustard and cress seeds in the borders of his back garden, then taking careful daily note of their failure to appear.

It is not surprising that this type of comedy has persisted into new media. There is no packing in the narrative: in fact it is very like a contemporary comedy programme. Pooter’s diary entries are a catenation of brief trivia, with recurrent themes and some interesting use of repetition – almost like a bathetic form of what are now called punch lines.

The diary entries record a series of foreseeable light disasters and embarrassments, knockabout farce (torn trousers and a straw topi sun hat) and there are some delightful recurrent motives – the blancmange that keeps reappearing at successive meals, and Pooter’s plea when confronted by frustration: “I am not a rich man, but I would give half a guinea to find out who …”

The material is a sociologist’s dream – the new piano bought on hire purchase instalments, the cost of meat and champagne, travel between the suburbs by bus and cabs, and the subtle distinctions between dinner, supper, and high tea, plus the times at which it is respectable or fashionable to eat them.

There are of course suburbs and suburbs. Holloway was a typical area of what is now inner London that was serving the commercial and the financial capital of Britain at the height of Victorian expansionism. Charles Pooter works as a clerk in the commercial sector, but it’s interesting to note that his socially ambitious son Lupin works in the City – the centre of financial risk. He is a trader, who sells Pooter’s friends bonds that sink, but who ends up prospering by stealing clients from one employer and introducing them to another.

But this is digging below the ideological surface of the text. The main substance for most readers will be the gentle comedy of manners that captures a lifestyle and an attitude of attention to the humdrum matters of everyday life that survives into the present. There are Pooters everywhere – maybe even in all of us.

The Diary of a Nobody Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Diary of a Nobody Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2012


George and Weedon Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.143, ISBN: 0199540152


Filed Under: 19C Literature Tagged With: English literature, George Grossmith, Literary studies, The Diary of a Nobody

The Doctor’s Wife

October 9, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, web links, and critical commentary

The Doctor’s Wife (1865) was the tenth work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a prolific Victorian novelist. She had shot to fame with her fourth publication Lady Audley´s Secret which established her reputation as doyenne of the ´sensation novel´. These works were described as ´novels with a secret´, and they rested heavily on the inclusion of what were considered shocking topics such as bigamy, imprisonment, false identity, forged wills, and other quasi-Gothic elements. Braddon wove these shocking topics into what were otherwise conventional social realist novels of middle and upper-class life – but the´sensation´ elemenst suggested dark forces lurking beneath the surface of polite society.

The Doctor's Wife


The Doctor’s Wife – a note on the text

The novel was first issued as a serial in monthly instalments between January and December 1864 in Temple Bar, a magazine devoted to poetry, essays, and prose fiction. It was then published in three-volume format, which was conventional at that time. Various other editions of Braddon´s works were issued during her own lifetime as a result of the popularity of her writing. For a full description of the textual history of the novel, see Lynn Pykett´s notes to the Oxford World´s Classics edition of the text.


The Doctor’s Wife – critical commentary

The sensation novel

Towards the end of The Doctor’s Wife Braddon (speaking with the voice of the narrator) claims ‘This is not a sensation novel. I write here what I know to be the truth.’ But she writes very much tongue in cheek, for the novel has many of the ingredients of a sensation novel – or ‘the novel with a secret’ as they were sometimes described.

The major secret in the narrative is the fact that Isabel’s father Mr Sleaford is not a ‘barrister’ as he is described in an opening chapter. He disappears immediately after this introduction when the family fall behind with the rent and are forced to vacate their Camberwell dwelling. Sleaford emerges again during the middle of the novel as the man who threatens to kill Roland Lansdell – but his identity is disguised behind the pseudonym ‘Jack the Scribe’.

Sleaford (we learn later) is in fact a criminal fraudster who specialises in forgery – for which he is eventually sent to jail. His family home in Camberwell is built on a sham existence, a pretence of respectability which is shattered when he is found out and has to de-camp.

Braddon plays a little unfairly with her readers over this issue. We spend page after page locked in the private thoughts of Isabel Sleaford about every aspect of Roland Lansdell’s character and doings, but not once does she think of the link between her father and the man she loves, who she knows has threatened to kill him.

In other words, psychological credibility in the novel is sacrificed to melodramatic plot manipulation to produce the shock effect of Sleaford’s sudden reappearance at the end of the novel. These are precisely the sort of sensation novel cliches Braddon satirises in the earlier parts of the book which feature the (somewhat superfluous) character Sigismund Smith, who writes sensation novels.

There are many other elements of the sensation novel at work in the plot. When Sleaford comes out of prison he blackmails his own daughter and then bludgeons Roland Lansdell to death as he threatened to do when Roland acted as a witness at his trial.

Roland falls in love with Isabel – who is married – and wishes to elope with her to live in Italy – which introduces the element of adultery, even though this ultimately does not take place.

Madame Bovary

The similarities between The Doctor’s Wife and Madame Bovary (1856) will be obvious to anyone who has read both novels – which were written only a few years apart. Both Isabel and Emma Bovary are victims of an addiction to romantic fiction, both are married to forbearing but boring provincial doctors, and both become emotionally involved with characters of a higher social status.

These similarities are quite obvious – but the differences are instructive. Flaubert’s heroine Emma Bovary does actually commit adultery, which is the logical development of a romantic passion. Braddon’s heroine does not cross this line – since censorship of fiction was much stricter in England than in France at the time. But it should be noted that Flaubert was pilloried by the French establishment and taken to court for the ‘immorality’ of his text.

Isabel rationalises her rejection of Roland’s offer of sexual commitment with the argument that to accept it would sully the romantic image in which she had enveloped him. This attitude blends seamlessly with the quasi-religious sentiments into which the events of the novel descend in its closing stages.

Contemporary readers are likely to find these issues of narrative resolution disappointing if not unconvincing. Isabel suddenly finds ‘respect’ for her husband, Roland forgives the man who has attacked him, and he ‘realises’ that he has ‘wronged’ Isabel by falling in love with her.

Braddon steers cautiously clear of the logical development of the theme she is exploring and merely envelops Isabel in clouds of romantic fiction and love of poets. Isabel never engages physically with Roland Lansdell: they remain lovers in theory alone, reading books underneath Lord Thurston’s oak tree.

Weakness

Braddon was known as ‘the queen of the circulating libraries’ – a role which required her to provide three volume novels that sold, rather expensively at five shillings per volume – half the weekly income of a modest, middle-class household. She did this admirably, writing a total of more than eighty novels during her professional career.

But this had an effect on her literary style. She goes in for long digressions, elaborate scene setting, and the creation of events which fill the pages of the three volumes – but do not add to the coherence of the novel.

The principal weakness which blights The Doctor’s Wife, is the inordinate degree of repetition detailing Isabel’s dilemma. We are told about her attachment to a view of life formed by her reading of romantic literature – but told about it over and over, again and again, in almost every chapter.

This repetition is exacerbated by the glacially slow progress of the plot, which has only one central strand – the tension between Isabel’s romantic views and her fixation on Roland Lansdell. The first two volumes of the triple-decker are almost all taken up with a will-she, won’t-she tension which is never resolved.

Braddon also has a stylistic tic of triplicating her comparisons and metaphors. If a situation or an aspect of character is mentioned, it is elaborated threefold:

Could it be that this woman had deceived him, – this woman for whom he had been false to all the teaching of his life, – this woman, at whose feet he had offered up that comfortable philosophy which found an infallible armour against sottow in supreme indifference to all things under heaven, – this woman, for whose sake he had consented to resume the painful heritage of humanity, the faculty of suffering?

Loose ends

There are also a number of loose ends in the narrative – lines of character and plot which are simply not developed or linked coherently to the story as a whole. They stick out like undigested lumps in the text, reducing its overall coherence.

For instance there is a wonderful character sketch of Horace Sleaford at the start of the novel. He is a cantankerous youth who is trapped half way between boyhood and manhood. He takes out his discontent on everybody he meets. As a character type, he is straight out of Charles Dickens, and is enormously successful as a fictional creation:

Master Sleaford shut the door with a bang and locked it … The disdainful boy took the key from the lock, and carried it in-doors on his little finger. He had warts upon his hands, and warts are the stigmata of boyhood, and the sleeves of his jacket were white and shiny at the elbows, and left him cruelly exposed about the wrists. The knowledge of his youth, and that shabby frowziness of rainment peculiar to middle-class hobbñedehoyhood, gave him a sulky fierceness of aspect … He suspected everybody of despising him, and was perpetually trying to look down the scorn of others with still deeper scorn.

But having made a vivid appearance in the second chapter, he never appears again, and has no relevance whatsoever to the novel as a whole. These elements demonstrate Braddon´s powerful imagination (and her often sardonic turn of humour) but they do not help to create a coherent novel. It is difficult to escape the suspicion that they are created merely to fill out the pages of the three volumes.


The Doctor’s Wife – study resources

The Doctor's Wife The Doctor’s Wife – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

The Doctor's Wife The Doctor’s Wife – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

The Doctor's Wife The Doctor’s Wife – hardcover edition – Amazon UK

The Doctor's Wife The Doctor’s Wife – hardcover edition – Amazon US

The Doctor's Wife The Doctor’s Wife – Kindle eBook – Amazon UK

The Doctor's Wife The Doctor’s Wife – Kindle eBook – Amazon US

The Doctor's Wife The Complete Works of Mary Elizabeth Braddon – Kindle eBook


The Doctor’s Wife – chapter summaries

Volume I

I   Young provincial doctor George Gilbert takes a holiday in London, arriving at the chambers of his friend Samuel (‘Sigismund’) Smith, who is a sensation novelist.

II   Smith is a mild young man who writes fanciful adventure fiction. They walk to the decrepit Sleaford house where he lodges and meet the disaffected youth Horace. The whole house is a dilapidated shambles.

III   George meets the attractive but hopelessly romantic daughter Isabel Sleaford. They enjoy a jolly lobster supper, but their pleasure is spoiled by the arrival of Mr Sleaford in a very bad mood. Next day Smith takes George to a French bistro, but when they get back the whole house is empty. The family have left for America, having defaulted on the rent.

IV   George and Smith are visited by the irate landlord of the house. Smith describes his plagiaristic literary methods and offers satires of the sensation novel.

V   George’s father eventually dies, leaving him to take over his medical practice. He is supported by the devotion of the gardener William Jeffson. Smith writes a letter with news of Isabel who is working as a governess near to George, who unconvincingly professes his indifference.

VI   George rides over to visit Isabel, but the meeting is uneventful and disappointing. Isabel continues to live via the romantic and sentimental dreams created by fiction and myths.

VII   There is a complete mismatch between George’s and Isabel’s dreams of their futures. They go on a picnic with Smith and Charles Raymond, who speculates on Isabel’s future. George finally declares his love and asks Isabel to be his wife. She thinks of the event as part of some romantic fiction.

VIII   William Jeffson warns George against rushing into marriage – especially with someone whom he knows so little about and who has not declared her love for him.

IX   Isabel enjoys the idea of being engaged, but she delays the marriage itself. She wishes George were more romantic, but he is not. Finally they get married, without any passion or deep engagement with each other.

X   They go on a week’s honeymoon and rapidly realise that they have nothing to say to each other. Within a week Isabel feels that she has made a terrible mistake. They arrive home to an unheated and cheerless house.

XI   Isabel feels stifled by the uneventful nature of her life, whilst George is absorbed in his work as a doctor. She continues to live in a romantic dream world.

XII   On Isabel’s birthday George takes her on a commemorative outing and picnic. They meet Roland Lansdell and Lady Gwendoline. Isabel sees Roland as a living Byronic hero

Volume II

I   Landsell had great prospects when young but by thirty they have come to nothing. He has been engaged to Lady Gwendoline, but she broke off the relationship, with her ambition set on higher social connections. He has been in parliament, but left because his reforming schemes failed.

II   Isabel loses herself in romantic yearning for Roland Lansdell, whom she meets out in the country. He invites Isabel and George to lunch the following week.

III   Lansdell is bored and unoccupied. He pities Isabel’s naievety, and prides himself on doing ‘no harm’ to anyone.

IV   The luncheon party is a big success. Raymmond recounts the story of his once having identified a banking fraudster who threatened to kill him once he was released from custody – which causes Isabel to faint.

V   Isabel and Raymond have more frequent meetings in the countryside. He lends her books from his library. Sigismond Smith visits and reveals that he was once Raymond’s tutor. They meet Raymond who proposes another picnic and a Sunday luncheon.

VI   Roland puts a lot of effort into the picnic, thinking he is leaving England soon. Charles Raymond warns Roland to stop paying so much attention to Isabel, and Roland promises to leave England the next day.

VII   Roland rides back home thinking regretfully what his life might have been. He writes a stiff, formal letter of explanation to Isabel.

VIII   Next day, Isabel is devastated when the letter arrives. She goes into a state of shock, then thinks of suicide. Her husband is oblivious to what is going on.

IX   The autumn and winter months pass by. Isabel tries to find meaningful occupation, but failSs. She starts visiting the library at Mordred Priory, Roland´s country house. It is there that she meets Roland when he suddenly comes back to England because of her.

X   Charles Raymond tries to persuade Roland to go away again to avoid a scandal, but he refuses, arguing that he is sincerely in love with Isabel, and she with him. It is a passion that has given meaning to his life. Raymond reveals that he loved Roland’s mother.

XI   Isabel is happy that Roland has returned, and he declares his love for her openly. He plans to visit London, and will reveal the results in two days time. She fears he might marry Lady Gwendoline.

XII   Next day Gwendoline arrives to issue a dire warning to Isabel about the malicious gossip that is circulating locally. Isabel once again thinks of stoic renunciation and suicide.

XIII   Roland finally asks Isabel to leave her husband and elope to live with him in Italy. But she refuses, seeing such a move as spoiling the romantic nature of their relationship. His offer confirms the criticisms made of him by Gwendoline.

Volume III

I   Isabel feels galled that Roland has not understood what to her was the ‘pure’ nature of their relationship. She feels the censure of the villagers, and seeks a semi-religious consolation in the sermon of a popular preacher.

II   Isabel begins to wonder if she has made a mistake in refusing Roland. He on his part endures a mixture of rage and frustration, hoping she will change her mind. He bemoans his world-weary state to Gwendoline, who reports on Isabel’s enthusiasm for the popular preacher.

III   Roland goes to the church in the hope of seeing Isabel. She appears for the afternoon service, and they are both very conscious of each other’s presence.

IV   Isabel walks home to find her husband ill with fever. She has been trying hard to be virtuous, but she is suddenly confronted by a threatening stranger.

V   George Gilbert’s illness gets worse. Isabel does her best to support him, feeling that she must atone for her ‘sins’. She feels motivated by the parson’s sermons.

VI   Roland feels resentful towards Isabel because of her rejection, but when she arrives late one night to ask for fifty pounds, he gives it to her and treats her in a friendly manner.

VII   Roland hears from Raymond the local gossip that Isabel has been seen with a strange man late at night. He immediately believes that Isabel has betrayed him with someone else.

VIII   Roland goes in search of Isabel and the strange man she is meeting. He attacks the man, only to find that it is her father, and he apologises. But Mr Sleaford is also the cheque fraudster who has vowed to kill him. Sleaford bludgeons Roland then leaves the area.

IX   Isabel has asked Roland for the money in order to get rid of her father and protect Roland, fearing he will learn of his proximity in the area.

X   Isabel feels relief that her father has gone, but her husband gets worse and eventually dies. Isabel is bitterly reproached by Mrs Jeffson.

XI   Isabel is overwhelmed by George’s death, and once again feels guilty for what she perceives as her sinful life. Raymond arrives and takes her to Roland, who is dying. Roland wants Isabel to forgive him for what he now sees as a wrongful pursuit of her. He also wants Gwendoline to befriend her. He appeals to Isabel to devote herself to good works, He has a quasi-religious conversion, and then dies.

XII   Mr Sleaford takes his fifty pounds blackmail money to start a new fraudulent venture in America. Isabel is bequeathed Roland’s property and money in his will. She goes abroad with Gwendoline, then settles down at Mordren Priory and makes improvements to the estate.


The Doctor´s Wife – principal characters
Sigismund (Samuel) Smith his friend, a sensation novelist
George Gilbert a young provincial doctor
Mr Sleaford a fraudulent ´barrister´
Horace Sleaford his son, a cantankerous boy
Isabel Sleaford his daughter, a beautiful young woman
William Jeffson a lazy but loyal gardener
Matilda Jeffson his reproachful and embittered wife
Charles Raymond a philanthropist, Smith´s uncle
Roland Lansdell a rich gentleman estate owner
Lady Gwendoline Pomphrey his cousin
Austin Colbourne a popular preacher

The Doctor´s Wife – further reading

Richard D. Altick Victorian Studies in Scarlet, New York: W.W. Norton, 1979.

Jennifer Carnell, The Literary Lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon: A Study of Her Life and Work, UK: Sensation Press, 2000.

Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

P.D. Edwards, Some Mid-Victorian Thrillers: The Sensation Novel, Its Friends and Its Foes, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1971.

Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Woman’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing, London: Routledge, 2013.

Anthea Trodd, Domestic Crime in the Victorian Novel, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1988.

Robert Lee Wolff, Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, New York: Garland Publishers, 1979.

© Roy Johnson 2016


Filed Under: Mary Elizabeth Braddon Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, The novel

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