The complete original title of this remarkable volume was as follows: "The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the famous Moll Flanders, who was barn in Newgate, and during a life of continued variety, for threescore years, besides her childhood, was twelve years a whore, five times a Wife (thereof once to her own brother), twelve years a Thief, eight years a transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew rich, lived honest, and died a penitent. Written from her own Memorandums." As this title suggests, the heroine of the story is perhaps the world's best known picaroon. Like the story of Robinson Crusoe. this book is so convincingly written, with such a wealth of intimate detail, the reader feels it must be true.
Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews
The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his friend Mr. Abraham Adams is the full title of the work often called the firsts realistic novel of English literature. Henry Fielding turned aside from the episodic sentimental writing of the age to give an honest picture of the manners and customs of his time and to satirize the foibles and vanities of human nature. In particular, he ridiculed affectation, whether it stemmed from hypocrisy or vanity. Although the structure of the novel is loose and rambling, the realistic settings and the vivid portrayal of English life in the eighteenth century more than compensate for this one weakness. Joseph is presented as the younger brother of Samuel Richardson's heroine, Pamela.
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
Elizabeth Bennet, one of the most delightful heroines of all time, would be enough to make Pride and Prejudice outstanding among English novels. In addition the book has a beautifully symmetrical plot in which the acton rises and falls as inevitably as does an ocean wave. Many of the other characters besides Elizabeth are superbly drawn. Jane Austen's delicate but telling satire of the English country gentlefolk of her day--and indeed of her neighborhood--remains a delightful commentary upon the little foibles of human nature.
Emma
The major problem in the world of Jane Austen's novels is that of getting the characters properly married, and Emma is not exception. Its plot is concerned with the complications taking place before the couples are paired off correctly, and with Emma's sometimes unwise attempts to help things along. She is perhaps a less generally appealing heroine than Elizabeth Bennet is Pride and Prejudice, but she is excellently done, as are her father and the rest of Highbury circle. Miss Bates and Mrs. Elton remain unsurpassed iin English satire.
William Thackeray: Vanity Fair
Vanity Fair, the best known of Thackeray's works, has justly joined the ranks of the classics, for in it Thackeray has created characters as great as any in English literature. Most of his people are not good people, but then they were not intended to be. Thackeray shows that goodness often goes hand in hand with stupidity as a folly, that cleverness is often knavery. A cynical story, this novel was intended to expose social hypocrisy and sham. Although Thackeray was frankly moralistic, his moral does not in any way overshadow a magnificent novel or the life-like characters he created.
Honore de Balzac: Pere Goriot
This account of the subtle transformation of Eugene de Rastignac from a naive provincial to a Parisian gentlemen is among the most credible stories in fiction. The story of the ruin of a successful merchant, Goroit, because of his love for two ungrateful daughters is effective but less realistic. These are but a few of the fascinating gallery of characters Balzac assembled at Mme. Vauquer's boarding-house.
Charles Dickens: Hard Times
This novel was Dicken's first story of outright social protest. Earlier works had contained sections of social criticism, but this was the first motivated entirely by the writer's feelings about contemporary British culture. The novel, appropriately dedicated to Thomas Carlyle, another critic of nineteenth-century British society, was based upon personal observations of life in Manchester, one of England's great manufacturing towns and the original for Dicken's Coketown. The story is loaded with the bitter sincerity of Dickens' dislike for the industrial conditions he found in his homeland. Unfortunately for the value of the novel as a social document, Dickens overdrew his portraits of the industrialists responsible for conditions he abhorred; his industrialists became sheer grotesques and monsters.
Great Expectations
Miss Havisham was deserted on her wedding day. Pip gave help to an escaped prisoner hiding in a marsh. From these two events Dickens weaves an amazing story of vindictiveness on one hind and gratitude on the other; and both of these motives affected Pip's life, for Miss Havisham had marked him as one of her victims, and the prisoner had sworn to reward the small boy who had helped him in the marsh. Although an absorbing tale, this is also a gloomy one, not lightened by Dicken's usual capricious characterizations. There are few moments to relieve the reader from the pressure of Pip's problems in life.
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte published Jane Eyre under the pseudonym of Currer Bell, a name chosen, she said, because it was neither obviously feminine nor masculine. But the emotions behind the book are purely feminine. Literary critics may point to the extravagant melodrama and faulty structure of the novel, but lasting popularity is sufficient evidence of its charm and character for generations of readers. Charlotte Bronte wrote wisely when she cast her novel in the form of an autobiography. The poetry and tension of Jane Eyre marked a new development in adult romanticism, just as Jane herself brought to English fiction a new type of heroine, a woman of intelligence and passion.
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Published under the pseudonym of Ellis Bell, Wuthering Heights was considered such a risk by its publishers that Emily Bronte had to defray the cost of publication until a sufficient number of copies had been sold. The combination of lurid and violent scenes in this novel must have been somewhat shocking to mid-nineteenth-century taste. Despite its exaggerated touches, Wuthering Heights is an intriguing tale of revenge, and the main figures exult in a more than life-size vitality of their own consuming passions. For her novel Emily Bronte chose a suitable title. The word wuthering is a provincial adjective used to describe the atmospheric tumult of stomy weather.
Ivan Turgenev Fathers and Sons
Fathers and Sons is important in the political history of Russia. Turgenev was here the first to use the word nihilist to describe a believer in political anarchy at a time when nihilism was the main current of liberal thought. There are excellent studies of the unsettled Russian peasants just before their emancipation. Beyond this historical importance, Fathers and Sons is a novel which dramatizes the conflict and differences between generations. The novel is relatively straight-forward in plot and the characters are simply drawn. These characteristics are not common in nineteenth-century Russian novels; the clarity of Fathers and Sons is probably a big factor in its popularity.
Herman Melville: Moby Dick
Moby Dick, or The White Whale is undoubtedly one of the finest novels in American literature. On one level it has an appeal for children, and on another a deep and penetrating significance for all men. Melville intended to indicate in this work the disaster which must result when man constitutes himself a god and sets out to eliminate a force established by God throughout the universe. The whale symbolizes evil, but Ahab, in believing that he alone could hope to destroy it was also evil. Here is a universal problem, handled with skill and understanding.
Gustav Flaubert: Madame Bovary
Flaubert's genius lay in his infinite capacity for taking pains, and Madame Bovary, so true in its characterizations, so vivid in its settings, so convincing in its plot, is ample testimony to the realism of his work. This novel was one of the first of its type to come out of France,,and its truth shocked contemporary readers. Condemned on the one hand for picturing the life of a romantic adulteress, he was acclaimed on the other for the honesty and skill with which he handled his subject. Flaubert does not pemit Emma Bovery to escape the tragedy with she brings upon herself. Emma finds diversion from the monotony of her life, but she finds it at the loss of her own self-respect. The truth of Emma's struggle is universal and challenging.
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment
The theme of this novel is that man pays by suffering for his crimes against men. Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov is a tremendous study of a sensitive intellectual driven by poverty to believe that he was exempt from moral law. Other features of Crime and Punishment are the use of psychology in police investigation, the author's sympathy for the downtrodden as expressed in the person of Sonia, a young prostitute, and realistic descriptions of slum life in a large Russian city of the nineteenth century.
Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn
Not to have read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is nearly as sad as never having been to a circus or never having played baseball with the neighborhood gang. Huck is every young boy who ever lived, and he is also an individual worth knowing. He swears and smokes, but he has a set of ethics of his own. Reared haphazardly in the South, he believes that slaves belong to their rightful owners, yet in his honest gratitude toward his friend Jim, he helps him escape his slavery. Muck could not bear to cheat the three Silks girls, but he did not hesitate to steal food when he was hungry. Huck talks with lowbrow dialect, but he is keen-witted and intelligent. He tells his story with a straight-faced forwardness, but the reader finds laughter and shrewd, sharp comment on human nature in every chapter of his adventures along the Mississippi.
George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss
This book is more than a revelation of manners and conventions. It is the happy union of knowledge with sympathy, of understanding with determination to reveal some of the real differences between people. There is also bitterness in this book, a kind of grimness which is basic. People who get on in the book are those who are strong- willed, who go after what they want and subdue all emotions and desires that lie close to the heart. Those who try to live both by bread and by spirit end tragically, as do om and Maggie Tulliver, both unfitted for the roles life chose for them.
Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D'urbervilles
Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'urbervilles has become a modern classic. In it Hardy concerned himself with the question of fate and its influence upon the lives of most people. If Tess's father had not learned that he was a d'Urberville, if Angel had found the letter Tess slipped under the door, her life would have been much different. But fate ruled that these things were to happen, and so determined the course of Tess's life. Hardy called Tess a pure girl, and so she was. He believed that she was not responsible for her actions, and he forces us to agree with him.
The Return of the Native
In this novel Thomas Hardy created two strong and opposing forces: Egdon Heath, a somber tract of wasteland symbolic of an impersonal fate, and Eustacia Vye, a beautiful young woman representing the opposing human element. Throughout the book Eustacia struggles against the Heath, but in vain. Of curse, her failure to overcome her environment would seem to prove Hardy's view that man is not the master of his fate. But in attempting to minimize the importance of the individual in this life, Hardy has created in the character of Eustacia Vye a person of great strength and marked individuality. Indeed, the reader, contemplating her, feels that Eustacia herself, not fate alone, is responsible for her tragic end.
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Despite contrived events, the plot of The Mayor of Casterbridge works out well. Descriptions of the Wessex countryside are excellent. Hardy's simple country people are realistic and sometimes funny, if not always sympathetic. The modern reader is likely to question the melodramatic and spectacular opening scenes of the novel in spite of Hardy's insistence that such occurrences did take place in rural districts during the last century. The plot illustrates Hardy's belief that "in fiction it is not improbabilities of incident but improbabilities of character that matter."
Stephen Crane Red Badge of the Courage
Most war stories are epic histories of generals and victories or defeats. In The Red Badge of Courage we follow only the personal reactions of a soldier; we do not even know what battle is being fought or who the leaders are. We know only that Henry Fleming was motivated, not by the unselfish heroism of more conventional and romantic stories, but first by cowardice, then by fear, and finally by egoism. The style of narrative of the novel belongs to a late period in English prose fiction. The stream of Henry's thought tells a story, and the reader must perceive the hero's environment through the subjective consciousness of the young man. This novel set the pattern for the treatment of war in modern fiction.
Henry James: Portrait of a Lady
With the exception of the English Lord Warburton, The Portrait of a Lady contains a Gallery of Americans who work out their destinies against a European background. The influence of European culture is seen most closely as it affects the heroine, high-minded Isabel Archer. By means of careful penetration into her mental processes, the steps which lead to her marriage with the dilettante, Gilbert Osmond, are delineated, as well as the consequent problems which arise from this marriage. The novel is an excellent example of the Jamesian method of refracting life through an individual temperament.
The American
In this novel Henry James shows the interaction of two cultures, the American and the French. His primary interest is not in the action; his aim is to analyze the various psychological situations created by the events of the plot. The author scrutinizes the inner lives of his characters and writes about them in an urbane and plished style uniquely his own.
D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers
Sons and Lovers is a realistic novel developing two significant psychological themes. The first is the story of Paul Morel's beautiful but terrible relationship with his mother, who gives to him her warmth of feeling because her husband has denied her the love she craves. The second is a study of attraction and repulsion in love, presented through Paul's relations with two quite different women, Clara and Miriam. It is, on the whole, a tragic story of work, love, and despair. Lawrence's psychological insight and the poetry of his style make this novel one of the great landmarks in modern autobiographical fiction.
Women in Love
Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
Mrs. Dalloway is a cleverly written book. The author has used the stream-of-consciousness method, encompassing within a single day the activities of Clarissa Dalloway's life and the lives of other people as well. There is little action but much intense probing of memory.
To the Lighthouse
Set in the out-of-the way Hebrides Islands, this book has an other-world quality. There is an air of unreality about it, achieved, perhaps, by the odd structure of the book. Virginia Woolf learned a great deal from James Joyce about the psychological novel. Although her stream of consciousness does not get out of hand or lean the story into hidden depths, it does dominate the entire novel and make good its effect. The past has, through-out the novel, an effect upon the present action, and this mingling of past and present is the secret of the book's unity.
Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie
Dreiser's first novel is, in some ways, somewhat superior to much of his later work. As usual, his characters are vivid and lifelike, sympathetically protrayed. Unlike some of the later novels, Sister Carrie is well-unified, the style more fluent and natural. A companion piece to Stephen Crane's Maggie --and a comparison between the two books is always interesting and revealing--it is also historically significant as a pioneer work of the naturalisitc movement in American literature.
Franz Kafka: The Castle
This unfinished novel has been called a modern Pilgrim's Progress. K. tries to find the grace of God so that he can fulfill his life, but his path is beset with the confusion of the modern world. K's straightforward attack on the confusion that surrounds the castle and his unrelenting desire to solve his problems are finally rewarded, but only at the time of his death. The unique thing about Kafka's allegory is the humor which runs through it. The story itself is emotionally and intellectually appealing.
Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms
Hemingway combines austere realism and poetic language to present a powerful argument against war and to tell a touching love story at the same time. Possessed of the most remarkable time sense of the period between wars, his disillusioned temperament and technical skill have influenced a whole generation of writers. In spite of its hard-boiled realism of detail and its tragic ending, A Farewell to Arms is nevertheless an idealistic book. The novel was dramatized by Laurence Stallings, and was made into a motion picture.
The Sun Also Rises
This early Hemingway novel reflects the period following the first World War, a period of maladjustment and despair on the part of a war-weary generation for whom life had lost its significance. The opening quotation from Gertrude Stein and the quotation from Ecclessiastes. from which the title of the novel was taken, clearly point to the theme. Such reference is not necessry, however, once the reader has started the book. The Sun Also Rises describes realistically life among American expatriates on the Left Bank in Paris and the color and excitement of a Spanish fiesta. Above, all, the skillful character analysis, sketched in so rapidly by Hemingway, will make the reader feel that he has really lived with the disillusioned people who appear in the novel.
John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
In The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck has achieved an interesting contrapuntal effect by breaking the narrative at intervals with short, impressionistic passages recorded as though by a motion picture camera moving quickly from one scene to another and from one focus to another. The novel is a powerful indictment of our capitalistic economy and a sharp criticism of the southwestern farmer for his imprudence in the care of his land. The outstanding feature of The Grapes of Wrath is its photographically detailed, if occasionally sentimentalized, description of the American farmers of the Dust Bowl in the mid-thirties of the twentieth century.
Of Mice and Men
Written in terms of theatrical melodrama, the compact, tragic story of Of Mice and Men spins itself out in only Lennie loses his life and George shoots his best friend. The effect of the tightly knit story is heightened by the naturalness of the setting and the men's talk, and by the underlying sympathy Steinbeck has for all of his creations, three days. In that brief time Curley has his hand smashed, his wife is murdered, the old swamper's dog is killed, even the meanest.
Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory
This novel reflects the author's interest in Mexico and his experience as a resident of that country. It is not surprising that he should write a sympathetic novel about the persecution of priests in Mexico since Greene himself is a convert and his serious novels are in keeping with Catholic idiom and doctrine. In this book he deals, as usual, with the psychology of the individual. The Power and the Glory was published in the United States in 1940 under the title The Labyrinthine Ways. It proved unpopular. A new edition, with the original title restored, has increased the body of readers familiar with the novel. In particular, Greene is a master of suspense.
The Heart of the Matter
The fears and hopes, friendships and petty rivalries, loves and hates of Europeans inured in a colony on the African coast afforded Greene, who actually worked in such a place during '42, the material for this novel. The book continues the study of British people under the influence of our times begun in Greene's earlier work. Major Scobie, like Arthur Rowe in The Ministry of Fear, is a relatively friendless man--a type that seems to have fascination for the author. Major Scobie is placed in a situation for the moral decision of life or death; there are, however, deeper implications in the story. The novel is actually a religious story about good and evil. It is a drama of a human soul in mid-passage between Heaven or Hell.
Robert Penn Warren: All the King's Men
All the King's Men, after a sluggish beginning, races smoothly to its inevitable ending. Warren's literary style is excellent. The real issue of the book is the character Jack Burden, although Willie Stark's rise to fame is the theme of the novel. From the opening pages of Sugar-boy's drive to the last pages when Jack realizes his self-destruction and, Phoenix-like, rises from the ruins of his past to make a new life with Anne Stanton, the plot is gripping and real.
Albert Camus: The Stranger
Bernard Malumud: The Natural
Alan Paton: Cry the Beloved Country
In South Africa today there is racial unrest more bitter than any now known in our own country. Cry, the Beloved Country is a beautiful and tragic story of that unrest, told with poetic loveliness. It is a personal story of tragedy. This distinguished novel by a South African minister has quickly, and rightfully, found a permanent place in twentieth-century literature. Dramatized, the story has been equally compelling as a play.
Ralph Ellison: Invistble Man
Richard Wright: Native Son
John Updike: Rabbit, Run
Those who have read John Updike's second novel as an exercise in frustration, sex, and squalor are missing the mark at which the writer has aimed. It is quite true that Rabbit, Run is one of the frankest books in all American literature. It is also a grim picture of man caught in the trap of nature, caught between instinct and social custom, mood and mind. It is ruthlessly unsparing in its picture of life lived on the edge of the abyss, of youth without resource, of a society which breeds national waste and moral squalor because of its disregard for the gap between fact and value in the lives of the unready and the immature.
John Fowles: The French Lieutenant's Woman
