Classics, Nonfiction, and Children's Literature
The Great Gilly Hopkins is not an easy book to read. Gilly is a child in a difficult situation. She is a child without a family, moved through the foster care system. She does not make it easy for her foster parents, because she believes that her mother loves her and needs her. She dreams
Maggie Tulliver is a quick-witted child, one with appalling manners for her strict Victorian house and community. She cannot seem to be a proper young lady. When the novel opens, she is about nine years old, and I couldn’t help adoring her childish antics, especially as she regularly brought disappointment to her mother and aunts
It is not often that I finish a book and feel nothing positive. I tend to like most of what I read, and even if I don’t like it, I try to find something that sheds light on life in some way. I struggle now to think of what I could possibly find redeeming in
Madame Bovary was a landmark book in the ways it blended romanticism and realism. Yet, its author, Gustave Flaubert despised the minutiae of everyday life, as well as the traditions and morals of society. The story of his life and how he, who despised realism, came to write a monumental novel of realism, is particularly
I loved George Eliot’s Middlemarch (published 1874; thoughts), despite its 800 pages. I can’t say the same about Eliot’s Silas Marner (published 1861), despite its comparative brevity. Now, if you have been reading my blog in the past, you will know that I tend to read classics and I normally love them, especially Victorian novels.
This month’s Classics Circuit features Meiji-era Japanese literature! I chose to read some short stories by Higuchi Ichiyō , the most well-known woman writer in Meiji Japan. In the Shade of Spring Leaves, by Robert Lyons Danly, is part biography of Ms Ichiyō and part a collection of nine of her short stories. I decided
Note: This post may contain spoilers for Wives and Daughters, Agnes Grey, and Middlemarch. Although the three Victorian novels by women that I read this summer all dealt with Victorian women’s limits in society, each captured distinct roles of women in society in radically different ways. The titles reveal the depth of each novel. Agnes
I believe it is possible to be very glad I read a book and yet still not really like it. I read not just for entertainment but for broader perspective. Reading Balzac certainly gave me a different perspective. In a sense, it’s kind of a mix between Dumas (humorous exaggeration) and Zola (heart-breaking realism). Honoré
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