Non-Genre Reading

Though my mind changes with my mood, here are a few of my favorite books. First and foremost is Jane Austen. (Click here if you want to read a riff on why, and here if you want to know why Mansfield Park is a great novel, though not my favorite.

Then, about equally, are letters, journals, biographies, and cultural studies from any period, and 19th Century literature--though I have a weakness for Smollett, Richardson, Fielding, Defoe, Lennox, Burney, and of course I love Spectator and other non fiction of the 18th Century. I am particularly interested in women's voices across time--how they observed their world, and reacted to it, and how people behaved. Favorites: Liselotte von der Pfalz, Fanny Burney's letters and diaries, the letters of Madame de Sevigny, Lord Chesterfield's Letters, Saint-Simon's diary, George Selwyn's and Walpole's letters, as well as Mary Wortley Montagu's.

Other frequent rereads are Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford, and Wives and Daughters. (In fact, I consider this to be one of the finest novels of that century; one can see its influence on George Eliot's Middlemarch, which is another favorite.)

I like a lot of Trollope, but I think my favorite is The Duke's Children, despite the nonsense about a woman who has dared to fall in love without the man giving her leave (by choosing her first) being thus rendered unpure and spiritually shop-worn. The characters in this book are so memorable, I reread it anyway. Of course Anthony Hope's romantic work--I delight in The Dolly Dialogues and P.G. Wodehouse, especially the earlier works.

Biographies I really admire are Juliet Barker's of the Brontes; E.F. Benton's As We Were and Penelope Fitzgerald's The Knox Brothers. I also enjoy dipping into Henry James' essays on literature, even though I don't particularly admire his fiction.

Then there are authors whose alien minds fascinate me--like Evelyn Waugh, and Edmund Wilson (essays, not his fiction, which I find dreadful). Nabokov is another whose nonfiction I appreciate more than I do his fiction.

Recently I have been reading the letters of Claire Clairmont. Fascinating view of how intelligent and creative people during the Romantic Era grow up. Claire and Mary Shelley are often considered prime examples of the Romantics; their letters speak to many of the concerns women writers in particular face now. Interesting side bits are their reactions to the Year Without a Summer (in fact, if it hadn't been for that terrible weather, might Frankenstein have been written at all?) A worthwhile read is swapping between Mary's letters and Claire's and Byron's, with what remains of Shelley's letters and diaries after his family went through them in order to transform him into Saint Percy.