Monthly Archives: July 2026

Should the Booker Prize Be Quirkier?

1 Reply

The Booker Prize longlist was announced today, and I’m happily reserving books at the public library. By late August I’ll have dark circles under my eyes, and metaphorically throw a few of the books at the wall, i.e., return them to the library.

And then the shortlist will be announced, and I’ll be happy again.

I’m a huge fan of the Booker.  I’ve been looking forward to the longlist for weeks.  I’d predicted that I would have read one, or two  max, on the list.  And, yes, I have read one:  Elizabeth Strout’s brilliant, dark, lyrical, political novel, The Things We Do Not Say. 

Last year the judges were eclectic: the charming Sarah Jessica Parker was one of the judges, and, the equally charming former Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle was the chair of the panel of judges.. Parker, an actress who has her own publishing company, described tearing the covers off the Booker books so she could read in public without anyone glimpsing the titles.

And Doyle was flamboyant about the low quality of most of the books. He delivered an outrageous, near-stand-up-comic speech at Southbank Centre, ranting about how most of the Booker submissions were terrible.

That was dramatic: it probably can’t happen twice.

But I wonder if the Booker should add more pzazz and quirks.

Here are two suggestions, which will doubtless be taken “under advisement.”

First, I would find an academic hipster who hasn’t read a new book since the mid-90s. The ’60s is her era. In fact, she has read nothing but Ken Kesey, Lynne Reid Banks, John Barth, Robert Coover, Doris Lessing, Jack Kerouac, and Charles Bukowski since she finished her dissertation. . And so she would crossly and quickly be able to winnow down the 13 new books to six, and then  go out and chat on the BBC or at Daunt Books about her outrageous views. If she starts quoting William Burroughs, hustle her offstage. They REALLY don’t want to hear her on Naked Lunch.

Here’s my other idea: recruit a pop star (why not Taylor Swift?) or rock star (Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders?) to perform a Booker-themed song.  Potential song titles:  Meta-Booker, Sexy Booker, Crazy Booker, Industrial Booker, Grateful Booker, etc. Reward them with books!

Oh, and it wouldn’t hurt to invite avid reader Jenna of Jenna Reads, the hostess of the Today show book club.  Her book club choices range from pop literary to literary, and are usually excellent.

Of course the Booker PR people may have more to do than organize celeb PR!

A New Take on Homer’s Epic: “The Odyssey,” the Movie

Leave a reply

We went to the 10 a.m. showing of The Odyssey, eschewing the DX and IMAX theaters. We had heard that the seats rocked during the boat scenes in the DX version, and the audience was squirted with water.

A terrifying Trojan horse.

Special effects are enough, and sometimes too much. This weird film is beautiful, but the special effects are hyperbolic. I covered my eyes during a long, terrifying storm scene with flashing red lights.

The director Christopher Nolan has a spooky imagination.  The Trojan Horse is not the wooden horse on wheels of the illustrations in old textbooks. Again, like the storm, it is plus-size – it weighs more than 8,000 pounds – and rears up menacingly on two hooves. Even the interior of the Trojan horse is perilous: Odysseus and the other Greeks struggle to keep their balance, and one drowns in water at the bottom of the horse.

As for the acting, it is superb, though many of the movie stars have disappointingly small roles.  Charlize Theron is a sympathetic nymph obsessed with Odysseus, but she seems to be there mainly to look gorgeous and supportive. (That’s the problem with beauty.) On the other hand, Circe the wicked witch (Samantha Morton), is powerful, but very homely. In a memorable metamorphosis scene, she turns Odysseus’ men into pigs by making them pig out.  Odysseus, rescues his men by trickery – they signal to him by oinking.

Anne Hathaway as Penelope (Odysseus’ wife) has the best female role. She is majestic and beautiful, and at first you think that’s all they’ll let her do. But the pace picks up: she must fob off creepy suitors – who now live in the great hall of the palace, eating her food and imbibing her wine. Penelope weaves all day, and undoes the weaving at night. And then Antinous (Robert Pattison), a sinister suitor, says he is on to her:  he has seen her unraveling the shroud. (She claimed she would choose a new husband when it was done.) She speaks quietly to Antinous, reasoning that that Odysseus may be alive, trying to explain why it’s not time to marry, until he backs off, for the moment.  Like Odysseus, she has the gift of gab.

Matt Damon’s take on Odysseus is is almost “meta”: he is not only a hero and the wily “man of many twists and turns,” but a complicated post-war Greek general who commands with a quiet authority. His quietness and stillness define his character:  although he fights deadly monsters, and has mercilessly tricked and killed during the Trojan War, he is gentle to his men, determined to get them home. (The goddess Athene tells him they will all die anyway, but he has to try.) He addresses the men in a quiet tone of voice, as if they are equals.  This works two ways:  they can engage him in dialogue, but they also feel they can go their own way, which is always disastrous for them. But never has there been a quieter, more sympathetic Odysseus.

In a way, The Odyssey reminds me of old 1950s Biblical spectacles like The Robe and The Ten Commandments, movies that played over and over on TV at Easter. But this is a different kind of spectacle, majestic but hip and edgy, a portrait of a terrible, terrifying world that is, alas, not unlike our own.

Book Martyrdom:  How Many Books Is Too Many? 

2 Replies

The movers sweated as they lugged boxes of books up three flights of stairs to our new apartment.

1950s Smiling Woman Teacher Librarian
. (Photo by Debrocke/ClassicStock/Getty Images)

The sweaty movers were good-natured, and joked around: “Which of you is the professor?” (Neither: we are amateur eggheads.)  But there was one grumpy exception: a man in a Frank Zappa t-shirt growled as he wiped the sweat off his forehead with one of my dish towels, which he had pilfered from the box labeled TOWELS.  “It’s like moving boxes of bricks. Are these yours, lady?”

I looked around wildly.  Should I deny it?  But no.  I was not going to prevaricate, though book martyrdom loomed.

“Yes.” I sounded wobbly, not dignified,. Then I picked up a box and headed upstairs with it.

A nice man intervened and gently took the box from me.  “If I may… Karl’s just a whiner, aren’t you, Karl?”

Indeed, Karl admitted he was a whiner.

But then they had to lug up actual boxes of bricks, for brick-and-board bookshelves, and Karl almost lost it.

You see, Karl was not a bookish person.  He was not a bricks-and-boards person, either. He didn’t understand the life-style. Sure, we had lots of books, but we not only read them, we needed to have them.  Because one day we would want to read Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family, and we wouldn’t want to go through Interlibrary loan, which is ghastly, because the paper in the books is often yellow and the pages are uncut. And it could take years to find the Charlotte M. Yonge at a used bookstore.

Fortunately, Karl didn’t have the power to evict me. But in New York, an avid reader was recently evicted from his apartment for having, oh, say, 100,000 books, or maybe 200,000.  The landlord said he feared the heavy books might crash through the floor.  Is that even possible? Well, that is a lot of books.

During my college days, a Dickensian graduate student, whom I shall call “the lodger,” because that’s what I called him, lived in a book-filled studio apartment below our apartment. It was arranged like the stacks at the public library.  There were narrow aisles between thousand of books crammed into metal bookcases of the kind the library uses. I can only suppose he found a special public library furniture store. 

At a book sale at his apartment, I learned that our landlord had refused to rent our apartment to him because he was convinced the bookcases would fall through the floor and damage the house.

I was very emmpathetic, but in the back of my mind, I thought, Someday I’ll have thousands of books, too!  Well, perhaps we have 1,000, 1,200 tops. Not in the lodger’s range!

The odd thing is that even fanatical readers disapprove of having “too many books.” Oh, they might have a cute t-shirt, saying Too Many Books, Too Little Time, but they don’t mean it.  They would rather pay $4,000 for soccer tickets, or $5,000 for rock concerts, than buy books they can “get at the public library.” The thing is, you can’t get them at the public library. The library discards many newish books, and the backlist is even more ephemeral.

We buy books instead of soccer tickets, or that trip to Hawaii we’ve never wanted to take.

And the important thing is: We refuse to be book martyrs!

Women’s Roles in “The Odyssey”:  Who Wants to Be Helen?

10 Replies

There has been a ruckus about the role of Helen in The Odyssey, the hit movie of the summer. A Black actress, Lupita Nyong’o, plays Helen, and online gossips are shocked out of their minds.

Lupita Nyong’o as Helen

There has been a storm on X, with many posters expressing indignation about a Black Helen.  One went so far as to say that no one will believe she is the most beautiful woman in the world.

Mind you, I’ve always pictured Helen as tall and blonde, though there is no evidence for this, and artists often paint her with red-gold or auburn hair. (Of course it’s black on the vase paintings.)

Helen is not described at all in Homer’s  Odyssey, so all this is fantasy.

Here’s the real reason to be indignant: Helen has a minimal role, unless the screenwriters have changed this. Why not cast the Black actress in one of the main roles? Why not Circe, the witty, brilliant witch with the power to turn men into pigs?  Or Calypso, the nymph who kept Odysseus for seven years?  (His poor wife, Penelope!) Even Princess Nausicaa has a bigger role than Helen.

And no one would have batted an eye if Nyong’o had stolen the show in one of these important parts.  No, it’s this absurd idea of beauty that triggers the prejudice. 

I haven’t seen the movie – I still haven’t seen Gladiator, so I’m way behind – but I’m amazed by how upset people are because of their personal version of Helen.

Anyway, would this have been an issue without the internet? Probably not.

By the way, tell me if the movie is good. I did like the trailer!

Why Mom Thinks We’re the Best!

Leave a reply

“Kat, this is your mom.”  Click.  Her phone messages were succinct.

“Kat, this is Susan.” Another message. Click.

I never called her Susan, but was pleased when she left a message.  Usually she hung up. Mom and her friends didn’t have answering machines.

On the phone, she talked about Oprah and The Good Wife, and then steered the conversation to her favorite topic: how great I was. She was hyperbolic in her admiration of her children.  We were born teachers, she said.  We were born writers, she said.  We were born doctors, she said.  Well… I fainted in Health class during a film of a cow giving birth, but if Mom thought I’d be a doctor… she had to be right!

One thing riled her up:  I was her favorite, so how dare I not be the favorite of everyone, not just in the family, but, if I understood it correctly, the entire world?

For instance, there was a fracas about my aunt’s will. Dad expected to be his sister’s heir. Instead, she left the whole estate to her bossy niece, X.

Mom liked my aunt (“the only decent one in that family”), but asked, “Why on earth didn’t she leave it to your dad?”

“Oh, X was always her favorite!”

“I would have thought you’d be her favorite! There you are, at her deathbed, and…”

“Mom, the intensive care unit was dominated by her visitors.  They kicked us out!”

Mom was loyal to a fault. When my best friend and I took an acting class in fifth grade, we were cast as trees.  The only speaking role was that of a bird, played by a fourth-grader.

“We’re better actresses,” my friend said. “She only got it because she’s pretty.”

Mom thought it was absurd that I didn’t have the leading role.  “All that talent,” she muttered. Out of loyalty, she also thought the play should be rewritten so my friend could be the co-star.

And then there was the time I applied to only one graduate school (the applications cost $25, which I thought outrageous) and was offered free tuition and a teaching assistantship.

Mom looked suspiciously at the letter.  “Why isn’t there anything about that fellowship?” 

“Well, I didn’t get it.”

She wanted to call up and complain to the department chair, but I convinced her the whole thing was a whimsy (true) and if I didn’t like it I was coming right home.

Another thing she wondered:  Why wasn’t I publishing my essays in The New York Times instead of the local newspaper?

“Gee, do you think they’d be interested in the butter cow?”

Okay, she knew when she’d gone too far. 

The  best thing she ever said to me:  “We’re not just mother and daughter, we’re friends.”

Not only was she my friend,  she was my best friend.

Was It Trippy? A Bike Trip on a Polluted Day

Leave a reply

Not a day goes by when I don’t complain about Climate Change:  the heat waves, the drought, the floods, and the wildfires.  Scientists have warned us since the mid-20th century, but the Earth Day festivities once a year make no difference, and Americans’ addiction to cars drives a large percentage of air pollution.

Wildfire smoke over New York City

And now the smoke from spreading Canadian wildfires has rapidly blown from evacuated Thunder Bay to northern Minnesota, Milwaukee, Detroit, and even Manhattan. I can’t take in the photographs of smoky cities and wonder how people will cope. Heat, wind, and dust: a horrible combination.

The air here is still moderate, according to the meteorologists, so I planned to take a bike ride today. I decided to get up at 8 and take my ride before the temperature rose to 90

My alarm went off at 8. Well, I did not leave at 8. But I promise I’ll leave at 8 next time. (Did I hear you say, “Uh-huh”?

The Six-Stop Bicycle Ride

First Stop:  I ditched my  600-page hardcover book at a Little Free Library because my bike was  wobbling from the weight.  What a rookie mistake!  A paperback is required for this situation. 

Second Stop.  I was already hydrated, but had brought two water bottles just in case,  Five miles into the ride, I drank half of a huge pink bottle which I bought because it was pink. It is not ideal for the road, because it weighs down the bike .

Third Stop:  I dumped out the small bottle of water, because I needed to travel lighter..

Fourth Stop:  All that water… what could I expect?  Should I stop at the restroom at the convenience store, or the patisserie with the clean restroom? The convenience store restroom has two stalls, the patisserie only one restroom with no stalls, so, yes, I stopped at the convenience store.

Fifth Stop:  Bought an iced tea at the patisserie. A big crowd inside but nobody came out to  the veranda.  Since I didn’t have my book, or anything to do, I considered walking my bike the rest of the way.   Oh no, I had already gone too far. What were a few hills?  Very burdensome, actually.

Sixth Stop:  One more drink of water…. it was hot on that last lap in the sun – and then home!

So was that a trippy trip?  No smoky yellow haze, thank God, so it doesn’t quite fit the sceniario of John Brunner’s The Sheep Look up, but in other ways we’re living in a dystopian novel.

Reading under the Heat Dome: Sigrid Undset’s “Kristin Lavransdatter” Trilogy

1 Reply

“You’ve got to read this!” I told a fellow burnt-out T.A.

Volume 2 of Kristin Lavransdatter

I had retired to the coffeehouse to read Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter before I graded 100 papers on Mircea Eliade’s Myth and Reality. You will understand my procrastination if you’ve ever graded undergraduate gibberish about a book they could not, and perhaps should not be expected to understand.  In my own long-ago undergrad Classical Mythology class, the professor assigned an excellent book on the influence of Greek and Roman myth on Western culture. And even the popularizer Edith Hamilton’s Mythology would have been a prelude to Eliade.

These students were not graduates of Choate or Exeter. They were intelligent, but still a bit raw.. There was a frat boy from Terre Haute, Indiana, a business major from Dubuque, Iowa, an English major from Omaha, Nebraska, and a pre-med major from Detroit.  (The pre-med student did more or less understand it.  There is a pre-med success gene.)

Can you blame me for losing myself in Kristin Lavrandstter?

Can you blame me now for losing myself in Kristin Lavransdatter under the heat dome?

Sigrid Undset, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1928, is best-known for the Kristin Lavrandatter trilogy. Set in medieval Norway, these spellbinding novels are elegantly-written and historically fascinating. Undset interweaves the threads of Kristin’s happy childhood, difficult marriage, near-death from numerous pregnancies, and nursing of victims of the Plague. We follow Kristin’s emotional, physical, and psychological experiences from childhood to death. She is a fascinating heroine, who learns from the mistakes that determine her fate.

That’s just the outline, of course: the language is elegant, the details religion resonate, and we are utterly transported to medieval Norway.

Charles Archer’s translation.

There are two translations of Kristin Lavransdatter, both excellent. Charles Archer’s 1920s translation holds up very well: the style is formal, and the word choices suggest the Middle Ages. Archer’s translation is available in paperback in three volumes: The Bridal Wreath, The Mistress of Husaby, and The Cross.

Tina Nunnally’s prize-winning 1990s translation (Penguin) is also stunning. It is available in a one-volume Penguin Deluxe edition, or as three individual Penguin paperbacks, The Wreath, The Wife, and The Cross.

Which translator do I prefer? I love both of them.

What Should We Do?  Working vs. Retirement

Leave a reply

After my mother’s death, I stopped visiting my hometown. I thought we would retire there someday, but it seems that we never will retire.

There are so many factors to consider. We will lose our insurance if we retire and have to sign up for Medicare.

Some doctors accept Medicare – it’s almost pro bono for them – but Medicare is reputed to be a slow payer, and not all doctors accept it.  My theory: you will never see a gynecologist again.  No, I’m exaggerating, but instead of a free annual physical, complete with gyn exam, for only a small co-pay, Medicare covers a gyn exam only every two years, with a 20% co-pay. No, I’m not keen on pelvic exams, or mammograms, but come on!  You don’t stop being a woman because you’re retired. 

My advice is, don’t ever get sick. Touch your toes! Run! Bicycle! So long as you don’t brood over the racing form, and go to the track to bet on the horses, you might break even.   Remember: you might win, show, or place today, and lose your savings tomorrow.

Why are the schools failing? Well, the teachers burn out. They are grossly underpaid, and teaching five hours a day five days a week is exhausting. The good thing:  many public schools offer teachers an early retirement package at age 52 so they can replace them with cheaper, young, inexperienced teachers. This is good for the older teachers, but it might explain the decline of our schools.

One exhausted, newly-retired teacher friend said, “I’d rather be a bodyguard than a teacher.” I could only think she had watched the Spanish Netflix film, Close, with action star Noomi Rapace as a bodyguard. My friend took martial arts classes and practiced archery every day, but nobody wanted a bodyguard whose choice of weapon was a bow and arrow.

Okay, I work at home. A home office? More like a messy desk and a computer. However,  it involves special computer skills, like attending Zoom conferences. Once, I had to look at the top of the boss’s bald head for an hour on Zoom. (Was it my camera, or his?) Another time, I forgot to hit the mute button while I was gossiping with a friend about a person we both agreed was “crazy.” Oops!  Thank God someone gently reminded me to mute before I revealed the details of her acrimonious divorce.

Part-time work would be ideal, and employers would save money, but they seem to have the notion that full-time people will be more efficient.  

But Hail, Corporate America!  I don’t run the world.  And thank God for leisure, retirement, and Medicare, and may we all have affordable health care!

Gothic Novels of Different Centuries: Mary Stewart to J. Sheridan Le Fanu

4 Replies

I am a fan of Gothic novels.

It began with the so-called “Gothic novels” of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. There was romance, there was travel, and a heroine’s investigation of a crime in an exotic location. She usually has two suitors,  one a charmer, the other more rugged. N.B. The charmer is usually the criminal.

Among the most popular Gothic writers were Mary Stewart, Phyllis A. Whitney, Victoria Holt, and Dorthy Eden. You could recognize the genre by the cover illustration. Above, a woman in an evening gown or negligee is running from something or someone. Below, a woman dressed for lunch, or the office, descends a steep trail to the beach under a full moon. Her dress looks stylish, though it might not do for a dolphin rescue.

The best of these Gothic novelists is Mary Stewart, a charming, intelligent writer who is also an unwitting travel writer, setting each of her books in a different country. In This Rough Magic, the heroine, Lucy, an actress, is visiting her sister in Corfu. During her stay, she saves a beached dolphin, quotes Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and uncovers a smuggling racket. (The crime in Mary Stewart’s novels is quite often smuggling.)

But of course these 20th-century Gothics do not resemble the original Gothic novels of the 18th and 19th centuries. I am not a fan of Ann Radcliffe or Horace Walpole, but I love Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,  Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, a satire of Gothic novels.

J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, one of my favorite Victorian novels, is superb and suspenseful, and stands out from the rest of the Gothics. Le Fanu, a prolific Irish writer of short stories, historical novels, mysteries, and Gothic novels, is remembered for Uncle Silas and his ghost stories. 

Let me just say, Uncle Silas is one of the most sinister characters in English literature. Silas, once accused of murdering a guest in his house, though the crime was never proved, is shunned by society, and has a reputation as a gambler and flim flam man. Now that he is old, he presents himself as a religious man, but that is a humbug. He is an impecunious opium addict who also drinks a lot.

And then there is an uproar. Silas is named the guardian of his niece Maud, a 17-year-old heiress, in a codicil to his brother’s will. Maud’s father never believed the charges against Uncle Silas, and Maud is prepared to think well of him..  Unfortunately, as Maud will learn, her father’s confidence in Silas was misplaced.

The structure of Uncle Silas is a clever double narrative. There are  two first-person narrators, both of them named Maud Ruthyn, who are one and the same person, at different ages. On the first page, after describing Maud as “slight and rather tall, with a great deal of golden hair, dark grey-eyed, and with a countenance rather sensitive and melancholy,” the adult Maud adds, “I was that girl.”

The adult Maud recounts the details of her dangerous sojourn with Uncle Silas. .Although we see most of the action through the heiress’s eyes, the adult Maud’s occasional remarks deepen our understanding..

One by one, Silas banishes Maud’s friends, including his own daughter, Milly, whom he sends to school in France. He forbids Maud to visit her middle-aged Cousin Monica, who is very concerned about her living with Silas, and then she is not allowed to leave the estate. Maud realizes she is a prisoner, and becomes terrified. Fortunately, a few of the employees are her friends, and try to help her, though this is almost impossible. There are spies everywhere.

 At one point, a wicked French governess – one who, ironically, had been fired by Maud’s father –  has locked Maud in a room with barred windows in a disused wing of the house. Le Fanu’s spare prose is curiously theatrical and effective as he describes her despair. Even with the cliches, it is a brilliant piece of writing.

Le Fanu writes, “I did not lie down; but I despaired.  I walked round and round the room, wringing my hands in utter distraction.  I threw myself at the bed-side on my knees. I could not pray. I could only shiver and moan, with hands clasped, and eyes of horror turned up to heaven….”

This elegant, exciting book can be devoured in a few days, if you have a few days off – or in a month – who cares?  It’s fabulous!

By the way, the heroine of Le Fanu’s novel The Rose and the Key is also named Maud. Perhaps it’s significant? In fact, all the women’s names in Uncle Silas being with “M.” Clever, though I don’t quite know the meaning of this alliteration.

The New Woman: George Gissing’s “In the Year of Jubilee”

2 Replies

It used to be a Herculean task to find George Gissing’s books.  After reading Gail Godwin’s brilliant novel, The Odd Woman, with its many allusions to George Gissing, I tracked down a paperback copy of his novel The Odd Women at a literary hub of a bookshop that had almost anything you could want.

My favorite of his books is New Grub Street, but I recently reread Gissing’s quasi-feminist novel, In the Year of Jubilee, an uneven but delightful book that is in part an exposé of women’s education. Gissing focuses on on the consequences of the inadequate education of Victorian women.

The four main characters are “New Women,” who want to break out of the mold of Victorian womanhood. None of them are well-educated, though all have gone to girls’ schools.

At the center is 23-year-old Nancy Lord, the wealthiest and best-educated of the lot. Nancy is complacent about her education but struggles when she attempts to read books about the sciences. And then she meets attractive, sardonic Lionel Tarrant, a clever young man educated at Oxford.  (Too clever? Kind of a swine, I thought!) Whether consciously or not, she sees a relationship with him as a way to escape the trap of Victorian womanhood. And yet, because Tarrant does not regard her as an equal, this mutual attraction proves disastrous.

Nancy wants to enjoy the same freedom her brother has, and near the beginning of the book, the Jubilee – the celebration of the 50th year of Queen Victoria’s reign – gives her an excuse to go out at night. Nancy is exhilarated by the crowd, and slips away from her chaperone (a business associate of her father’s) for an illicit meeting with a male friend who takes her out for a drink. Nancy would love to live freely like a man.

Her friends are also New Women, to a greater or lesser extent.  Some achieve their goals, some do not. Beatrice French is the most successful. She brilliantly founds a women’s club that sells cheaply-made, ostensibly fashionable clothing to lower-middle-class women. Her younger sister, Fanny, is too flighty for business, and actively pursues free love. (Hippie or slut? Well, everyone thinks she is a slut!)

And then there’s Jessica, who is determined to take the baccalaureate exams at the University of London. Jessica is a fascinating character, a true bluestocking who at first strikes this reader as an intellectual.  She and Nancy knew each other at school, and often have tea together. Jessica works part-time as a governess, but devotes the rest of her time to studying. She cannot understand the math and science. It isn’t a matter of intelligence: she simply does not have the background. (Jessica the Obscure?)

As the time draws nearer to her exams, she becomes fearful and convinced she will fail. And tragically she does fail, and has a nervous breakdown from which she never recovers.  If she had attended a good school, rather than a finishing school, would she have passed the exams? I think so! But of course her parents did their best: they thought they were sending their daughter to a good school. But Jessica’s fall is tragic. She had so much potential, and was such a kind young woman, and now she is permanently befuddled, spiteful, and jealous.

Class matters  The characters are all more or less middle-class, ranging from lower-middle-class (Jessica) to more prosperous middle-class (Beatrice and Fanny French) to a sort of wealthy business class that is not considered quite top-notch (Nancy). Oddly, It is the middle-middle-class women, Beatrice and Fanny, who have the most freedom. Beatrice is a successful businesswoman, and Fanny happily pursues her sexual relationships with men.

This novel does veer toward the melodramatic: there is a secret marriage, a mysterious rich aunt, and even a Tess of the D’Urbervilles vibe. In my opinion, Gissing makes a wrong turn near the end of the novel. He believes in free love, but apparently not for women.