What’s So Great About the Great Books is a defence of (and argument for) reading the ‘Great Books.’ Naomi writes that her book has two audiences:

Yes, it’s addressed primarily to people who are somewhat interested in the Great Books but wonder whether a deeper investigation is truly worth their time. However, this book is also addressed to people who already love the Great Books and are perusing my book because they enjoy works in its genre: apologias for the classics.

I haven’t really read an apologia for the classics before this one, but I would put myself in the second camp. I’m already sold on reading the Great Books. In fact, my problem tends to run the other way – I have difficulty settling down to reading contemporary fiction being so very captivated by the literary past.

I’ve seen a whole lot of reviews of Naomi’s book doing the rounds – the one I enjoyed the most was this one by .2 I also enjoyed some of the interviews Naomi has done, including this one with and this one with . Definitely read or watch those if you’re interested in knowing more about Naomi and her book. Or read on for a few of my own undercooked thoughts…

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A defence of lay reading

Naomi says that her book is in part a defence of lay reading. She writes:

Over time I taught myself how to read the Great Books. I didn’t need professors. I didn’t need a lot of external guidance. I read these books the same way I read everything else: I sank into the dream of the text, experiencing it with as much immediacy as I could. … Some things I understood well, others I understood poorly, and some things I understood not at all. And that, too, was ok.

This has been my experience as well. And it’s this self-directed ‘lay reading’ that has brought immeasurable richness into my life. And although we can go to university and receive formal instruction, most of us will only learn by doing – we will only learn how to read the classics by reading the classics in the way Naomi describes – experiencing the text with immediacy and without much external guidance.

One of the first classic novels I read was Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. My family had a rather impressive edition with tissue thin pages, a sewn in ribbon bookmark, and a claret-coloured imitation leather cover with gold embossed lettering. We had plenty of books on the shelf but none that looked like that. I recall even from a young age understanding that there was something special about this book (it had a sewn in bookmark for a start!). I also recall not knowing enough to know whether it was Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë or Charlotte Brontë by Jane Eyre. Nothing in the presentation of the book, its title page, or page headers, clarified the matter. I knew of ‘Jane Austen’ so was leaning towards ‘Jane Eyre’ being the author. At thirteen, I decided it was time for a precocious young scholar such as myself to tackle this book. I began. Aha, I thought. It’s Charlotte Brontë by Jane Eyre. I read on… and on and on. And then came to the end of… the Introduction – a short biographical sketch of the author, Charlotte Brontë. It had taken hours to read that far and, finally, disconsolately, I turned to… Chapter One.

But this is how you learn to read the classics. You sit in a chair, open the cover and have a go. And strangely, as you read, amid hours of confusion and lack of comprehension, something begins to coalesce – some burgeoning understanding, some growing receptivity – that eventually permits contact with other minds across time.

Sometimes, reading the Great Books is hard work. But, to Naomi’s way of thinking: ‘that work is worth doing because the Great Books offer more than immediate pleasure; they also offer enduring value—something that stays with us even after the pleasure has passed.’

Have people always read the Great Books?

We don’t really call them the ‘Great Books’ in Australia (at least, I don’t think we do!) – here we would just say ‘the classics.’ But one thing I found out from reading this book was that this belief in the value of pursuing a reading program of the classics was largely a social construct – a fad that arose in the twentieth century.3

Perhaps you imagine that universities in English-speaking countries have always taught the English canon (at least since an English canon began to form) but they haven’t. Studying the canon, even in a university setting, is relatively new. Up until the mid-nineteenth century, universities in the English-speaking world concerned themselves with works in Latin and Greek. Hardly any works in English were taught and no works of French or Continental philosophy were taught. Most of what we would consider the ‘Great Books’ were ignored. ‘Grammar Schools’ (in Australia, these are usually posh, private schools), literally taught grammar – Latin and Greek grammar – to prepare students for entrance to university. They didn’t teach Shakespeare or Milton. Those were things, Naomi writes, that you maybe read on your own!

What’s So Great About the Great Books traces the fascinating history that resulted in English translations of Latin and Greek texts eventually being taught (this was extremely controversial at the time!) and a Great Books movement focused on lay readers gradually gathering momentum with the publication of various ‘Great Books’ collections in the first half of the twentieth century.

But that movement has foundered. In our time, the Great Books have somewhat fallen out of favour with the Left due to being considered egregiously undiverse and written predominantly by dead white guys. At the same time (as if to underline their dubiousness to the Left), they have been increasingly embraced by the Right.

I think, for a lot of us who are outside academia or who have not much proximity to the Culture War type debates being waged on the internet – this politicisation of the Great Books is difficult to understand. We have read and loved Austen! We have been moved by the novels of George Eliot! We have been surprised by the rambunctious humour of Chaucer and the timeless acuity of Shakespeare. We have been captivated by the poetic vision of Milton or the detailed eye of Proust or the innovations of the Modernists or the relentless searing vision of the nineteenth century Russians. The relationships we have with these writers feels personal.

I suppose it might lead those of us who revel in these books to feel defensive. Why wouldn’t we! There is a feeling of indignation at having something we value dismissed out of hand with little more than a sanctimonious ‘too white’, or ‘too male’, or ‘dodgy politics.’ Then there is the secondary horrifying prospect that our enjoyment of those books is indicative of something deeply suspect in our own politics!

Naomi takes seriously those concerns and criticisms of the Great Books and works through them one by one. Each chapter responds to a question, such as: Aren’t the Great Books kinda problematic?’ and ‘Why not read other books that are equally beautiful but have better politics?’ and ‘Can’t reading the Great Books be psychologically damaging for marginalised people?’ I found those chapters fascinating partly because Naomi doesn’t allow herself any pat answers. She tackles those questions seriously and empathetically. I don’t have time to recreate Naomi’s arguments here, but I appreciated her working through and addressing those concerns about the ‘Great Books’ and the ‘Western Canon’ – concerns I am alive to but have struggled to assimilate into my overarching feeling that reading those books is still a worthwhile enterprise.

Which books, which list?

Inevitably, the next question must be: ok, but which books are the ‘Great Books’? Which list should we follow?

Naomi follows the reading list contained in the The New Lifetime Reading Plan, originally written by Clifton Fadiman in 1960 and revised by John S Major in 1997. But there are plenty of lists to choose from such as this one from St John’s College and the Core Curriculum offered by Columbia (and many others besides).

All of these lists are very white and very male. And many of the books contain racist or sexist or homophobic or otherwise unenlightened views. So, I suppose one might then ask Naomi: why not curate your own list? Naomi has opted not to do that and has gone so far as to include the Fadiman-Major list in the endnotes of her book. She writes that she didn’t feel qualified to create her own list. She goes on:

The Great Books concept is about placing faith in those who came before us. Yes, there are many methods of constructing a Great Books list, but they all rely on trusting other people’s judgement. […] There is, in my opinion, some collective wisdom contained in these lists, and yes, you can definitely fiddle around with any of them and add and subtract things, but I think this wisdom is worth respecting.

I admire Naomi’s humility on this point because I imagine that there might’ve been an awful lot of pressure to develop a more palatable list that addresses the obvious lack of diversity of the writers represented in the list.

The obvious point to make (one that Naomi makes in her book) is that you shouldn’t just read the Great Books. It is open to us to read widely and voraciously and follow our interests. But on that point of the lack of diversity of Great Books writers, Naomi introduces the idea that the Great Books contain another form of diversity: They teach us about other times. They teach us about cultures from far in the past.

The reading of books written a long time ago has always appealed to me. I know that a lot of people aren’t quite so interested in this, that it might just be a quirk of certain personality types (mine) to want to immerse themselves in the past and understand what life was like then and how people thought. Inevitably, old books contain what we might consider to be outdated ideas, but they also contain their own wisdom and exposure to them broadens our perspectives and denaturalises our assumptions. The idea that we should confine ourselves to books that are morally ‘pure’ sounds both sterile and arrogant to me – arrogant because there is a built-in assumption that we have reached some sort of moral pinnacle that allows us to stand outside time and judge those poor idiots that dared to write books before us, while imagining that we will never be judged by those who come after.

In any case, Naomi believes that it is the moral complexity of the Great Books that makes them great. ‘My contention,’ writes Naomi, ‘is that if the politics are unimpeachably good, then the book simply cannot be beautiful.’

Moral complexity and aesthetic beauty are, to my mind, inextricably intertwined—and moral complexity is so important that it doesn’t really matter what message the author was trying to convey, or where they personally stood, because their genius often brings out the full contours of the situation that reveals itself when the book is read as a whole.’

The Great Books have integrity

Early on in her book Naomi writes that the thing that tends to distinguish the Great Books is that they have a lot of integrity. She takes up this idea of ‘integrity’ in a later chapter (and I’ll leave you with this quote):

For me, the Great Books are marked by their courage: They engage with moral, ethical, political, and spiritual questions on the deepest and most rigorous level. And whatever answer the author produces, you often see within them the ghosts of other answers. This aligns with the argument “The Great Books teach you how to think,” but it’s not quite that simple either. I think my position is more like “The Great Books teach you how to have integrity.” To have integrity means recognising that the bad and the good are often inextricable and that what we like or praise about a situation is often a direct result of the parts of it that we most loathe.

I chose Piranesi by Susanna Clarke – a book I loved when I read it and continue to love. It’s meaningful to me for a few reasons. I read it at a time when I wasn’t reading much – certainly not very much contemporary fiction anyway. And I was feeling pretty discouraged about the state of contemporary literary fiction. It seemed as if writers, in an effort to be heard in a crowded marketplace, felt they had to do everything to an extreme degree. The first chapter must grab the reader immediately. Immediately, the writer must raise the stakes. They must also choose a slightly unusual writing style and take it to its zenith. And, at every turn, the writer must demonstrate edgy brilliance.

I guess it felt like contemporary fiction was trying very hard. And I didn’t like it. Be cool Contemporary Fiction. Chill out. Stop with the hard sell!

And I suppose I would add: Feel free to be brilliant. But if you could aim not to be competitively brilliant, that would help somehow.

Because a competitive mindset risks shifting creative energy from the writing to the reception of the writing. And this gums up the artistic process. Like Narcissus transfixed by his reflection in the pond, the writer looks into the water trying to discern the flash of a silver fish in the depths (artistic inspiration?) but can’t see past the glorious surface impression of themselves as a brilliant writer-lauded-by-all. Their artistic focal range becomes abruptly superficial and self-reflexive. All their creative decision-making loops back to the preening part of their mind – the part fascinated by how they’re being received. (It’s difficult not to dwell on the reception of one’s writing. I’m not unsympathetic.)

Actually, I’m reminded of a moment in Anna Goldsworthy’s memoir, Piano Lessons, which records her experience of being taught piano – from the age of nine right up to becoming a concert pianist – by the same teacher. Her teacher was a brilliant Russian pianist living in the suburbs of Adelaide in South Australia. (She was on the Liszt List.1) After Goldsworthy’s first lesson, the teacher (in a strong Russian accent) says: ‘Music is not just playing right notes in right time, but digestion hugely important.’ A decade later, her teacher tells her:2

Sometimes people very good at doing very shallow, very superficial. For example they take shell, and forget about oyster! We need to feed every time when we play, and not just polish the shell.

I love this and it’s stayed with me. (The book is crammed with wisdom about the creative process, issuing from the mouth of Goldsworthy’s brilliant teacher.) I wonder if what I’m reacting to in contemporary fiction is the feeling that there is a lot of shell-polishing going on.

The thing I like about Piranesi is that Susanna Clarke has written a book that appears utterly true to her unconventional artistic vision, unconcerned about reception, and indifferent to all the stuff and nonsense that’s supposed to enhance a book’s saleability. It was pleasing to read a novel that was not maimed or regulated by the editing and publishing process (or, at least, this was my impression). It impressed me and reignited my interest in contemporary literary fiction. And so, from about the time of reading Piranesi, I’ve been trying to read more new books (though I still wallow in the classics like a pig in mud).

Anyway.

Piranesi was a great book! Beautiful. Suspenseful. Morally complex. Singular. Here is me speaking enthusiastically about it with Alyssa (with big thanks to Alyssa – it was so much fun!):

Other odds and sods

Book Idle

I’m road testing new names for my newsletter and think I might’ve settled on ‘Book Idle.’ This newsletter started off as a Virginia Woolf reading group (with the name Wolfish!) and while I maintain an abiding love and respect for VW, I’ve been writing more broadly about books and literature and wanted a name that reflects that broader scope. I quite like the proximity of ‘idle’ to ‘idyll’ and ‘idol’. I also quite like its proximity to ‘bone idle’ – though book idleness is quite a different kettle of fish. Readers may appear idle – they recline; they are still – but their minds expand and roam.

Sometimes I do feel that reading takes over my life a bit. I should be doing other things but I’m book idle. Other times, I feel inclined to lean in to the slower tempo of books as a private protest to the online churn. Why not idle along for a while. Why not engage in reading as counter-practice.

Fear not, Woolf-heads. Virginia Woolf will continue to be the patron saint of this operation and we will continue to do a group read of a Woolf novel each year. And please know that there are other excellent Woolf-focused newsletters out there like Woolf in the World written by academic and author if you are wanting more.

Speaking of Woolf, we recently finished reading Orlando together. If you’re interested, a full set of posts and podcasts is available here.

Autumn

Let the record show that the weather, currently, is stunning. A lovely, bright, sunny, clear autumn has arrived.

EDITH

I’ve been reading and thoroughly enjoying a serialised novel about of the life of Edith Wharton, written by Olivia Ciacci, aka . It’s really really good – beautifully written, impeccably researched and free on Substack. I’ve enjoyed it all the way through, but I think it was the third instalment about teenaged Edith when I really locked on. Wharton was a fascinating person and is the perfect subject for a fictional treatment. This is polished, beautiful prose. Definitely worth your time.

So far, seven instalments are up. Why not go over and have a read?

Why Teach?

I seem to be reading a fair bit of fiction published outside mainstream channels. EDITH, mentioned above, is serialised and published on Substack, and Why Teach?, by , was self-published (about a year ago). I think I have this preconception that self-published fiction will be lower quality (often it is!) but that wasn’t the case with Why Teach? or EDITH. I heard about Why Teach? around the (Substack) traps and decided to check it out. Somehow, I inhaled it in two evenings – I just couldn’t put it down. The main character’s plight was extremely relatable and, in the end, moving.

The Tortoise and the Hare

runs a 20th-Century Book Club and her next book will be The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins. I’ve dug out my copy and plan to read along with her. I really love the books Ann picks which have included The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim, Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner and Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers (all excellent!). Tune in, if you’re interested.

Beardsley

There happens to be really excellent biography and history writing on Substack. Recently I read this excellent piece about artist and illustrator Aubrey Beardsley by . And part 2 is out too…

One Song

Do any of you listen to the podcast One Song? (Here’s a link to the YouTube channel but you can find it on whatever podcast app you use.) In each episode, the hosts take a close look at a single song. It’s such a great format and all the behind-the-scenes information about the chosen song is completely fascinating. I loved listening to their breakdown of ‘Helter Skelter’ by the Beatles. And I enjoyed the ‘You Oughta Know’ episode too. (And many others besides.)

Aster**

The Merriam Webster Dictionary website tells me I’ve been mispronouncing ‘asterisk’ all this time. I’ve been saying ‘Asterix’ (like the comic strip guy who hangs out with Obelix) when it’s supposed to be pronounced the way it’s spelt: risk not riks.

Gee I love reading articles on dictionary websites. Now please excuse me while I check the word of the day…

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Thanks friends! Until very soon.

But all of that is prologue. The point I wanted to make was that I more or less stopped reading for maybe seven years. From the time of having babies to a few years after losing the house I hardly read more than a handful of books. I just didn’t have the headspace, time or attention span. A few years ago, I realised that I was starting but not finishing books, so I set myself a reading goal for the year and began recording the books I read. The risk of doing this is that you become sort of obsessed with numbers. But the upside is that you have a wonderful record of your reading year and it’s very nice to look back over it. The first year I did it, in 2023, I read 30 books but it was a struggle. The second year, 2024, I read 31 books. This year, I read 62 books and it’s really been a wonderful reading year. I’ve discovered some truly excellent writers and have felt my interest and engagement with books and literature ignite. I suspect part of it has to do with following other readers and writers on Substack – it really is a wonderful place to be a bystander to good literary analysis and book chat among engaged, thoughtful readers.

Anyway, I am sneaking in one of these ‘year in review’ posts just before the end of the year. (Maybe there is a book in the list that you also read and loved…?)

Thank you for reading my newsletter in 2025! And thank you for your thoughtful comments and enthusiasm for books and reading. I feel encouraged to keep going! I’m still feeling my way a bit with what I want this newsletter to be. But I expect to lead another group read of a novel by Virginia Woolf next year (probably March) so do tune in for that. (Absolutely blistering pace! One Woolf novel a year!! See if you can keep up.1 )

Now for my favourite books of 2025. In no particular order…

Best epistolary collection

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

This is a collection of twenty years of correspondence between Helene Hanff, a freelance writer living in New York City, and a used-book dealer in London. Opened the cover. A little over two hours later, finished, without having moved from my chair, feeling all soft and tender.

Best tearjerker

Loved and missed by Susie Boyt

This book (published in 2023) crept up on me slowly. At first, I wasn’t sure it was my thing, despite the wry intelligent narratorial voice. Then, just after halfway, it delivered a gut punch and proceeded to pummel me until the end. I sobbed (not cried) more or less from Chapter 8 onwards, then attended a work meeting with a swollen tear-soaked face and bright red nose. With thanks to for recommending this.

Best and most courageous novel

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

This book really exceeded my expectations – particularly the acuteness of the portrait of the two main characters, their plight and tribulations. But I am also deeply impressed by the courage of James Baldwin, both personally and professionally, to write a novel about a gay love affair in 1956. Apparently, when Baldwin delivered the manuscript to his publisher, Knopf, they urged him to make Giovanni a woman (effectively rendering it a heterosexual love affair which would have made no sense to the story) or to come up with a ‘Negro’ novel instead (the main character in Giovanni’s Room is a white American). According to Baldwin: ‘They said I was a negro writer and I would reach a very special audience… And I would be dead if I alienated that audience. That, in effect, nobody would accept that book coming from me… My agent told me to burn it.’ Baldwin fired his agent and took the book to a smaller less prestigious press. I guess I just feel deeply impressed by Baldwin’s integrity and writerly vision. I will certainly be seeking out more of his books.

Best novella (print)

The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt

This novella was so so good. I loved every second. I wrote about it further here.

Best novella (online)

Money Matters by Naomi Kanakia

published her novella Money Matters on her substack in November 2024. She describes it as ‘A story about a ne’er’do’well kid who’s inherited a house from his uncle and schemes to find a girlfriend who’ll help him pay the property taxes.’ I missed it when she first published it but had been reading and enjoying her other ‘tales’. But then it blew up in May this year when it was mentioned in glowing terms in The New Yorker.

I really loved this novella. It was fresh and original and written in an inviting, informal voice that Naomi has perfected across all of her writing, both fiction and non. I’ve had a lot of thoughts about why Naomi’s fiction succeeds online where other fiction fails which I may write about further at some point. (No one else (as far as I can see) has confronted that challenge – that otherwise good literary fiction seems to wilt online; that fiction writing may need a change of approach to stay buoyant in the choppy, foamy waters of the internet – as successfully as Naomi.)

Interestingly, both Money Matters and the other novella I mentioned above, The English Understand Wool, involve characters that may appear at first blush to be amoral or immoral or driven by moral instincts that fall outside the norm. And yet, I think the thing that makes both so compelling is that they do engage with moral questions in really interesting, inventive ways. In both, the reader is sort of won over to a different, unintuitive way of thinking. A lot of contemporary novels fail to grab me because the moral fabric of the story is an unquestioned backdrop that the characters accept implicitly but never really engage with in any meaningful way.

Anyway, both novellas are worth your time.

Funnest self-help

Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life by Arnold Schwarzenegger

I am an omnivorous reader. This may not be obvious to those who read my newsletter but there you have it. Anyway, I did myself the good turn of listening to the audiobook of Be Useful, read by the man himself in that very distinctive accent we all know and love. It was just really… fun. I had a good time!

I think I can sum up the main message of the book as: work harder and stop complaining. There were bits about selling yourself and backing yourself that didn’t really land for me. What I enjoyed was hearing about Schwarzenegger’s life – how he did what he did – told with zest and good humour. Schwarzenegger also writes about growing up in Austria and how he viewed the idea of ‘America’ as an outsider – why he wanted to go there. He obviously just really loves the country and that was kind of nice to read.

If you want to read this, read it for the time you get to spend with Arnie, rather than for the self-help. If you’re not a Schwarzenegger fan, you will not like this book!

Most charming novel

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim

It is difficult to express in words how charming and uplifting this book is. When I finished it, I felt all rosy-cheeked and delighted. I had a sort of overflowing joy in my heart. Others who’ve read it report the same thing. You finish and you are literally charmed. With thanks to who included it in her twentieth century book club which was how I came across it. Read Ann’s posts on Von Arnim and the book here.

Best biography

The Trauma Cleaner by Sarah Krasnostein

This book is about Sandra Pankhurst, a woman who runs a trauma cleaning service which cleans up after homicides, suicides, hording and severe mental illness. In the early chapters, Krasnostein describes Pankhurst’s interactions with clients (people with severe hording issues, for example, who are on the verge of being evicted) and shows her disarming them, overcoming their anxieties, working through their concerns with a no-nonsense practicality. She’s both gentle and firm. Nothing can surprise or ruffle her and this seems to set people at ease – people whose instinct is to feel terrible shame and to bar the entry of anyone sent to help.

Pankhurst herself endured unimaginable suffering in her life. She experienced abuse both as an adopted child and as a trans woman. The book describes those phases of her life: child growing up in Melbourne in the fifties and sixties, husband and father to two boys, drag queen, sex worker, wife, funeral director, business owner. The Trauma Cleaner is a moving, humane book. Pankhurst died in 2021 from a severe pulmonary disease (probably acquired from her work as a cleaner without the appropriate protective equipment).

Best short story collection

The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke

Like many, I was first introduced to Susanna Clarke when I read her incredible novella, Piranesi. After that, I had to read everything by her. Last year, I read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and this year I read The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories (stories that take place in the wings of the world of Strange and Norrell). It’s a testament to Clarke’s brilliance that I will happily read adult ‘fairy tales’ – not a genre I would usually seek out for myself. But the writing is just very very good and Clarke has understood that fantasy offers an excellent mode in which to explore capricious evil. Her mimicry of older forms of language is word perfect. She is particularly good at depicting the petty pomposities, certainties and self-congratulatory postures of men and women of earlier times. Lots of humour and irony. I eagerly await Clarke’s next book.

Best American gothic

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson is getting to be one of my favourite writers of all time. I remember first reading her short story ‘The Lottery’ at school for English and being slightly shocked – its seemingly unassuming premise turns very dark. Years later I read her non-fiction memoir-y book, Life Among the Savages and just loved her voice – so clever and funny. Then I read The Haunting of Hill House which Stephen King said was ‘as nearly perfect a haunted-house tale as I have ever read’ (he’s right – it’s great!). Then this year I read We Have Always Lived in the Castle (first published in 1962). Each book is better than the last. I don’t think I’ve ever read a more powerful climactic scene than the one in We Have Always Lived in the Castle. There is something very compelling about Jackson’s voice, humour and ability to evoke a gothic, menacing atmosphere. In all three books (Savages, Hill House and Castle) a house plays a major role in the story – almost becoming a character itself.

Next up for me is Hangsaman.

Best murder mystery with no murders

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers

Gaudy Night was my first outing with Sayers so I had high expectations and the book did not disappoint – though I kept waiting for a murder that never came. I just assumed I was reading a murder mystery – emphasis on murder. (Whereas what I was reading was a mystery – emphasis on mystery.) A friend who is a die-hard Sayers fan scolded me for starting with one of the last Peter Whimsy novels so I diligently went back and read Strong Poison and did in fact get a fairly different impression of Sayers’ writing. It was lighter and more playful in Strong Poison and hewed much more closely to the murder mystery genre. (There was a murder, for a start.) But Gaudy Night was definitely the better book. Lovely close view of a women’s college at Oxford. Another book I read for ’s excellent twentieth century book club!

Best essay collection

Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature by Iris Murdoch

I’ve been really getting into Iris Murdoch’s non-fiction writing – her essays and philosophy. Earlier in the year I was very taken with a group of essays that appears in the middle of this collection of her writings, which included: ‘The Sublime and the Good’, ‘Existentialists and Mystics’, ‘Salvation by Words’, ‘Art is the Imitation of Nature’, ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’, and ‘Against Dryness.’ Drawing on some of the ideas in those essays, I wrote this piece: Where has the moral gravitas gone from novels?

This is one of those essay collections that I will probably return to again and again. Murdoch has a way of drawing my thinking into new and fruitful places. Love her mind.

Best nineteenth century novel

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

I’m not sure that any further commentary is required on Austen and her wonderful novel Pride and Prejudice. I reread it this year to mark Austen’s 250th birthday. It was better than I remembered. So astute, funny and clever. If you want to close out the year with a little more Austen, I can recommend this conversation between and John Mullan, a professor of English literature at University College London. I felt at least 25 percent more British after listening to these two talk. It took at least an hour for my accent to recover its flat Australian intonation.

Best novel featuring one human

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer

This novel (translated from German) is one of those stories which is so uncannily realistic that it feels as if the writer went through this impossible experience herself. Reading, you just can’t help but think: how? How did she so realistically depict this experience that no human has ever been through? This book, published in 1963, depicts the plight of a woman on holidays in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains who wakes up one morning to find a transparent wall has appeared between her and the rest of the world in the night. Her cousin and cousin’s husband (whose house it is) went out the night before and never returned. The woman can see one or two houses through the transparent barrier. Nothing moves. No one appears to be alive. On her side of the wall, the woman has a dog, a cat and a cow and some stores of food. How will she proceed?

put it perfectly when she said of the book:

For those of you who, like me, are not massive sci-fi or dystopian fiction fans, do not let the premise put you off. The wall itself is less a sci-fi tool than a metaphor about isolation, gender and what happens when the scaffolding of society disappears. Haushofer is not interested in telling you what happened but rather what happens to a person when all the invisible threads that kept them tied to family, children, life dissolve. Who are we when nobody is watching?!

This book might not be for everyone. I found it quite incantatory, almost as if I were directly experiencing what the woman was experiencing – each small triumph, each setback – I suppose I was under it’s spell. It’s stayed with me.

Best depiction of the life of a boomer

Lessons by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan is one of those consistently good, consistently published writers that, I confess, I often overlook. Maybe I’ve become inured to his talent as a writer and he publishes so regularly that I struggle to keep up anyway. I recall liking On Chesil Beach and that was the last thing of his that I read. This year I read three of his novels, of which Lessons was the best. I enjoyed its sensitive depiction of a life including that life’s intersection with world events. A rich accounting of the personal ‘epochs’ that sort life into phases. This was a detailed and humane portrait of a man’s life.

Best epic

Voss by Patrick White

It’s not clear to me why Patrick White is so little read. He is Australia’s only Nobel-prize winner for literature and his books are incredible. Maybe it’s because they are dense and packed with those grand themes: striving, love, loss, power, sickness, leadership, betrayal, pride, civilisation, death. You finish and you are exhausted! But the writing is so very good (though perhaps some find it turgid?). Voss follows a German man by that name in nineteenth century Australia, leading an exploratory expedition into the interior. White’s books are big undertakings but definitely reward a solid investment of readerly energy.

Best allegory

The Feast by Margaret Kennedy

Even though the reader finds out in the first pages that a cliff has collapsed on a seaside hotel and that a number of people have been killed, this book – which describes the week leading up to the collapse – is a real page-turner! Who will die and who will survive (and how will they survive) (and why will they survive)? An excellent book with lots of deliciously hateable characters and quite a few loveable ones too. It wasn’t until after I’d finished that I tuned into the allegorical frame. Highly recommend.

With thanks to the most prolific reader I know – – who put me onto this book. (Alyssa is planning a year of reading the Brontës for any of you who may be interested. I’m interested in getting better acquainted with Anne.)

Best (and most terrifying) non-fiction

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares

This book (published just a few months ago) terrifies me. It’s about the risks inherent in the development of superintelligent AI. If you think AI is not a risk because ‘it’s stuck in a computer’ or ‘we can just turn it off’ – you’ve got another think coming. Everyone should read this book now. It is easily accessible for lay non-technologist readers. This will be humanity’s greatest challenge in coming years and decades.

Best domestic saga

They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple

I have a feeling that my next literary obsession will be Dorothy Whipple. This book, about three sisters, their lives and fates and the fates of their children, was excellent. Brilliant characterisation and one of the most detestable villains I’ve ever come across in fiction. I plan to read more Whipple next year.

Best Booker prize winner

Possession by A.S Byatt

Back in the day, (particularly when the day was in the nineties) books and movies were events. This year I read Booker prize winners Flesh by David Szalay and Orbital by Samantha Harvey and, while I enjoyed those books, Possession was just so much more. More abundant and grandiloquent and fun and far-reaching by comparison. Ok, maybe it’s unfair to compare others to the incomparable Antonia (especially if those others are writing in a more pared back, minimalist style).

Anyway, here is a lovely excerpt from near the end of the book about reading:

Now and then there are readings which make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark – readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, know it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge.

With thanks to who got me reading this! I wrote more about Possession here.

So what were your favourite reads this year?

And are there any new writers you read this year that you’re excited about?

Thanks again everyone! And see you in the new year!

Byatt has said that when the book was finished, publishers in the UK and US were dubious: ‘They begged me to cut out the poetry, to cut down the Victorian writing. ‘You have ruined a nice intrigue with these excrescences’, said the only American publisher brave enough to take it. I wept in the early mornings.’1 But then the book began winning prizes and became – to everyone’s surprise (to Byatt’s surprise also) – a bestseller, translated into over 30 languages.

This post is about that book – Possession – but it is also about writing against the market, against expectations, against what editors and publishers tell you their readers want.

Tell a good yarn and include as much Victorian poetry as you like

When developing her idea for the novel, Byatt said that her major breakthrough came by way of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: ‘My husband’s friends in the city were all engrossed in this book, and interested in all the mediaeval theology it contained. The secret, I saw, was that if you tell a strong story, you can include anything else you need to include.’

Because, the fact is, Possession is a rollicking good story. It’s exciting! In this academic detective caper, young scholars Roland Michell and Maud Bailey travel across England and France, tracking down clues in castles and waterfalls, and in archives presided over by protective academics. Urgency is provided by the other characters on their tail, not least an acquisitive American collector with an inexhaustible line of credit who is intent on vacuuming up all historical remnants, textual and otherwise, in his area of interest – including items lately discovered by Roland and Maud. This is the frame narrative.

The secondary narrative is a love story between two Victorian poets – the famous and loved (fictional) poet, Randolph Henry Ash – and the less well-known and well-loved lady poet (also fictional) – Christabel LaMotte. In this secondary narrative, Ash is married to someone else and Ash and LaMotte have never been connected until Roland discovers a fragment of a letter written by Ash folded into the pages of Ash’s copy of Vico’s Principj di Scienza Nuova held in the London Library. And so the investigation begins. The reader finds out about Ash and LaMotte through the textual evidence uncovered by Roland and Maud, and through their poems.

Is this a postmodern novel?

I watched an interview with Byatt in which she refers to Possession as a postmodern novel.2 This interested me (particularly given other comments she made about postmodernism which I cover below). Certainly, Possession has many of the features of a postmodern novel but I had not categorised it in this way. It incorporates a lot of pastiche, for example, which is a common feature of postmodern literature. Pastiche – the imitation of other styles and forms – tends, in the postmodern context, to involve an homage to other styles rather than a parody of them. In Possession, Victorian poetry is evoked in a realistic and sincere way. Byatt’s imitation of Victorian poetry is surprisingly good. It may surprise you to know that Byatt had initially planned not to write the poetry herself:3

Formally my novel needed the presence of real poems. I don’t write poetry. […] My editor at the time was that very good (underrated) poet, D.J. Enright. I told him I was thinking of using Ezra Pound’s early ‘Victorian’ verses. ‘Nonsense’, said Denis. You will write them yourself.

(If only we all had a Denis in our lives, telling us to just do the thing already.)

Of course, Byatt was helped by her love of the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning. In an interview for The Paris Review (invoking one of those meanings of ‘possession’), she said:4

It really was a sort of experience of being possessed. It was an experience of all the Victorian poems that didn’t exist and should have existed suddenly crowding up like ghosts in Homer and trying to get out. There was no problem to writing any of it. I didn’t have to think about it. All my life I had had a passion for Victorian poetry, which had been denigrated and despised by both T. S. Eliot and the Leavis school. There was nobody who liked it.

In the event, the poems came easily to Byatt. ‘[T]hey were written as they were needed in the shape of the novel, as part of the run of words – I see a novel as a piece of knitting, all one continuous thread.’

So there is pastiche. There is also a merging of high and low literary forms – another common feature of postmodernism; the breaking down of the boundaries between high and middlebrow art; the revelling in popular forms. Readers are told from the start that this novel is a romance – formerly a no-no for serious literary fiction. And, on opening the cover and diving in, readers encounter some of the tropes of detective fiction (though translated into a very literary form). As Byatt explained:5

I started inventing a detective story like those I read in my childhood. I discovered that detective stories have to be constructed backwards – the plot has to be invented to reach a denouement that is already worked out. Things have to be hidden in order to be found at strategic moments. In psychological novels, the characters make the plot as their feelings become clear. The rigour of this new form was a liberation. I found myself parodying scenes from D.L. Sayers and Georgette Heyer.

Though Byatt clearly has fun with these popular forms – romance, detective fiction – she employs them wholeheartedly. She leans in. She does it properly.

Pastiche, embracing of popular forms, and finally, there is at times a metafictional slant to the writing – moments when Byatt draws attention to the textual artifice by winking at the reader. I won’t go into detail here, but one example is the unusually resonant names Byatt has chosen for her characters – replete with wordplay, imagery and secondary associations all of which remind the reader of the unreality of the text.

And yet, the novel seems to argue against postmodernism

Postmodernism at times revels in style over substance – it plays with the reader’s instinct to make meaning from the shiny surfaces of its offering.6 In my opinion Possession goes quite a lot deeper than this into the psychologies of the characters, their motivations, the social and academic setting in which they act. The book is not just a fun caper; it has serious points to make about love, sex, poetry, reading and scholarship.

Byatt said: ‘When I wrote the novel, I was writing against the idea that we are spoken by the language. I do have this idea that an author writes, an author is an author.’ To me this indicates a mindset fundamentally at odds with postmodernism and post-structuralism. She appeared to view postmodernism as something playful but ultimately empty and the postmodern novel as something akin to a joke palace: ‘Every now and then you need a joke, but not so much as the people who spend all their lives constructing joke palaces think you do. They think it’s a form of sanity in an insane world, but I’m not sure it is.’7

It argues against other -isms as well

Possession establishes a conspicuous contrast between the romantic love of Ash and LaMotte on the one hand, and the strange bloodless operations of the present day characters on the other, who are hindered rather than enlightened by their knowledge of, or commitment to, Freudian analysis, feminism, post-structuralism, Lacanian theory, postcolonialism and so on. Theory comes between them and the immediacy of life. Life is analysed rather than experienced. Life is lived at a distance.

Notwithstanding that this is a postmodern novel in some ways and a feminist novel others (witness the treatment of Beatrice Nest; the limited opportunities afforded LaMotte; the different scholarly treatment of LaMotte and Ash), the book also criticises ‘isms’ like feminism for the way they knot the characters up. Roland and Maud are both inhibited by all the theory they have imbibed. Roland dismisses his own feelings – his experience of himself as a ‘self’ – as artifice. The self is a construct; he is just experiencing neurons firing, etc etc. In so doing, he loses any instinct for what he wants. His relationship with Val limps on. Maud hides her long blond hair under a scarf to avoid upsetting ‘the feminists’ who imagine that Maud’s hair cannot possibly be that naturally blond and therefore assume she is dyeing it for men. Capital offense! There is a feeling in the novel of both characters hovering near their bodies – looking on and analysing – rather than experiencing life as embodied human beings with their own immediate sense perceptions. One senses that their fascination with Ash and LaMotte has something to do with Ash and LaMotte’s unimpeded expression of emotion and sensation. Here, suddenly, is life; here is immediacy. Roland will eventually have a sort of epiphany about this – an epiphany accompanied by enormous appetite – that most embodied of feelings.

Respect for the lay reader

Possession is an ambitious and, in some ways, dense and difficult novel. But its popular and commercial success shows that readers are willing to take on dense and difficult novels that reward their readerly labour. (It is not that dense and difficult. It just contains a lot of poetry.)

Byatt not only wrote novels. She was a university lecturer and wrote literary criticism, including about Iris Murdoch (whose influence is, I think, evident in Byatt’s fiction). In that interview for The Paris Review, Byatt was asked: did you ever regret your novel writing taking you away from academic criticism? (She didn’t.) I loved her response – about the importance of that sort of critical writing to her development as a writer – and I loved her point about respect for the lay reader (my emphasis):8

Not even for a moment. All my academic work has been done for one of two reasons. One was to sort out something I needed to think about as a writer. I think of my critical writing that I’ve enjoyed doing as being in the line of Coleridge needing to write about poetry, T. S. Eliot writing his odd essay, George Eliot’s essays, which I love.

I think of my criticism as being ‘writer’s criticism.’ I taught an extramural class for about ten years in London University, and I loved that because that was where I learned the novels you don’t read in an English literature degree. We did Dostoyevsky, Camus, Kafka, Beckett, and we did Thomas Mann, and we did Ulysses, and by the end of it I knew the novel, not just the English novel; I also understood that people of very varying backgrounds when reading novels were interested in almost everything. It teaches you respect for the lay reader.

It’s a great shame when writers abandon ambitious or unusual or unconventional novels because they are receiving a message (from agents, publishers, editors) that: ‘this is not what the market wants.’ It seems likely that a less experienced writer than Byatt might not have followed through on a book like Possession. They would have been stymied and discouraged by publishers at every turn and taught to distrust their own instincts about story.

Writers, ignore the Trend Machine!

Personally, I think writers should try to insulate themselves from predictions and determinations about ‘what readers want’. I’ll leave you with two observations by wonderful E.B. White.9 First:

If you write, you must believe—in the truth and worth of the scrawl, in the ability of the reader to receive and decode the message. No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader’s intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing.

Second:

[Y]our concern for the reader must be pure: you must sympathize with the reader’s plight (most readers are in trouble about half of the time) but never seek to know the reader’s wants. Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. Start sniffing the air, or glancing at the Trend Machine, and you are as good as dead, although you may make a nice living.

More more more

So. Have you read Possession? (Possibly I should have asked that at the outset haha.) Did you like it? What did you like about it?

If you want more on Possession, there is currently a ‘slow read’ ongoing at Book (& Craft) Alchemy being led by – you need a paid subscription to access posts. Caroline’s slow read is nearly finished but there is really no reason why you can’t access those posts after the fact. They maintain their value and definitely enhance the reading experience.

Thanks for reading and until very soon.

I hope this missive finds you well. For most of you it’s autumn and cooling down. For those of us in the other hemisphere, it is spring and heating up – though erratically so that one is always wearing the wrong clothes. I’m not sure anyone has adequately voiced the psychological angst arising from Wrong Clothes. I am just back from a short trip to Canberra where it was snowing pollen. I’m not sure anyone has adequately voiced the psychological angst arising from Wrong Clothes, Streaming Nose and No Tissue to Hand. There is a definite feeling of bodily unwelcome in the world. Though, the riot of flowers is, of course, very lovely. Life bursts forth.

Today, a bit of a hodgepodge. A thoughtful hodgepodge. Next month – Possession by A.S. Byatt (more below). Thank you for reading!

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Bathwater, bus, bin

Recently, I wrote about contemporary fiction and wondered where the moral gravitas had gone from (certain) contemporary novels. I did not intend to throw all contemporary literature out with the bathwater or under the bus or into the bin but maybe that was how it sounded.

To atone…

… I find myself suddenly (diligently, sheepishly) reading a lot of recently published novels so that I can criticise from a firmer evidence base in future haha.

Unexpectedly, I’m reading a lot of novels about child prodigies

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney is partly about a chess prodigy called Ivan (though I related much more to the put-upon less-brilliant older brother Peter, being myself a put-upon less-brilliant older sister). The English Understand Wool and The Last Samurai – both by Helen DeWitt – are also about child prodigies (or at least very exceptional young people). It was something of a fluke to find myself reading nearly exclusively about brilliant children (some young and in the flower of their exceptionalism; others grown up and a little bruised by life). I enjoy encountering child prodigies in fiction. In fact, I think I enjoy encountering prodigies of all ages in books and film. It strikes me that many of the TV shows and movies I like feature prodigies – The Queen’s Gambit, Amadeus, Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game.

Novels about prodigies – particularly child prodigies – are fun to read because:

• It is fun to watch other characters be astonished by the child’s capabilities; we look on with bated breath as the child casually reveals that he has read The Odyssey in the original Greek or that she knows advanced maths; with each new character, we wait for the big reveal; we wait for astonishment.

• It is easy to get behind a character with the innocence and goodness of a child but the intellect and insight of someone older; they think like a grown-up! they can explain their struggles with the sophistication of a well-read thirty-year-old but without any of the unredeeming features that grow on people as they age.

• We get to encounter a character with a superpower without having to resort to fantasy; I’m not actually against fantasy fiction1 – I am only observing that here we encounter a major fantasy trope (a character with a gift or superpower that sets them apart) in a realist setting.

But there are some pitfalls too (which I think both Rooney and DeWitt navigate effectively):

• At times, things come a little too easily to the child prodigy; the child’s intellectual prowess is wielded effortlessly, shielding the child from difficulty, and narrowing the scope for genuine character development – the child is already fully mentally developed.

• At times, intellectual exceptionalism is made equivalent to moral superiority; in contrast, all the mere mortals of average intellect that people these novels may find themselves cast as morally deficient or even evil.2 The prodigy uses reason, you see, which must elevate their thinking. Ordinary idiots are guided by emotion, unreason, stuff and nonsense. How can they possibly know right from wrong?

• At times, child prodigy novels might suffer from the same flaws that superhero movies suffer from; except that unlike superhero movies, child prodigies are perhaps less likely to encounter intellectual kryptonite which might otherwise introduce Drama and Contingency.

Intellectual kryptonite tends to be more common in movies involving adult prodigies – often taking the form of some sort of mental illness or problem with addiction. The price of brilliance is that the prodigy’s mind frequently teeters at the edge of sanity or requires the dampening relief of drugs and alcohol.

The English Understand Wool

I LOVED The English Understand Wool (one of the child prodigy books I mentioned above by Helen DeWitt) and highly recommend it. It is a novella and can be read in a single sitting. In fact, you’ll have trouble putting it down. It’s about a precocious 17-year-old girl – brought up in privilege, taught the piano, taught impeccable good taste by her demanding mother. In the course of the story, the girl finds herself in calamitous personal circumstances which demand creative deployment of this narrow, highly specialised, rarefied skillset. The blurb describes The English Understand Wool as ‘a modern amorality drama,’ yet I found it to be far from amoral – to be embedded, in fact, with a strict and unusual moral code which finds form through an uncompromising opposition to ‘mauvais ton.’

This book is also funny. A thoroughly good time was had by all.

The Last Samurai

I am STILL DIGESTING The Last Samurai which was a bit of a challenging read if you are not a prodigy and are in fact a less-brilliant older sister type with grossly unremarkable powers of cognition.

Reading it, one has the feeling of being a bystander to the bright, multi-directional fireworks of Helen DeWitt’s intellect. She seems to know a lot about languages, music and mathematics. In fact, the author bio on the opening page of the book states that DeWitt knows (in descending order of proficiency): Latin, Ancient Greek, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese.

The prodigy in The Last Samurai is realistically prodigious and precocious. He lives with his mother and at the age of 11 adopts the principles he finds embedded in Akira Kurosawa’s film, Seven Samurai, to seek out his father, or a suitable father figure. I enjoyed the stories of each ‘father’ and I enjoyed DeWitt’s wry humour. I was at times bamboozled by the dense information flooding in from all directions and the arcane chapter numbering. If you have read this book, please feel free to enlighten me about the subtleties that went flying over my head.

Next up, I plan to read Possession by A.S. Byatt

There was a time, back in the nineties, when this book was everywhere. Every bookshelf had a copy. I read it as a teenager but remember nothing. I’ve been meaning to come back to Byatt so I plan to next month to see how this Booker Prize winning novel has stood the test of time. Do tune in.

Over at BOOKS ON GIF, Murdoch-tober is drawing to a close

If you are an Iris Murdoch superfan like me, why not take a moment to check out Murdoch-tober – brought to you by . It features reviews of Under the Net and The Green Knight. Books on GIF also offers a safe space to nerd out about your favourite Murdoch novel. (My favourite is The Nice and the Good though I still have so many to discover.) It’s not too late – take a look!

Mr Squiggle, the man from the moon

Children who grew up in Australia in the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties will know Mr Squiggle – a TV show featuring a marionette with a pencil for a nose who, each episode, travelled to Australia from the moon to draw cartoons. Children would send in a meaningless squiggle and Mr Squiggle would turn it into a (usually silly) picture, all with his nose. Then he would depart in his rocket, with a puff of smoke (or maybe corn flour).

Recently there was an exhibit of Norman Hetherington’s puppets (creator of Mr Squiggle) at the National Museum of Australia. Apparently, Hetherington said he created Mr Squiggle because he liked puppets and drawing cartoons – and Mr Squiggle combined the two. I confess I found this very inspiring – to find one’s eccentric and unusual artistic niche. So often artists are railroaded into a medium and genre; how else can their art or music or books be marketed if not easily categorisable? But maybe there is a chance not to be railroaded. Maybe you should just make a TV show about a puppet that draws cartoons.

Life of Chuck

Has anyone seen this movie? I was moved.

Until very soon!

A bit of an extended pause from me while a big work project took over my life. Reader, the project is delivered. I delivered the deliverable and have delivered myself too somehow. Not from evil but possibly into a state of exhausted relief. It is very windy. As I write, things around the house are banging and rattling. The trees are roaring. Doors clap shut before you can catch them. Sticks and leaves are whipping past the window. Everything standing has fallen over.

Oh life! Things constantly falling over and people diligently standing them up again. I can’t help but feel there is something noble and good about being a stander-upper in the certain knowledge that bad weather always returns. (How very Sisyphean of me.)

This post comprises a few half-baked thoughts and ruminations about novels; their moral density or leanness, and why I don’t find myself drawn to contemporary fiction all that much. (I have wondered why this is.) I have been reading some excellent essays by Iris Murdoch which got me thinking.

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1. Why don’t I gravitate towards contemporary novels?

There is something about contemporary fiction that does not inspire confidence. I thought that this might just be a case of older books having stood the test of time. Time helps sort the wheat from the chaff. When I read contemporary books, I feel there is a higher chance of a mouthful of chaff – a total lack of nourishment.

Perhaps, reading this, you are bristling with suggestions for excellent recent novels. Or perhaps you write fiction and are bristling with offence. Let me assure you that I have read excellent novels published in recent years. It is only that I have also read many mediocre ones and have wondered if there is a common thread to the mediocrity.

After reading a few essays by Iris Murdoch on morality, art, what novels are for, what they can do, I began to wonder whether there was something different in the way that we tell stories in the twenty-first century: a diminishment or thinness. Murdoch (writing in the twentieth century) thought we had suffered a general loss of concepts – the loss of a moral and political vocabulary – brought on by the rise of a scientific, anti-metaphysical age.1 Those mainstays of the nineteenth century – God, Reason, Society, Improvement, the Soul – had, by the following century, been quietly wheeled off.2 The optimism preached by science in the nineteenth century was replaced by the violent effectiveness of technology in the twentieth.3 The individual, says Murdoch, became more genuinely frightened and alone.4

I suppose we, in the twenty-first century, have inherited that scientific, anti-metaphysical age but with some additional quirks that compound its effects. Ours is an age of ongoing conceptual fracturing and diversification brought about by the unique conditions of our techno-cultural moment. And it is not just a breakdown of moral concepts we’re experiencing but a breakdown of conceptions of reality itself. Oceans of digital content proliferate every second online. We are each awash with information but each of us is being tossed by different waters.

Murdoch points to the consolations offered by the nineteenth-century novel because of the unity of its moral vision:5

There is a great consoling power in the nineteenth-century novel, a deep relaxing of tension, however alarming or horrible the events which are narrated, because of a sense of the strength of society and of politics as a natural and ordinary part of the human scene. One might sum this up by saying that there is a profound belief in God, a faith in the absolute significance and unity of the moral world. This particular confidence is peculiar to its age.

(I don’t pine for social and religious homogeneity, by the way. I am only observing that the peculiarities of each age might affect how writers tell stories.)

In many contemporary novels, I cannot help feeling that I am reading about the actions of characters driven largely by their own whims and passions without any placement in, or reference to, a wider sphere of meaning.6 Often the main character’s self-serving apologia provides the novel with its (meagre) moral ballast. Twentieth-century man, writes Murdoch, ‘finds his religious and metaphysical background so impoverished that he is in some danger of being left with nothing of inherent value except will-power itself.’7 Might twenty-first-century man (or woman!) dispense with will-power also…?

2. The Existentialist Hero, the Mystical Hero

In her 1970 essay, ‘Existentialists and Mystics’, Murdoch conceived of two types of novels: the existentialist novel and the mystical novel and defined them in the following way: ‘The existentialist novel shows us freedom and virtue as the assertion of will. The mystical novel shows us freedom and virtue as understanding, or obedience to the Good.’8 The Existentialist Hero is sincere, courageous, godless, self-reliant, unaffected by guilt, free to do not what is right but what is desired. The Mystical Hero is humbler. Mystical novels, said Murdoch, attempt to express a religious consciousness without the traditional trappings of religion.9

3. The Passive Hero

It strikes me that now, in the twenty-first century, we have the rise of the Passive Novel and the Passive Hero. Not all novels are Passive Novels, of course. But certainly the ones I dislike are. The Passive Hero is acted upon. Trials and tribulations mount up. (One imagines a writing teacher instructing the writer to raise the stakes, raise the stakes, keep imposing dilemmas on your hero.) And the Passive Hero’s path through is not via any new or difficult moral calculus, or exercise of will, or surrender of the self, or confrontation with a new idea that conflicts with ideas the hero holds dear, or discovery of agency despite unpromising circumstances, or making of meaning in the face of evil or absurdity. It is more of an insipid ‘survivability’. Admire me, demands the Passive Hero – I survived this. When we, the reader, witness the suffering of the hero, we feel the writer compelling us to feel something; to be moved by the suffering. But the moral weave of the story is threadbare. We have only gratuitous suffering or injustice, but an injustice so hackneyed and overused as to be part of the furniture, as it were. Nailed down to the set. The bad are bad and the good are suffering. And suffering is an end in itself.

4. It’s possible I dreamt all this up to explain why I didn’t like a book I read recently

I will not name the book because I don’t wish to be unkind to the writer and because the book was, I think, a debut novel. But it was dreadful in a way I see quite often in contemporary literary fiction.

The main character was insipid (though voiced his insipidity with great eloquence). Bad things happened to him which he endured, feeling at times helpless annoyance, at times being driven to clench fists or ruminate in a bereft manner on the injustices done to him. He was wanly noble though not due to any inherent strength of character but rather a resigned onward plodding. And then the book ended. I think the reader was supposed to feel moved by the protagonist’s suffering. (I was not – it was too generic, too calculated.) And I think the reader was also supposed to be impressed by the protagonist’s poetic mode of expression (I was not – it was irritatingly overwrought; the small cast of characters seemed each not much more than vehicles for parading the writer’s literary chops).

Sometimes the main characters of these sorts of novels are not gallantly insipid but edgy or feisty or eccentric but the edginess or feistiness or eccentricity is empty – just the empty calories of a literary market geared towards novelty and facile virtuosity.

5. Art and morality

In her 1959 essay, ‘The Sublime and the Good,’ Murdoch writes:10

Art and morals are, with certain provisos […], one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

(From any other person, this might sound hippyish or New Agey, but from Murdoch, we hear the wry, scholarly voice. And I have cut to the chase here. A large portion of the essay is devoted to Kant; his ideas about art and the sublime.) Murdoch goes on:11

The tragic freedom implied by love is this: that we all have an indefinitely extended capacity to imagine the being of others. Tragic, because there is no prefabricated harmony, and others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves. […] Freedom is exercised in the confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness.

I sort of love this idea – the idea of art and morality both having to do with love and love having to do with the perception of individuals – and the implication that literature, can be considered a moral practice of imaginative understanding of other people; that the writer is engaged in the moral practice of overcoming themselves, their ego, to enter into the particularity of their characters.

6. At this point I might be accused of wanting art that moralises or preaches love

For the avoidance of doubt, let me say that I am not hankering for novels that moralise or preach. A moralising, hectoring style would strip novels of their power to depict the rich, messy, complicated, conflict-ridden morass of human experience. It would reduce them to dry, didactic homilies which nobody would read. (I am also not interested in novels that are humourless and dour.) What I am after I think is some engagement with the questions of how to be, how to live – not through parables of righteousness but through encountering other people cumbered by those questions.

Murdoch says it better than me: ‘To say that the essence of art is love is not to say, is nothing to do with saying, that art is didactic or educational. It is of course a fact that if art is love then art improves us morally, but this is, as it were, accidental. The level at which that love works which is art is deeper than the level at which we deliberate concerning improvement.’12

7. The consoling power of art is not moral unity but form

I wrote above (quoting Murdoch) about the moral unity of the nineteenth century novel and how this unity consoles and comforts. But there is another consolation offered by art and literature which I think still applies today and that is the self-containedness of novels, their form, their finitude, which counteracts the dissatisfying feeling that life is unconstrained and unfinished and always rattling on before we have time to understand what is happening to us. Says Murdoch:13

[T]he fact remains that the love which is not art inhabits the world of practice, the world which is haunted by that incompleteness and lack of form, which is abhorred by art, and where action cannot always be accompanied by radiant understanding, or by significant and consoling emotions. Tragedy in art is the attempt to overcome the defeat which human beings suffer in the practical world. It is […] the human spirit mourning and yet exulting in its strength. In the practical world there may be only mourning and the final acceptance of the incomplete.

Perhaps art and literature are the places we can go to think things through – seek out that ‘radiant understanding’ – slow down the endless conveyor belt of time and look closely at the items there assembled. Form imposes reasonable limits; it makes the attentional task manageable. That said, form must not stifle or cinch off the expansion of the characters or impede their contingency. This, if I’m understanding Murdoch correctly, is the hazards of form.

Simone Weil said that morality was a matter of attention. Art offers a mechanism for fostering attention – or, put another way, for fostering ‘the non-violent apprehension of difference.’14

8. Caveats, qualifications…

As I draw to a close, I begin to feel that the material has gotten away from me. Murdoch’s essays are wonderfully dense and astute and clear-eyed and I worry that I’ve misrepresented her arguments or not done them justice. It goes without saying that I’ve hardly skimmed the surface of what she said and thought in the few essays considered here. And I see that I left hanging her thoughts on the Existentialist Novel and the Mystical Novel; where those novelistic forms came from and what might come next. I don’t have time here to follow her argument to its conclusion though encourage you to read the essay if you’re interested.15

And (as mentioned above and despite all my curmudgeonly complaining) I have read exceptional contemporary novels. I think my favourite novel of the twenty-first century is Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. It was brilliant and singular.

I wonder what twenty-first century novel is the stand-out for you?

(For those interested in Virginia Woolf, I do hope to lead another group read of one of her novels – I just need some time to prepare. In the meantime, I will continue writing posts about what I’m reading and thinking, like this one.)

The first time I saw a dead human body was recently. A dear friend died and his wife had his body brought home from the hospital to their small farm. She invited us, his friends, to come over, drink some of the friend’s famous (very sweet) blackberry wine and say goodbye. In a few weeks there would be a proper funeral but for now it was just a small gathering to remember a good and decent man.

I was frightened of seeing my friend deceased. It seemed to me a shocking breach of bodily privacy – something I couldn’t fathom agreeing to in relation to my own body. So, when I added my car to the cluster of other cars outside the little farmhouse, my grief had been overtaken by trepidation.

My friend’s wife, also a dear friend, hugged me when I arrived and we cried. Others were gathered in the kitchen, talking and laughing and telling stories. The body was laid out in the lounge room and there was a curtain across the doorway with a small gap which I avoided looking through. It was alright if we didn’t want to go in, the wife said. We could choose what was right for us. It wasn’t expected. We could stay in the kitchen if we preferred or gather in the garden.

Finally, one of the other women, feeling the same apprehension as me, took my hand and said we should go in together. We drew back the curtain.

Our friend was laid out in the middle of the room on a special type of bed that plugs into the wall and keeps the body cool. He was dressed in a collared shirt and jeans. On his feet were socks but no shoes. His hair was combed. His eyes were closed and his face was smiling slightly. His skin was grey and waxy. He was so obviously dead.

Sitting with my friend’s body was a life changing experience and an overwhelmingly positive one. Previously, death had been hidden, mysterious and terrifying. People didn’t die, they just sort of disappeared. Being confronted with an actual body – the body of a friend, a friend I’d so recently had lunch with – changed that. Death was revealed to be both profound and ordinary. A strange relief overtook me – that this thing that I feared so dreadfully was in fact the most natural thing in the world. I needn’t be afraid. I need only be human and nature would do the rest. Everything extraneous fell away. Life felt simpler and enlarged.

But the effect, which lasted several weeks, faded.

Writers and artists have understood the powerful impact of memento mori (Latin for ‘remember you must die’). One need only look at the vanitas paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries with their skulls and hour glasses and wilting flowers and rotting fruit. These paintings emphasised the transience of life and the hollowness of ambition and worldly pleasure. Their message was that time passes and death is certain. Soon, you too – with your big plans, your pride, your achievements, your standing among peers – will be worm food.

My favourite example of the vanitas genre is a piece of literature rather than a painting: The Death of Ivan Ilyich – a novella by Leo Tolstoy first published in 1886. (I particularly like Anthony Briggs’ 2008 translation.) The story opens with the friends and colleagues of Ivan Ilyich reading a notice of his death in the newspaper. Rather than being upset by the news or reminded of their own mortality, the men experience ‘a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn’t’ and immediately contemplate how Ivan Ilyich’s death might benefit them – Ivan Ilyich was a senior official in the Ministry of Justice so his death will create an opening and a chain reaction of promotions. Each man is energised by self-interest.

One of the men assembled is Pyotr Ivanovich who was a friend of Ivan Ilyich and who travels to pay his respects to the widow. Pyotr Ivanovich acts as a proxy for the reader. Like him, we are bystanders to Ivan Ilyich’s death. With him as our guide, we have an opportunity to experience insight in the wake of death.

But Pyotr Ivanovich does not take up this opportunity. There are moments when unpleasant thoughts of death and suffering break through – when he looks on the corpse of his friend, when the widow describes how Ivan Ilyich screamed in agony for three days – but Pyotr Ivanovich reminds himself that all of this happened to Ivan Ilyich and not him. Whenever an unpleasant feeling arises, he returns to the comforting thought that this reminder of death doesn’t apply to him.1    

Pyotr Ivanovich is further fortified by the appearance of his colleague Schwartz at Ivan Ilyich’s house. Schwartz appears as a symbol of worldly success and death denial. He winks at Pyotr Ivanovich in a way that Pyotr Ivanovich interprets to mean: ‘Ivan Ilyich has messed things up – not what you or I would have done.’ Later, when Pyotr Ivanovich is again assailed by uneasiness, he is once more reassured by the presence of Schwartz: ‘One glance at his mischievous, immaculately elegant figure and Pyotr Ivanovich felt restored. He could see that Schwartz was above all this…’

If Schwartz is the symbol of worldly success and death denial, Gerasim, Ivan Ilyich’s peasant servant, symbolises the opposite. He first appears as Pyotr Ivanovich is leaving to give him his coat and when Pyotr Ivanovich comments on the sadness of the occasion, Gerasim replies: ‘Tis God’s will, sir. Twill come to us all.’

From here, the story goes back in time to give an account of Ivan Ilyich’s life – how he rose through the ranks, becoming an examining magistrate, then assistant chief prosecutor, then public prosecutor, then accepting a senior position in Petersburg at the Ministry of Justice for 5000 roubles a year. (Almost more important than the salary is the fact that the position is two grades higher than his peers.) He marries, choosing a woman that will meet with the approval of society but who will ultimately make him unhappy, and they have a daughter, then a son. He and his wife discard their shabby friends and relatives. With each life advance, Ivan Ilyich enjoys his rise in social status and the gravitas with which people treat him. And, although he plays it down, he relishes his power over people.

Throughout this recital of Ivan Ilyich’s successes, there is frequent reference to pleasure, enjoyment, ease and respectability. Together, these are Ivan Ilyich’s North Star.

Plainly, Tolstoy is setting Ivan Ilyich up for a big shock.

It seems appropriate that Ivan Ilyich’s demise is brought on not by a noble or valorous deed but by an accident when he is decorating his new apartment in Petersburg. He mounts a stepladder to show the upholsterer how to hang the drapes and falls, bumping his side on the knob of the window frame. Later – after a pain develops and gets progressively worse; after he sees doctors and takes medicines to no avail; after the pain becomes unbearable and he realises, finally, that he will not recover – he will be tormented by the thought: ‘I have lost my life here on this curtain, my battleground. Have I really? How horrible and how stupid!’

As Ivan Ilyich dies, slowly and agonisingly, he is most distressed by psychological rather than physical pain – the realisation that he has wasted his life on hollow things. He is further distressed by the reaction of those around him – his wife, his daughter, his doctors – who refuse to acknowledge that he is dying. His wife chides him for not taking his medicine. His daughter chitchats about the opera. His doctors wonder whether his health issues stem from a floating kidney or a problem with the blind gut. He realises that not only are those around him lying to him but that they want him to be a party to the lie. And this lying was ‘inexorably reducing the solemn act of his death to the same level as their social calls, their draperies, the sturgeon for dinner…’

The only people capable of understanding what Ivan Ilyich is going through are his 12-year-old son, who is still young enough not to have been socialised out of an awareness of death, and Gerasim, whose kind ministrations and honesty about what is happening comfort Ivan Ilyich.

As with another of Tolstoy’s stories, Master and Man, the climax arrives when the dying man experiences a momentous revelation in the moments before his death which releases him from earthly suffering. And we, the reader, can experience that revelation too. We can practice adopting the mindset of someone close to death and learn what is important in our lives and what is unimportant.

Memento mori (or ‘respice finem’ (Latin for ‘consider the end’) – which a young Ivan Ilyich, in a moment of irony, has inscribed on a medallion attached to his watch chain) offers a tool for digging ourselves out from the deluge of distraction and self-concern that characterises the age in which we live. If people were concerned about trivial matters in the time of Tolstoy, it is clear that those concerns have only been intensified in the digital age. It is hard to avoid becoming preoccupied with the reception of our online selves and the relentless ticking over of online metrics such as the number of followers, subscribers, views, downloads, likes and shares. It is hard to avoid fixating on the our curated digital avatars and the threat of being misconstrued in a world of short attention spans.

In such conditions, one’s attention struggles to rise to matters of importance, being drawn ceaselessly back into the online tumult.

Memento mori offers a powerful psychological counterweight in the age in which we live because it is so physically grounded, so embodied – the very opposite of the internet. The thumbs up symbol is immortal. Your thumb is not. Think of memento mori as a form of ‘counter-practice.’ This term, coined by , is defined by Sacasas as ‘a deliberately chosen discipline that can form us in ways that run counter to the default settings of our techno-social milieu.’

The point is not to become morbidly obsessed with death and dying. The point is to remember that your life must end and time is short. Reminding ourselves of this fact offers a mental shortcut away from empty anxieties about ego, status, fame and competition. To ignore our mortality is to risk becoming distracted with trivial things or indifferent to the implications of our finitude – it is to risk the fate of Ivan Ilyich. The characters in Tolstoy’s novella err by falling for the fallacy that death is for other people. For, even though Ivan Ilyich understands the logic that ‘Caesar is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caesar is mortal,’ he is unable to apply that logic to himself and the effect is catastrophic. ‘Yes, Caesar is mortal,’ thinks Ivan Ilyich, ‘and it’s alright for him to die, but not me, Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my feelings and thoughts – it’s different for me.’

Needless to say, my perspective about my own death – about allowing my family and closest friends to see my body – has undergone a full reversal. Might this not be a precious gift I can give my loved ones like the one my friend gave me? Even visualising my own body, grey and unmoving, is a powerful form of memento mori. I see that it is my body there, not someone else’s. I see that it is lifeless and cold but also inescapably and nobly human. Right now, sitting at my desk typing this, I’m alive with ‘all my feelings and thoughts’ but inevitably I will die. Twill come to us all.

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Today, I’m going to discuss Mansfield’s story, ‘Marriage à la Mode.’ If you don’t want to have the story spoiled by what follows, read it here first.

‘Marriage à la Mode’ (which translates as ‘fashionable marriage’) first appeared in the weekly illustrated newspaper, The Sphere, in December 1921 and was later included in the collection, The Garden Party and Other Stories, published in 1922. Some have pointed to parallels between ‘Marriage à la Mode’ and Anton Chekhov’s 1892 story, ‘The Grasshopper.’ Certainly, there are echoes between the two stories, particularly the portrayal of the marriage, the positioning of the husband as ‘outer’ to the wife’s little group of bohemian friends, and the disastrous effect this has on the relationship between the husband and wife. But the key events in each story are different and the storytelling is also different. You can read ‘The Grasshopper’ here and make up your own mind about the similarities.

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The plot

This is the story of William and his wife Isabel who have two sons. Previously the family lived in a small house in London and William was happy there while Isabel was miserable. They have since moved to a larger house in the country where Isabel is happier. William continues to work in London during the week and travel home on weekends. The story opens with William taking the train home to his family on a Saturday. He will have to return to London the following afternoon.

It's clear there’s been a significant change in his and his wife’s life together, brought on by her new association with a group of louche poets and artists. She is much happier now and appears to spend most of her time with her new friends, at the centre of which is a woman called Moira Morrison. With the arrival of the bohemians, William has found himself less and less welcome in his own life. Isabel has new ideas and pretensions. The bohemians are always there in his home. They find William dull and his weekend visits a drag yet rely on his income and hospitality.

When William arrives at the train station in the country, Isabel is there to meet him and he is relieved that she is there alone. His heart lifts. However, Isabel’s friends are waiting for him in the taxi. A pecking order is revealed when William goes to sit up front with the driver but is told that one of the other men, Bobby Kane, is going to be sitting there – instead he is squeezed between Isabel and Moira in the back. When Bobby Kane emerges from a sweet shop, it is William (via Isabel) who pays the bill. Isabel also claims the pineapple and melon (gifts intended for his sons) for herself and the other adults, despite William’s protests.

Once home, Isabel and her friends go off for a swim and William is alone. The children are asleep and will be out all the next day, so he won’t see them. As the others return, he overhears them saying unkind things about him. As he prepares to leave the next afternoon, Isabel appears to feel some compunction and carries his suitcase for him out to the front of the house. She chatters blithely about how soon he has to return to London – ‘poor William!’ – and he departs.

A day or two later, Isabel receives a letter from William in which he pours out his heart, his love for Isabel, and his angst about what is happening. In a gross betrayal, Isabel reads William’s letter to her friends to much laughter and crowing amusement. Afterwards, realising what a dreadful thing she has done, she hurries to her room to wallow in shame, then resolves to write back to William immediately. But her friends call up to her inviting her for a swim. She hesitates, then goes to join them.

First impressions

A few first impressions:

• Lovely William. I’m curious about his marriage; nice mounting of tension on the train and foreshadowing (I’m outraged later when Isabel takes the fruit – William has predicted it!)

• At the station, ‘His heart leapt.’ Why did this move me so?

• Loved the breezy chatter of the bohemians. Mansfield has an excellent ear for this sort of talk. She’s an excellent mimic. I understood exactly what sort of people these were. I recognised that empty gimmicky wit, the meaningless in-jokes, the performative eccentricity.

• There are strong contrasts between the artless sincerity of William and the heavy-handed irony of the bohemians.

• I am appalled at Isabel’s reading out of the letter. Awful! Who doesn’t relate to that fear that one’s vulnerability will be paraded in cruel and unsympathetic society.

• In the last line, Isabel runs down the stairs, ‘laughing in the new way.’ So much is communicated here with so little.

Structure and point of view

The story can be divided broadly into three acts. In the first, William takes the train from city to country, thinking uneasily about Isabel and remembering happier times. In the second act, William is in the country with Isabel and her friends witnessing what his life has become. In the third act, Isabel receives William’s letter and reads it out.

Most of the story is told from William’s point of view so the reader naturally falls into sympathy with him and his plight. However, after the ‘familiar dull gnawing in his breast’ on train ride, Mansfield opts to give very few overt clues about William’s thoughts and feelings during the second act. The action is reported plainly and directly with little internal commentary. He listens to the empty, breezy conversation of the bohemians. He overhears the unkind things they say about him. He watches two of the men, Bill and Dennis, eat enormously (at his expense) while Isabel fills glasses. With reduced interiority, William’s humiliation has a quality of quiet stoicism. He bears witness uncomplainingly.

In the third act there is a shift in perspective and we spend the rest of the story watching the action from Isabel’s point of view. There is a distinct change in tone as Isabel is given much more interiority. When she opens the envelop from William and realises it’s a love letter of sorts: ‘her feeling of astonishment changed to a stifled feeling. What on earth had induced William…? She felt confused, more and more excited, even frightened. It was just like William. Was it? It was absurd, of course, it must be absurd, ridiculous.’

A story of contrasts

‘Marriage à la Mode’ seesaws between a series of contrasts and opposing forces. These include:

• City and country – the city represents industry, drab forms of work, bourgeois enterprise, the site of William’s former happiness; the country represents ease and enjoyment, leisure, the site of Isabel’s current happiness.

• Adults and children – William is an adult, he works, supports his family, pays the bills, he is reserved (he doesn’t casually vent his feelings); Isabel is also an adult in the sense that she has taken on a mothering role in relation to the bohemians (at one point, she refers to them as ‘my children’); the bohemians are children, they expect to be waited on and paid for, they buy sweets and claim the children’s gifts, they ‘eat enormously,’ they don’t work, it’s their toys (small books of poetry) that now lodge in the backs of armchairs rather than the actual children’s toys; William and Isabel’s actual children have been pushed out of frame by these new pretend children.

• Married and unmarried – William is married and socially conventional; Isabel is married but trying to free herself from the strictures of convention; the bohemians are unmarried and free to flout social conventions. ‘I am going to rescue your wife, selfish man,’ Moira says to William at a party when they first meet.

• Sincere and insincere – William is sincere, his ultimate act of sincerity is the writing of a letter expressing his true feelings to Isabel; Isabel is mostly insincere but moments of honesty break through – moments she dismisses as ‘sentimental’ or ‘absurd’; the bohemians are always ironic, everything is a joke, sincerity in their hands is immediately made ridiculous.

Those opposing forces give the story depth and conflict which helps create enlargement – a wider picture emerges as we, the reader, intuitively fill in each contrasting counterpart.

Is Isabel bad?

Despite Isabel’s gross betrayal of William in reading out the letter, I cannot hate her. She has been unhappy and lonely in marriage and motherhood and the arrival of Moira and the others has thrown open a window in her marriage and allowed in a gust of fresh air. The story appears to take place when Isabel is at the peak of her infatuation with her new friends. With a few tweaks to the characterisation of William and Isabel, we might have had a lot more sympathy for Isabel and a lot less for William.

I think I’ve said enough. But I sincerely hope you enjoyed the story. And take a look at Hogarth’s series of paintings – Marriage A-la-Mode, painted between 1743 and 1745 – a much starker morality tale than Mansfield’s.

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We will be reading Mrs Dalloway in June, so now is the time to track down a copy of the book if you haven’t already.

In the meantime, I thought we could take a look at a couple of the short stories of Katherine Mansfield who was a contemporary of Virginia Woolf. I love Mansfield’s short stories. They are so vivid and thrumming with life. Mansfield could write place beautifully (‘At the Bay’), she wrote sensitively and realistically about children (‘Prelude,’ ‘The Dolls House’), she wrote about class (‘The Garden Party’), she was funny (‘The Dove’s Nest,’ unfinished at the time of her death), and she had an excellent ear for dialogue and different registers of speech (‘Marriage à la Mode,’ ‘Life of Ma Parker,’ in fact, nearly anything of hers).

What we will read first

Let’s start with ‘Marriage à la Mode.’ It’s part of The Garden Party and other Stories collection but it’s also available online here. Please go ahead and read it if you’d like to join in the discussion and we’ll tackle it in a week’s time.

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Katherine and Virginia

Katherine Mansfield was born and grew up in New Zealand. She was educated for a short time in England and returned at age 20. Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield knew one another and had a slightly fraught relationship, largely due to their mutual competitiveness. They were very different. In her biography of Woolf, Hermione Lee points out that Katherine’s colonialism and her itinerant uprootedness were the opposite of Virginia’s ancestral network.1 Lee describes them as utterly different in looks, temperament and experience but with some strong affinities, not least their fierce dedication to their work.2

Despite their rivalrous relationship and moments of prickliness and distrust, Katherine and Virginia visited one another many times and their conversations about writing were vivid and exciting. In 1918, Katherine wrote to a friend that Virginia ‘was very nice’ and that she ‘does take the writing business seriously and she is honest about it & thrilled by it. One can’t ask more.’3 In 1919, Virginia would confess to her diary, ‘as usual, I find with Katherine what I don’t find with other clever women a sense of ease & interest, which is, I suppose, due to her caring so genuinely if so differently from the way I care, about our precious art.’4 ‘To no one else,’ wrote Virginia in her diary in 1920, ‘can I talk in the same disembodied way about writing; without altering my thought more than I alter it in writing here.’5 ‘I wonder if you know what your visits were to me,’ Katherine wrote to Virginia later the same year, ‘–or how much I miss them. You are the only woman with whom I long to talk work. There will never be another.’6

Tragically, Katherine died at only 34 from tuberculosis which she likely contracted from DH Lawrence. After her death in 1923, Virginia felt that there was ‘no point in writing any more’ – ‘Katherine won’t read it. Katherine’s my rival no longer.’7 In a review of Katherine’s journals on their publication, Virginia wrote: ‘No one felt more seriously the importance of writing than she did. In all the pages of her journal, instinctive, rapid as they are, her attitude to her work is admirable; sane, caustic, and austere. There is no literary gossip; no vanity; no jealously. Although during her last years she must have been aware of her success she makes no allusion to it. Her own comments upon her work are always penetrating and disparaging.’8

To read more about Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, I encourage you to stop by ’s substack, Beyond Bloomsbury and her piece Katherine & Virginia: Friends or Foes?

And I’ll see you in a week to talk about ‘Marriage à la Mode’!

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