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My 7 Favorite Victorian Novels

Posted in 19th century English novels, Bruce Byfield, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Personal, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, Wilkie Collins, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on October 2, 2013| Leave a Comment »

For someone who has taught courses in the 19th Century English novel, I have decidedly unorthodox tastes. For instance, I have yet to read Anthony Trollope or William Thackeray extensively, because I find them almost unbearably superficial.

Instead, my preferences run to the Gothic and psychological, like William Godwin’s Caleb Williams or James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Although I haven’t taught now for years now, I still keep a library of novels drawn from the century, and periodically renew my acquaintance with old favorites.

Over the years, the book I find myself returning to are:

7.) Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights: This novel is for the young. It is a vision of romance by someone with little or no first-hand experience, who can see dying for love as a desirable ending. I suspect its intensity scares many scholars, who prefer Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre to it. But if Wuthering Heights is morbid to an extreme, it has ten times the poetry of Jane Eyre, and a tighter structure as well, both of which justify the somewhat guilty pleasure of reading it.

6.) Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island: You know that a writer is under-rated when they are treated as children’s writers. But the vivid descriptions and memorable characterizations show how unfair this treatment is in Stevenson’s case. His work may be light, but it is also intelligent, making it first rate reading just before bedtime.

5.) Charles Dickens, Great Expectations: Dickens is usually at his best when he fictionalizes his early life or dabbles in the macabre. In Great Expectations, he combines both, although it is his early aspirations rather than actual events that inform the plot. Scenes like the meeting of the convict Magwitch in the graveyard, or the passages about the reclusive Miss Havisham are dark and full of wonder. As always in Dickens, comic workers (Joe) and misogynistic portrayals of women (Estella) grate on modern sensibilities, but in general I agree with Dickens that Great Expectations is his finest work.

4.) Wilkie Collins, No Name: No Name is the best depiction of a woman by a man in 19th century literature. Deprived by an accident of her legal rights, a young woman descends to impersonation and fraud to retrieve what is rightfully hers, meeting a comic and grotesque set of characters that out-Dickens Dickens. Naturally, she must repent at the end of the novel, saved by her virtuous sister, but Collins clearly sympathizes with her until then.

3.) Jane Austen, Emma: Today, Austen is popularly known for only Pride and Prejudice, but Emma is far more interestingly psychologically. Somehow, Austen manages to make the protagonist’s mis-perceptions humorous while ensuring that she keeps readers’ sympathies.

2.) Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure: Hardy’s knowledge of rural life and lore is unique in his era; although he sometimes uses comic rustics modeled on Shakespeare’s, ultimately he has a familiarity and respect for the working class that few of his contemporaries share. The earnest, self-taught protagonist is a figure with a dignity of tragic proportions – and who surprised me by having an inner life that often sounds like an echo of my own.

1.) George Eliot, Middlemarch: This novel explores different aspects of marriage through a variety of sub-plots. The main plot involves an intelligent, but inexperienced young woman, who, restricted by the roles available to her, makes a disastrous first choice in marriage, and has to live with the consequences. Unlike most of my selections, Middlemarch is more about eccentricity than the macabre, but the depth of characterization make it the greatest English novel of its century, if not of all time.

I could easily double or triple this list, but by the end I would probably be slipping in titles to impress, or because I think more people should read them. These are the books from the 1800s that I have not only read dutifully, but five or six times of my own free will. They are the ones that catch my eye when I’m scanning my bookshelves – the ones I am likely to pull out to re-read a favorite scene, and then find myself starting all over again, renewing my acquaintance with them like with an old friend who has just come into town.

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When women came to the canon

Posted in Bruce Byfield, feminism, literary canon, Personal, Uncategorized, women writers, writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 19, 2013| Leave a Comment »

I have been lucky enough to witness several social revolutions in my time. The most obvious is the personal computer; I only regret that it didn’t happen twenty years earlier. But the one that is most important to me personally is the acceptance of women into the literary canons.

Art being the record of human experience, this change did as much as any friendship or relationship to help me understand that women’s experiences were human experience, and therefore were something I needed to know.

When I started studying literature in Grade 12, women were severely under-represented in the works studied in academia. Except for those who might be hidden under the name of Anonymous, the first female writer mentioned was usually Jane Austen. She was too important a novelist to ignore, but for the rest of the nineteenth and twentieth century, women’s representation was limited. Charlotte Bronte was credited with having written one worthwhile novel. Elizabeth Barrett Browning had written a collection of soppy sonnets to her husband. Christina Rossetti had written a few children’s poems and minor lyrics. Emily Dickinson was a decided eccentric.

And so it went, with women consistently written out of the literary history whenever possible, and presented as minor if they had to be mentioned at all. Even George Eliot was known for only three novels, one of which, Silas Marner, was taught mainly because it had the virtue of being short enough for undergraduate’s attention spans.

The only exception was contemporary literature, especially science fiction. There, you could find female authors in something close to the percentages that you might expect from random chance, and I read writers like Ursula K. LeGuin and James Tiptree, Jr. (actually, Alice Sheldon) as eagerly as their male peers. But even these pioneers sometimes had little to say about women as women, as Le Guin would come to acknowledge later in her career.

Anyway, there was something daring about asserting the worth of writers who were still living. Somehow, they were not taken with quite the same seriousness as writers in the canon.

By contrast, by the time I finished my bachelor’s degree, the canon had been drastically revised. In those pre-Internet days, the main reason for this change was the feminist-inspired publication of more female writers, often by small, painfully non-profit imprints.

Suddenly, Charlotte Bronte, Christina Rossetti, and George Eliots were revealed to have had not just the occasional success, but entire writing careers. Other writers were suddenly being talked about – people like Aphra Behn, Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, Zora Neale Hurston, and dozens of others.

I viewed this change with a mixture of enthusiasm and confusion. On the one hand, here was enough fresh reading to keep me busy for years (which it has). On the other hand, just what had I been taught?

More importantly, who were these women? As a science fiction reader, I already knew that all worthy works were not contained in the canon, and reading Robert Graves’ literary criticism had taught me that exercising my own judgment on the canon was not only permissible, but necessary for independence of thought.

Yet if these women were any good, then surely I would have been taught something about them. I suspected that the promotion of some of these writers was as much the result of academics creating careers for themselves as it was of negligence. And, aside from the occasional exception for historical reasons, why should I bother with mediocrity?

Gradually, though, I realized I was being unreasonable. How could I possibly learn who was worth reading unless a wide variety of works were available? Besides, while most of the work of Elizabeth Gaskell (for example) struck me as uninspired back then, so did that of accepted male members of the canon, such as Anthony Trollope or William Thackeray. If mediocre men were accepted, there was no reason not to accept mediocre women as well. If nothing else, tastes differ, not only between person and also occasions.

At any rate, the newly available work had enough masterpieces to justify the era of rediscovery in general. Without it, I might never have discovered the slippery mind of Aphra Behn, or learned as a non-Christian to appreciate the quirky thoughts of Christina Rossetti. I would have enjoyed Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss, but not have had Eliot’s other books to put them into context.

Just as importantly, I found myself reading works by women differently once a critical mass of their work became easily available. Being a young man and as egocentric as most young men, I had always read Jane Austen’s novels about courtship and marriage or Jane Eyre‘s story of love and indendence as exceptions – interesting in their own way but somehow trivial compared to the concerns of male writers.

However, discovering dozens of female writers changed my perception. Newly able to place their subject matter in context, I realized that such topics were not exceptions. For a very long time, they were the concerns of half the human race. If I were to be fully human myself, I needed to understand these concerns, and appreciate them – and in a matter of months, I did.

I like to think that ordinary life was leading me to similar conclusions, and perhaps it was. But I think that, without the rewriting of the canon, the process would have taken me years, instead of months. I might not have even been ready for love and marriage when they came my way near the end of my readjustment.

People often talk about how feminism transforms women’s lives. But, if my personal example is any indication, its effect on men’s lives can be just as great. Throughout my life, my outlook has been broader – more mature – because of the simple fact that, when I was in my late teens, suddenly I could read about women’s lives and learn to appreciate them as the material of art.

The lesson remains one of the most valuable ones that I have ever had.

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The problem of Byron

Posted in Bruce Byfield, George Gordon Lord Byron, literature, Lord Byron, Personal, poetry, Romantics, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on August 16, 2012| Leave a Comment »

George Gordon Noel Byron, better known to literature as Lord Byron, has always presented a problem for me. On the one hand, he is the writer of some of the most magnificent poetry and wry comic verse in the English language, and a champion of social reform and political liberty. On the other hand, he was a braggart and a libertine, and may have been a rapist, abuser, and harasser as well – hardly the sort of person that I’d care to admire.

My ambiguity is not helped by the fact that Byron’s biographers tend to believe whatever they want. At one extreme are those who believe that Byron committed incest with his half-sister, raped his wife, and was guilty of all the other crimes heaped upon his name. This outlook is supported by numerous vague yet suggestive hints from Byron himself.

At the other extreme are those who believe that all the allegations against him are the result of a combination of rumors and his own boasting and exaggeration, as well as his deliberate cultivation of a rakish reputation during some periods of his life. Stung by real or imagined tales of his behavior, Byron liked to present himself as someone who stood outside conventional morality – a pose that only makes him appear even more immoral than ever.

One of the problems I have in trying to decide between these two different portraits is that Byron was a passionate and demonstrative man in a passionate and demonstrative age. The generation that followed his was neither, and today we are still far closer in spirit to that generation than Byron’s. A frank and flowery phrase that seems to us proof of his unnatural fondness for his half-sister Augusta or of active bisexuality (not a crime to us, of course, but certainly to his contemporaries) might be no more than the normal discourse of the times, especially coming from a man who postured as a poet as often as he actually proved he was one.

Another problem in trying to decide what view of Byron to take is that both extremes sometimes take evidence from the same events. For example, those who see Bryon as a sexual sociopath take the fact that Byron’s friends destroyed his autobiography as proof that it included confessions of immorality and criminal activity. By contrast, those who believe Byron to be the victim of his own posturing insist that the autobiography was simply more of the same, with exaggerations and fantasies that his friends either believed themselves or were sure that others would. Since the autobiography no longer exists, either interpretation might fit the facts.

Similarly, how much credibility should be given to those who testify to his depravity and cruelty? The jilted, erratic Lady Caroline Lamb is far from the most reliable of witnesses. If Byron himself was unstable, she seems even more so. She seems to have been capable of saying or doing anything, yet what she knew of Byron might have been shocking even by her easy-going standards.

An even more problematic figure is Annabella Milbanke, Lady Byron. Extremely sheltered before her marriage, how would she have known what sodomy and incest were, unless she had experienced or witnessed them? Or did the sexually active Lady Caroline Lamb coach her? Did she exaggerate because she needed a strong case for separation under the laws of her time? If so, why would her accusations be so lurid and potentially damaging to herself as well as Byron unless they were basically true?

Even the fact that she tried to raise their daughter to be free of what she considered the strain of madness in the Byrons is difficult to judge. Was Byron simply too eccentric for her limited experience and imagination to understand? She seems to have suffered mental and verbal abuse, yet her lifelong obsession with Byron even after their separation suggests she was no less unstable than him. It is hard to imagine anyone spending their lifetime justifying themselves, yet that is exactly what Lady Byron seems to have done.

In the end, the evidence is inconclusive on both sides. Writers about Byron simply see in him what they choose. The sexually neurotic accept all accusations as true, although, were that so, Byron would have had little time for the other parts of his busy life. The hero-worshipers find reasons to excuse him, because of the political sentiments he expressed and his death while fighting for Greek independence – as though his life could be neatly divided into good and bad karma and a final score provided.

Only rarely does anyone consider that both viewpoints might be true, or at least have aspects of the truth – or, rarer still, that all the posthumous gossip has little to do with the worth of his poetry. In the end, Byron remains a figure who is impossible to ignore, but also one who is impossible to define.

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Reading, age and gender

Posted in adventure stories, Bruce Byfield, gender, literary genres, literature, novels, Personal, reading, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 29, 2011| Leave a Comment »

When I was twelve, I thought J. R. R. Tolkien the greatest writer in the world. By the time I was 15, I was appreciating Shakespeare, and reading systematically through the collected poems of Byron and Shelley. But it wasn’t until after my bachelor’s degree in English that I could read Dickens for pleasure, and I was doing my master’s before I became a fan of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and the other Victorian novelists. These experiences, I believe, indicate something that is often overlooked in high schools and universities – namely, that you can only read a writer in your own time, and when that time occurs is partly dependent on gender.

The question is not just one of age, although those who try to classify young adult fiction would have you believe everything is that simple. Admittedly, my own trail shows a progression in subtlety, from Tolkien’s action-packed adventures to the verbal cleverness of Shakespeare and the iconoclasm and revolutionary spirit of the Romantic poets (so suitable to a boy who believed in social causes), and becomes increasingly nuanced after that. But it is also a matter of increased experience and perception as well.

Just as few great novels are written by anyone under twenty-five, so few great novels are likely appreciated by men under twenty-five. The majority of teenage boys (and I was no exception) simply don’t have the experience to have developed the taste for demanding works when they’re young. The insights that underlie a novel, let alone the rhythms of a strong prose stylist, represent a kind of aesthetic puberty that teenage boys and young men haven’t reached yet. Few of them can appreciate such things any more than a pre-pubescent child can appreciate the intricacies of sex and love.

By contrast, plot-driven stories such as Tolkien’s seem accessible to males at a relatively young age. You only have to see the selection of blockbuster movies aimed at the taste of young males to see the truth of this fact. In much the same way, as a dramatist, Shakespeare externalizes experience, with introspection served up in the breaks in the action represented by the soliloquy. The shift to perception and point of view that is characterized by the novel is subtler than either – and also a relatively recent literary development, and one that wouldn’t have been possible without adventure tales and plays having been developed first.

The trouble is, the average male adolescent, no matter how full of social causes and good intentions, isn’t socially conditioned to want to seek out a female point of view like Austen’s. The definitions of male sexuality in the culture don’t encourage them to be aware that a female point of view even exists. If they do discover it, they are likely to be too egocentric to care much about it. If they approach it at all, they usually do so with reservations.

With the best will in the world, the female perspective is too foreign to them – and the novel, whoever writes it, has always been more about female perspectives than any other structural genre in English (which is why terms such as “chick lit” are nonsense). The average male in modern industrial culture needs five to ten years of relationships and even marriage to appreciate a socially-centered or psychological novel.

By contrast, the female experience seems quite different. Women start off with an advantage because, if they are interested in adventure at all, they have to learn early how to read around the male dominance in such stories. Probably, too, they are ready for the novel earlier, because its territory is more familiar to them – when I was teaching university English, I couldn’t help but notice that in the novel courses I taught, three quarters of the young students were women, while poetry and drama courses tended to have a slight majority of men.

Middle-age is a great equalizer, and I am glad to have arrived at an age where I can view both Tolkien and Hardy as great writers, each in their own way. But when I think of the gender-influenced delays and detours I took, I wish that I could have more daring or imagination and expanded my horizons more quickly. If I had, I could have had another decade or more to enjoy George Elliot! But, considering the odds, maybe I should just be glad that I managed to reach my current perspective at all.

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