The text follows Equiano’s journey from his kidnapping in Africa, and incorporates slavery in the British navy; work on slave ships; the purchase of his own freedom; work on plantations; and finally a return to England. It is an explicitly religious meditation that simultaneously forges an identity for the author that is self-consciously both British and African. This is highlighted in his choice of names. While on abolitionist tours, in publications, and in public, he referred to himself as Gustavus Vassa; in this text his African identity is brought to the foreground, while the narrator is acutely conscious of his existence as both. The recent revelation that Vassa/Equiano may have been born in South Carolina, and that consequently he constructed his African identity, only enhances the remarkable insights the text offers into the ambiguities of such experience. As a result, it is as relevant now as it has ever been. MD
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PRE-1800
The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ann Radcliffe
Lifespan | b. 1764 (England), d. 1823
First Published | 1794
First Published by | P. Wogan (Dublin)
Original Language | English
An essential gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho remains a classic today. It tells the story of Emily St. Aubert, who is imprisoned by her evil guardian, Montoni, in his grand gothic castle, Udolpho. Terror and suspense dominate Emily’s life within Udolpho, as she struggles to withstand Montoni’s perfidious schemes and her own psychological breakdown. The narration has a dream-like quality, which reflects Emily’s confusion and horror, and lends emphasis to the psychological battle she must engage in to survive her nightmares. Radcliffe’s spectacular descriptions of landscapes are used partly to reflect emotion in the novel, particularly melancholia and dread—but also tranquillity and happiness. Radcliffe’s characters are varied and well drawn, but where she really succeeds is in the creation of a likable and strong heroine.
Although rarely considered a feminist, Radcliffe conveys a significant underlying message about the importance of female independence. Despite her apparent weakness and the extremity of her fears, Emily ultimately defeats Montoni through the strength of her own free will and her moral integrity. The Mysteries of Udolpho offers not just the supernatural horrors created by the imagination; the true horror that Emily must face is the dark side of human nature, a more potent terror than anything conjured by the mind. EG-G
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PRE-1800
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Lifespan | b. 1749 (Germany), d. 1832
First Published | 1795–1796
First Published by | Unger (Berlin)
Original Title | Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
Despite Goethe’s forbidding stature, this is a delightful novel. Goethe is engagingly worldly and wry, telling a story of intellectual development and education with warmth, in what is often considered the classic example of the Bildungsroman.
Initially disillusioned by unrequited love, Wilhelm Meister travels forth on various adventures, and joins a group of itinerant players who afford him apprenticeship in life. Offering a group portrait of the life of theater, much imbued with Shakespeare, the novel celebrates and then undermines the theatrical vocation. The humane realism of the early parts of the novel deepens and modulates into something altogether more unusual once the surfaces of theatricality and social performance are penetrated, and mysterious characters hint at a different kind of literary symbolism and intellectual purpose. Goethe builds a richly ironic account of human self-development across its knowingly flimsy plot structure, somehow combining the ironizing good humor of Fielding’s Tom Jones with something more philosophical. Not to be confused with Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, this novel is especially recommended reading for deluded thespians and wannabe aesthetes. DM
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PRE-1800
The Monk
M. G. Lewis
Lifespan | b. 1775 (England), d. 1818 (at sea)
First Published | 1796
First Published by | J. Bell (London)
Full Title | The Monk: A Romance
A 1913 edition updates Lewis’s eighteenth-century horror story to appeal to the taste of early twentieth-century decadents.
“Who but myself has passed the ordeal of youth, yet sees no single stain upon his conscience? . . . I seek for such a man in vain.”
An extravagantly, possibly gratuitously, dark gothic novel, M. G. Lewis’s The Monk caused controversy when it was first published, and remains shocking and chilling today. Unlike Ann Radcliffe, whose gothic fiction always comes with rational explanations, Lewis embraces the supernatural alongside the most extreme and gruesome acts of human depravity and cruelty. The monk of the title is Ambrosio, who is admired for his piety. As we discover, however, Ambrosio is truly the most hypocritical and evil representative of the Catholic church imaginable. His crimes begin relatively modestly but quickly escalate into the darkest and most blasphemous acts possible. Nor is he the only character so perfidious—the prioress of a nearby convent shows that she, too, is capable of barbaric excesses of cruelty. The novel offers an extreme picture of how power, perhaps especially the power held by spiritual figures, can corrupt absolutely.
Despite a convoluted plot, the novel moves at a good pace and the story flows easily. Although Lewis does not employ extravagant descriptions of landscape, The Monk is nonetheless a highly visual novel, conjuring vivid and thus memorable images of horror and destruction. This is ultimately a story of the complete crushing of innocence, with no softening redemptive message to lighten the horror. The Monk continues both to fascinate and to shock today, and few modern novelists could compete with the sheer grotesqueness of Lewis’s vision. EG-G
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PRE-1800
Camilla
Fanny Burney
Lifespan | b. 1752 (England), d. 1840
First Published | 1796
First Published by | T. Payne and T. Cadell (London)
Original Language | English
The full title of this novel is Camilla; or, A Picture of Youth and this is precisely what Burney gives us in this, her third novel. Camilla tells the story of a lively and spirited young girl’s entry into the world, of her eventual coming of age. Camilla’s story and those of her sisters—the beautiful Lavinia and the angelic, though disfigured and scarred, Eugenia—display the ideals, temptations, loves, doubts, and jealousies that both inform and trouble the passage from youth to adulthood. Burney’s characters, especially the women, are realistic, enabling the reader to be easily drawn in to their joys, sorrows, and concerns.
Burney’s novel also gives a wonderful depiction of public entertainment and pleasure in late eighteenth-century England as well as the manners and fashions that made up the social theater—in particular, the social restrictions and even dangers that confronted young women. Burney uses the emotional extremes of popular gothic fiction to show that danger can be found close to home.
In Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen’s narrator alludes to Burney’s novels Camilla and Cecilia, saying they are “work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.” Austen’s high praise is well deserved, and makes the strongest case yet for reading this novel. EG-G
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PRE-1800
Jacques the Fatalist
Denis Diderot
Lifespan | b. 1713 (France), d. 1784
First Published | 1796 (written 1773)
First Published by | Buisson (Paris)
Original Title | Jacques le Fataliste et son maître
Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist is among those very few extraordinary novels that seem to anticipat
e the distant future of the genre, leaping ahead of itself by 150 years, into the company of Samuel Beckett’s anti-fictional transgressions of the novel form. It is an exceptionally interesting novel with an exceptionally uninteresting plot. Like metafiction of the twentieth century, it comments continually on its own procedures of composition and guesses continually at the reasons why its story might have turned out as it did, satirizing the reader’s appetite for romantic tales or the thrills of an improbable adventure. Diderot sprinkles a few such thrills into the narrative recounted by Jacques to his characterless Master as they roam about, but he is always sure to announce their arrival.
Diderot was a polymath—philosopher, critic, and political essayist; hence, perhaps, his distrust and comedic handling of the novel form. His most famous literary labor, taking him almost twenty-five years, was on the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, the great expression of French Enlightenment rationality co-authored, among others, by the mathematician D’Alembert. Jacques the Fatalist, which Diderot wrote around 1770 but never published during his lifetime, was a curious departure into a parallel zone of philosophical thinking, in which the so-called “problems of existence” can be staged as farces of self-expression and storytelling. KS
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PRE-1800
The Nun
Lifespan | b 1713 (France), d. 1784
First Published | 1796 (written 1760)
First Published by | Buisson (Paris)
Original Title | La Religieuse
Nuns take the offensive in an illustration to Diderot’s novel, captioned: “I was on the ground and they were dragging me.”
The playful origins of this epistolary novel, published posthumously, are intriguing. In 1760, Denis Diderot and his friends wrote a series of letters to the Marquis de Croismare. The letters purported to come from Suzanne Simonin, an illegitimate child who had been forced to take religious vows to expiate her mother’s guilt. Having escaped from the convent, she apparently wanted the Marquis to help her annul her binding vows. In her letters, the nun recounts the details of her confinement against her will and describes its effect on her understanding of religion and her faith. The novel’s reputation as a succès de scandale is due in great part to its unashamed and explicit depiction of the narrator’s encounter with the cruelty prevalent in monastic institutions, and her attendant discovery of eroticism and spirituality.
The Nun has been considered an attack on Catholicism, typifying the French Enlightenment’s attitude toward religion. It stirred public opinion anew when, in 1966, the Jacques Rivette movies version was banned for two years. More recently, The Nun has been much discussed for its emphatic portrayal of lesbianism and sexuality. Aimed at exposing the oppressive and unnatural structure of life in religious institutions, the narrator’s fate at the hands of monastic power provides a striking model for narrative and, indeed, life reversals. CS
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PRE-1800
Hyperion
Friedrich Hölderlin
Lifespan | b. 1779 (Germany), d. 1843
First Published | 1797 (vol. 1), 1799 (vol. 2)
First Published by | J. Cotta (Tübingen)
Full Title | Hyperion, oder der Eremit in Griechenland
Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion appeared in two volumes between 1797 and 1799, and is a kind of autobiography written in letters from Hyperion mostly to his friend Bellarmin, but with some to Diotima. The text is set in ancient Greece, yet some 200 years after it was written, the words that describe invisible forces, conflicts, beauty, and hope are still relevant.
The novel works on several levels as a fictional reflection on, and interpretation of, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. On the philosophical level, it can be interpreted as an investigation into the separation between subject and object, between individual and individual, man and nature, as a condition of their unity. On the political level, it expresses the ambivalence toward reason and revolutionary force as possible instruments of social and historical progress—elements that still exist in various twentieth-century forms.
Hölderlin’s critical description of the German society of his day is still broadly applicable to bourgeois Western European existence in the third millennium. And those who have never felt Hyperion’s Utopian longing for harmony with nature and God, free of all alienation, should ask the divine cashier for their money back. The inexplicable reasons have to do with love, language, and Diotima. But for this one has to delve into the experience of reading the novel oneself. DS
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1800s
Contents
Castle Rackrent
Henry of Ofterdingen
Rameau’s Nephew
Elective Affinities
Michael Kohlhaas
Sense and Sensibility
Pride and Prejudice
Mansfield Park
Emma
Rob Roy
Frankenstein
Ivanhoe
Melmoth the Wanderer
The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
The Life of a Good-for-Nothing
Last of the Mohicans
The Betrothed
The Red and the Black
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Eugene Onegin
Eugénie Grandet
Le Père Goriot
The Nose
Oliver Twist
The Lion of Flanders
The Charterhouse of Parma
The Fall of the House of Usher
Camera Obscura
A Hero of Our Times
Dead Souls
Lost Illusions
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Three Musketeers
Facundo
The Devil’s Pool
The Count of Monte-Cristo
Jane Eyre
Vanity Fair
Wuthering Heights
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
David Copperfield
The Scarlet Letter
Moby-Dick
The House of the Seven Gables
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Cranford
Bleak House
Walden
Green Henry
North and South
Madame Bovary
Indian Summer
Adam Bede
Oblomov
The Woman in White
The Mill on the Floss
Max Havelaar
Great Expectations
Silas Marner
Fathers and Sons
Les Misérables
The Water-Babies
Notes from the Underground
Uncle Silas
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Crime and Punishment
Last Chronicle of Barset
Thérèse Raquin
The Moonstone
Little Women
The Idiot
Maldoror
Phineas Finn
Sentimental Education
War and Peace
King Lear of the Steppes
Alice Through the Looking Glass
Middlemarch
Spring Torrents
Erewhon
The Devils
In a Glass Darkly
Around the World in Eighty Days
The Enchanted Wanderer
Far from the Madding Crowd
Pepita Jimenéz
The Crime of Father Amado
Drunkard
Anna Karenina
Martín Fierro
The Red Room
Nana
The Portrait of a Lady
The House by the Medlar Tree
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
Bouv
ard and Pécuchet
Treasure Island
A Woman’s Life
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Against the Grain
The Regent’s Wife
Bel-Ami
Marius the Epicurean
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Germinal
King Solomon’s Mines
The Quest
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The Manors of Ulloa
The People of Hemsö
Pierre and Jean
Under the Yoke
The Child of Pleasure
Eline Vere
Hunger
By the Open Sea
La Bête Humaine
Thaïs
The Kreutzer Sonata
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Down There
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Gösta Berling’s Saga
New Grub Street
News from Nowhere
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Diary of a Nobody
The Viceroys
Jude the Obscure
Effi Briest
The Time Machine
The Island of Dr. Moreau
Quo Vadis
Dracula
What Maisie Knew
Compassion
Pharaoh
Fruits of the Earth
The War of the Worlds
As a Man Grows Older
Dom Casmurro
The Awakening
The Stechlin
Eclipse of the Crescent Moon
Some Experiences of an Irish R. M.