Ode on a Grecian URL

I am nothing if not a Great Procrastinator. I meant these recommendations to be up at the beginning of winter break, but honestly there's no reason they can't go up now. I realize that you already have an enormous amount of work on your plates, but there's nothing to stop you from reading for fun on top of that. Indeed, there are many of us who survived our undergraduate careers more or less sane (though you might fairly critique the extent of that sanity) by reading for fun just a few hours a week. As an intellectual practice, free reading allows you to direct your own education and to reserve for yourself the right to investigate areas that your classes cannot adequately cover.

If you liked Middlemarch and are hankering for similarly powerful Victorian prose, Jane Austen's Persuasion and Charles Dickens's Bleak House are both powerful, beautiful novels that ask similar questions about community, family, custom, and love. They are not the lightest novels by those authors, so be forewarned that we're not talking here about the happy-go-lucky Austen of Pride & Prejudice or the adventure-story Dickens of Great Expectations.

Charles Flaubert's Madame Bovary, written just a few years before Middlemarch, is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century fiction: if Middlemarch in one of the greatest English-language prose works, Madame Bovary is one of the finest from across the Channel. It's also a bit spicier: think of Emma Bovary as a Rosamond Lydgate run amok.

The other direction to go after reading George Eliot is to read the works by slightly younger authors who were in awe of her and her accomplishment. Henry James, an American expatriate who spent nearly all his adult life in Britain and the Continent, took Eliot as one of his principle literary models. His early novels, particularly Portrait of a Lady, exhibit some of the same types of characters and relationships that we saw in Middlemarch. (We could argue that James's later works are even more Eliotic - particularly The Golden Bowl - but I hesitate to recommend them, as they are quite long and not generally thought as enjoyable as James's earlier writing. Frankly, I much prefer The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors to James's earlier stuff, but that might just be me.)

If you were particularly taken by the Dorothea/Celia/Casaubon/Chettam storyline, and particularly by the discussion of power and marriage, you might consider E. M. Forster's Howards End, which offers a fascinating take on a similar set of relationships--indeed, he seems to have had Middlemarch in mind when he set up the Schlegel sisters and the way they relate to the men in their lives. The differences between MM and HE would make for a fascinating study in the ways late Victorian literature transitioned into high Modernism.

Virginia Woolf, arguably the single most important British Modernist, admired Eliot enormously. Woolf's later works - particularly Mrs Dalloway (1925) - clearly respond to the kinds of characters and the styles of narration that we saw appearing in Middlemarch. Obviously Woolf's prose and plot differ from Eliot's enormously, but I think the threads of connection are fairly plain.

If you were into Frankenstein - and many of you seemed to be - you might tap into the world of thoughtful fantasy and science fiction writing it spawned. Mary Shelley's closest successor is probably Ursula K. Le Guin, whose A Wizard of Earthsea and its sequel, The Tombs of Atuan, wrestle with some of the exact socio-political problems Shelley was investigating. (Wizard is at least partly about race; Tombs mostly about gender.) On the science fiction side, writers like Kurt Vonnegut (whom we shouldn't think of as strictly scifi) and Philip K. Dick see genre writing not as an easy way to push out new volumes but rather as useful means by which to discuss modern society. Of Vonnegut, read Cat's Cradle, Sirens of Titan, and maybe Bluebeard and Galapagos; of Dick, read his short story collections. (Dick is a painfully bad writer, but he can construct a plot like few others.)

And here, at the end, are some recommendations for those of you who are thinking about majoring in English. If you're going to be serious about this major, you should study earnestly some of the significant antecedents to our literature: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are simple necessities; I read the former in the Lattimore translation and the later in the Fitzgerald, though there are some newer and slightly jazzier translations out. I hear mostly good things about the Fagles. Dante's Inferno is another essential, and his Purgatorio probably just as important--for some reason the Paradiso isn't well thought of. The Sinclair translation, in prose, is the old school word-for-word version; the Ciardi verse translation is virtuosic, though more than occasionally inaccurate. Less important, but perhaps more interesting, is Ovid's Metamorphosis and Virgil's Aeneid: Roman works, for whatever reason, haven't been quite as important as Greek or Italian in our literary history. I also recommend Madame Bovary as an important read for anyone interested in twentieth-century European literature: it's rarely taught in English classes, since it wasn't written in English, though most important Anglophone authors had read and deeply admired it.

And, of course, I'm happy to recommend books more particularly tailored to your interest; just shoot me an email!