Items30The creator’s order
  1. 1Virginia WoolfVirginia WoolfBorn 25 Jan 1882Mrs Dalloway turns a single London day into a meeting place for different minds and many layers of remembered time. Woolf lets a bell, a street or a passing thought carry the reader between lives, so form itself reveals connections that the characters cannot see. Start here for an experiment with…0i
  2. 2Murasaki ShikibuMurasaki ShikibuIn The Tale of Genji, courtship extends into a vast study of memory, rank, ageing and the consequences of desire. The sustained attention to changing feelings is the reason to read Murasaki alongside much later psychological novelists. Royall Tyler's English translation supplies extensive notes for…0i
  3. 3Toni MorrisonToni MorrisonBorn 18 Feb 1931Beloved makes the past an active presence in a household rather than background information explained once and left behind. Morrison's changing perspectives and recurring images require the reader to piece together experience that resists a tidy account. The form is inseparable from the novel's…0i
  4. 4Clarice LispectorClarice LispectorBorn 10 Dec 1920A sculptor enters a room and encounters a cockroach; The Passion According to G.H. makes that small event the occasion for an immense disturbance of identity. Lispector follows thought as it strains against the words available to it. In Idra Novey's translation, the repetitions feel like a mind…0i
  5. 5Jane AustenJane AustenBorn 16 Dec 1775Read Emma for the pleasure of gradually noticing how a confident person's version of events colours the narration itself. Austen's free indirect style brings us close to a character's thoughts while leaving room to recognise their mistakes. The innovation is felt as comedy and misreading, not a…0i
  6. 6George EliotGeorge EliotBorn 22 Nov 1819Middlemarch enlarges the novel's moral field by making one person's hopes part of a network of marriages, professions, debts and local loyalties. Eliot's narrator can widen the view when a character's explanation becomes too convenient. Follow an apparently secondary person and watch how much of…0i
  7. 7Mary ShelleyMary ShelleyBorn 30 Aug 1797Frankenstein gives a created being a substantial account of his own life inside the stories told about him. That movement of narrative authority turns a Gothic premise into an argument about creation, education and responsibility. Read the novel rather than relying on its screen image: its nested…0i
  8. 8Emily BrontëEmily BrontëBorn 30 Jul 1818Wuthering Heights reaches us through people who observe, repeat, judge and misunderstand what happened. Brontë's violent family story gains force from the difficulty of separating an event from its transmission. Listen to the narrators as carefully as to Catherine and Heathcliff. The experiment…0i
  9. 9Charlotte BrontëCharlotte BrontëBorn 21 Apr 1816Lucy Snowe's intimacy is selective: in Villette, she can bring us close to an emotion while keeping its circumstances to herself. Brontë makes that control part of the action. Follow the silences as well as the confessions, and the first-person voice becomes a contest over how much another person…0i
  10. 10Dorothy RichardsonDorothy RichardsonBorn 17 May 1873Pointed Roofs begins Pilgrimage by following Miriam Henderson into work at a German school. Richardson gives the movement of attention the space usually reserved for decisive events: impressions, discomforts and half-formed judgements become the substance of a life. Begin with this opening volume…0