Suggested Reading Easter, 2023

Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative is a landmark text and a crucial read for anyone seeking to understand the complex issue of race in Britain and the lineage of Afro-British writing. This is the earliest first-hand account in English of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, presenting the full horror of the experience in order to justify and promote the abolitionist agenda. In a hostile political and literary climate, the success and popularity of Equiano's text succeeded in furthering this agenda.

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.

Austen said of her fourth published novel that it would contain a heroine no one would like but herself—and as if to prove her wrong, generations of readers have warmed to the flawed protagonist of Emma. 'Handsome, clever and rich,' Emma is a young woman used to ruling over the small social world of Highbury. The comedy as well as the psychological interest of the novel lies in seeing what happens when people fail to act as she hopes and ordains. She attempts to pair her protégée Harriet Smith with two unsuitable candidates, and completely fails to read the true direction of the men's affections. She also fails to decipher, until it is almost too late, the nature of her own feelings for Mr Knightley, her wise neighbour who functions throughout as Emma's only critic. Some recent readers view the novel as dangerously paternalistic in its intertwining of romance and moral education, but it should be said that Emma is less concerned with teaching a lesson than in the mortifying effects of learning one.

Austen's trademark blending of an omniscient and ironic third-person narrative voice with a more indirect style that renders individual points of view comes into its own. A form suited to both the novel's concerns with the individual, solipsistic desires and to is overarching moral commitment to the importance of frankness and mutual intelligibility, it points the way toward later nineteenth-century works of novelistic realism.

At the centre of Frankenstein is the idea that our understanding of science can be developed and controlled, to the point that the tendency of Nature toward dissolution can be arrested; the impossibility of this desire is at the centre of its 'horror.'

The subtitle of the novel, The Modern Prometheus, makes clear the connection with Greek mythology, but it is evident that Frankenstein is a novel that looks forward as well as back. The Swiss scientist and philosopher Frankenstein is inspired by occult philosophy to create a human-like figure, and give it life. The idea of reanimation is at the heart of much modern horror-the attempted violation of chaotic natural order in favor of linear certainty is something that modern society takes for granted, from the construction of unnatural environments to the continual attempts to postpone death and decline.

Frankenstein is a novel that addresses such concerns from a point in history where the developments could only be imagined. Yet it remains, in all sorts of ways, an inescapable part of the culture it examines and foresees, and for these reasons alone it must continue to be read and reassessed. Effortless prose, grotesque imagery, and surreal imagination will ensure that it continues to be enjoyed.

Charlotte Brontë's first published novel tells the story common to her later novel, Villette, of a young woman who must struggle for survival, and subsequently fulfilment, without the support of money, family, or obvious class privilege. The orphaned Jane is caught between two often conficting sets of impulses. On the one hand, she is stoical, self-effacing, and self-sacrificial. On the other, she is a passionate, independently minded and dissenting character, rebellious in the face of injustice, which seems so confront her everywhere. As a child, Jane Eyre suffers first as the ward of her aunt, the wealthy Mrs. Reed, and her abusive family, then under the cruelly oppressive regime at Lowood School, where Mrs. Reed finally sends her.

As a young governess at Thornfield Hall, questions of class thwart her course toward true love with the Byronic Mr. Rochester, with whom she has forged a profound connection while caring for his illegitimate daughter.

Class, however, is less of a barrier to their union—and both characters are in any case contemptuous of its dictates—than the fact that Mr. Rochester already has a wife. She is the infamous madwoman imprisoned in the attic (the Creole Bertha Mason from Spanish Town, Jamaica, whose story is imaginatively reconstructed by Jean Rhys in Wide Sargasso Sea). Bertha's plight has been seen to offer a counterpoint to Jane's, as well as raising questions about the representation of women in nineteenth-century fiction. Strong elements of coincidence and wish fulfillment lead ultimately to the resolution of the central romantic plot, but Jane Eyre still speaks powerfully for the plight of intelligent and aspiring women in the stiflingly patriarchal context of Victorian Britain.

A huge monstrous, and exquisitely refined creation, Moby-Dick continues to confound and enthrall readers around the world.

Narrated by Ishmael, a Massachusetts schoolteacher who has forsaken his old life for the romance of the high seas, the novel chronicles the long sea voyage the Peqod, a whaling ship led by the demonic Captain Ahab. Ahab is hunting for the white whale that has robbed him of one of his legs. All other considerations (including the safety of his crew) become secondary concerns compared with his monomaniacal quest.

No simple plot summary can do justice to the breadth and complexity of Melville's novel. One can almost feel the book fighting with itself—balancing the urge to propel the narrative forward with the urge to linger, explore, and philosophize. Moby-Dick is a turbulent ocean of ideas, one of the great meditations on the shape and status of America—on democracy, leadership, power, industrialism, labor, expansion, and nature. The Pequod and its diverse crew become a microcosm of American society. This revolutionary novel borrowed from a myriad literary styles and traditions, switching with astonishing ease between different bodies of knowledge. Quite simply, no one in American literature had written with such intensity and such ambition before. In Moby-Dick are abstruse metaphysics, notes on the technicalities of dissecting a whale's foreskin, and mesmerizing passages of brine-soaked drama.

Moby-Dick is an elegy, a political critique, an encyclopedia, and a ripping yarn. Reading the novel constitutes an experience every bit as wondrous and exhausting as the journey it recounts.

The Mill on the Floss reworks elements of George Eliot's own history into a study of childhood and of how a woman's identity is shaped and constrained by circumstance. Following the development of Maggie and Tom Tulliver, the two children of the miller of Dovecote Mill, it stresses the unpredictability of family inheritance. Stolid Tom takes after his mother, while his sister Maggie—dark, impulsive, and imaginative—favours her father. Unlike Tom, Maggie is intellectually sharp, and is a tomboy in contrast to her cousin, Lucy Deane. The story is set in the 1840s, within the wider provincial middle-class community of St. Oggs, and explores the competing forces of continuity and change. Tulliver is financially ruined by the modernizing lawyer Wakem; and while Tom labours to reclaim the family property, Maggie strives to overcome past feuds through her friendship with Philip, Wakem's disabled son. However, it is the brother-sister bond and the conflict between the claims of family ties that drive the novel. In a moment of impulse, Maggie gives way to her suppressed desire for Lucy's fiancé, Stephen, with drifting with him down the stream, before returning, disgraced, to her family. In a tragic denouement, Maggie is ultimately reconciled with Tom; however, as the narrator comments on the aftermath of the flood, "Nature repairs her ravages—but not all."

Somebody must have made a false accusation against Josef K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.

As in Franz Kafka's long story Metamorphosis—which begins with the line "Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect"—the entire narrative of The Trial emerges from the condition that announces itself in the opening sentence. The protagonist, Josef K, never discovers what he is being charged with, and is never able to understand the principles governing the system of justice in which he finds himself ensnared.

Instead, the narrative follows his exhausting determination to understand and to protest his innocence in the complete absence of any doctrine that would explain to him what it would mean to be guilty, or indeed, of what he actually stands accused. In following Josef K's struggle toward absolution, the novel presents us with an astonishingly moving account of what it is to be born naked and defenseless into a completely incomprehensible system, armed only with a devout conviction of innocence.

Intimacy with this novel has a peculiar effect on the reader. If the first response to K's grappling with the authorities is a sense of familiarity and recognition, there is soon a strange reversal. It begins to seem that our world merely resembles Kafka's; that our struggles are a faint likeness of the essential struggle that is revealed to us in K's endless plight. For this reason, The Trial, in all its inconclusion, its impossibility, and its difficulty, is a wildly exhilarating book, which takes us to the very empty heart of what it is to be alive in a world of everyday trials pushed to the extreme.