A few of my favorite reads…
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All tagged Novel
This spring I read Wide Sargasso Sea and then re-read Jane Eyre as it had been many years since I last read Brontë’s most famous novel. Rhys’s short novel brings the Caribbean islands and Creole culture to life as it provides mad Bertha of Jane Eyre a much-needed backstory.
Thomas Hardy is famous for his later novels like Tess of the d’Urbevilles and Far From the Madding Crowd, but this winter I decided to pick up one of his early works, A Pair of Blue Eyes (originally published in 1873) and I did not regret it. A Pair of Blue Eyes was Hardy’s third novel (published serially) and the first he published under his own name.
Diane Setterfield’s Once Upon a River: A Novel came out in 2018, but as I began to float through its pages, it felt very Victorian in style. Appropriate for its nineteenth-century setting, Setterfield populates her lyrical narrative with characters who embody archetypal roles: good or evil, liminal or privileged, young or old. Also, like Dickens or Hardy, Setterfield’s novel unravels slowly as she introduces various characters whom the story eventually brings together—like tributaries of the river Thames—and it took me a while to get into the flow of the story.
