The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark, 1961
HarperCollins
160 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061711299
Summary
At the staid Marcia Blaine School for Girls, in Edinburgh, Scotland, teacher extraordinaire Miss Jean Brodie is unmistakably, and outspokenly, in her prime. She is passionate in the application of her unorthodox teaching methods, in her attraction to the married art master, Teddy Lloyd, in her affair with the bachelor music master, Gordon Lowther, and—most important—in her dedication to "her girls," the students she selects to be her crème de la crème.
Fanatically devoted, each member of the Brodie set—Eunice, Jenny, Mary, Monica, Rose, and Sandy—is "famous for something," and Miss Brodie strives to bring out the best in each one. Determined to instill in them independence, passion, and ambition, Miss Brodie advises her girls, "Safety does not come first. Goodness, Truth, and Beauty come first. Follow me."
And they do. But one of them will betray her. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 1, 1918
• Where—Edinburg, Scotland, UK
• Death—April 13, 2006
• Where—Civitella della Chiana, Tuscany, Italy
• Education—James Gillespie's High School for Girls; Heriot-
Watt College (one course)
• Awards—James Tait Black Memorial Prize; US Ingersoll
Foundation TS Eliot Award; David Cohen Prize; Dame
Commander of the Order of the British Empire; Booker
Prize, short-listed twice.
Dame Muriel Spark, DBE, was an award-winning Scottish novelist. She was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh, to a Jewish father and an English (and Anglican) mother, and was educated at James Gillespie's High School for Girls. In 1934–35 she took a course in "Commercial correspondence and précis writing" at Heriot-Watt College. She taught English for a brief time and then worked as a secretary in a department store.
On 3 September 1937, she married Sidney Oswald Spark, and soon followed him to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Their son Robin was born in July 1938. Within months she discovered that her husband was a manic depressive prone to violent outbursts. In 1940 Muriel had left Sidney and Robin. She returned to the United Kingdom in 1944 and worked in intelligence during World War II. She provided money at regular intervals to support her son as he toiled unsuccessfully over the years. Spark maintained it was her intention for her family to set up home in England, but Robin returned to Britain with his father later to be brought up by his maternal grandparents in Scotland.
Spark began writing seriously after the war, under her married name, beginning with poetry and literary criticism. In 1947, she became editor of the Poetry Review. In 1954, she decided to join the Roman Catholic Church, which she considered crucial in her development toward becoming a novelist. Penelope Fitzgerald, a contemporary of Spark and a fellow novelist, remarked how Spark "had pointed out that it wasn't until she became a Roman Catholic...that she was able to see human existence as a whole, as a novelist needs to do." In an interview with John Tusa on BBC Radio 4, she said of her conversion and its effect on her writing:
I was just a little worried, tentative. Would it be right, would it not be right? Can I write a novel about that — would it be foolish, wouldn't it be? And somehow with my religion — whether one has anything to do with the other, I don't know — but it does seem so, that I just gained confidence.
Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh supported her in her decision.
Her first novel, The Comforters, was published in 1957. It featured several references to Catholicism and conversion to Catholicism, although its main theme revolved around a young woman who becomes aware that she is a character in a novel.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) was more successful. Spark displayed originality of subject and tone, making extensive use of flashforwards. It is clear that James Gillespie's High School was the model for the Marcia Blaine School in the novel.
After living in New York City for some years, she moved to Rome, where she met the artist and sculptor Penelope Jardine in 1968. In the early 1970s they settled in the Italian region of Tuscany and lived in the village of Civitella della Chiana, of which in 2005 Spark was made an honorary citizen. She was the subject of frequent rumours of lesbian relationships from her time in New York onwards, although Spark and her friends denied their validity. She left her entire estate to Jardine, taking measures to ensure her son received nothing.
She refused to agree to the publication of a biography of her written by Martin Stannard. Penelope Jardine now has the right of approval to publication; and the book was published in July 2009. Stannard was interviewed in the week of the publication of the biography. According to A. S. Byatt, "She was very upset by the book and had to spend a lot of time going through it, line by line, to try to make it a little bit fairer".
She received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965 for The Mandelbaum Gate, the US Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992 and the David Cohen Prize in 1997. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, in recognition of her services to literature. She has been twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in 1969 for The Public Image and in 1981 for Loitering with Intent.
Spark and her son had a strained relationship. They had a falling out when Robin's Judaism prompted him to petition for his late grandmother to be recognized as Jewish. The devout Catholic Spark reacted by accusing him of seeking publicity to further his career as an artist. During one of her last book signings in Edinburgh she responded to an enquiry from a journalist asking if she would see her son by saying 'I think I know how best to avoid him by now'. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Muriel Spark is one of the few writers on either side of the Atlantic with enough resources, daring, and stamina to be altering, as well as feeding, the fiction machine.... We are never out of touch in a Spark novel with the happiness of creation; the sudden willful largesse of magic and wit, the cunning tautness of suspense.
John Updike - The New Yorker
One of our greatest living novelists.
The Times (London)
Spark’s powers of invention are apparently inexhaustible.
Commonwealth
[Spark is] one of this century’s finest creators of comic-metaphysical entertainment.
New York Times
[Spark] has written some things that seem likely to go on being read as long as fiction in English is read at all.
New York Times Book Review.
Book Club Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie:
1. What is Miss Brodie's "prime"? What does she mean by the term and why is it so significant—she announces it to her class and refers to it time and again? It also brought up in the last line of the book.
2. Do we ever learn why she selects the particular girls she does as her Brodie girls? Talk about the girls, their relationships with one another, and their relationship with the school. Are they individuals...or conformists?
3. What is Miss Brodie's purpose in creating the Brodie set? Is it purely educational...or something else? What does she want for (or from) them? In what ways, if at all, does the Brodie set change over the years? Do the girls alter their feelings for Miss Brodie by the time their schooling ends?
4. What do you think of Miss MacKay, the headmistress, who continually attempts to undermine Miss Brodie? At the end, she says to Sandy, "I'm afraid she put ideas into your young heads." Why has that bothered her for so many years? Is that not precisely what education is about, at least Miss MacKay's own philosophy of teaching? Is Miss MacKay a watchful headmistress doing her job? Or is she inhibiting a vibrant, creative teacher?
5. Speaking of the philosophy of education: according to Miss Brodie, she and Miss MacKay differ on the correct method of education. Discuss the following passage and decide whom you agree with:
To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil's soul. To Miss MacKay it is a putting in of something that is not there.... I call that intrusion.... Miss Mackay's method is to thrust a lot of information into the pupil's head; mine is a leading out of knowledge, and that is true education as is proved by the root meaning [of the word].
6. We know Miss Brodie only through the eyes of the girls, primarily Sandy. How does their perception of her change by the time they are 17 years of age...and also when they are even older?
7. Muriel Spark wrote with a great deal of wit, and her humor is particularly evident in this novel because we view the adult world through the eyes of innocents. What are some of the sections you find particularly funny?
8. Is Miss Brodie a good person? Is she a good teacher? Try, in fact, to explain the enigma that is Miss Jean Brodie? What, for instance, is her background—do we ever find out?
9. What about Teddy Lloyd and Gordon Lowther, Miss Brodie's two love interests? What does she want with them? She refuses Lowther's entreaties to marry her—why? And more mysteriously, she encourages Rose to have an affair with Lloyd—why, again?
10. When she is finally betrayed, was the one who did so right or wrong? What prompted the girl tell Miss MacKay what she told her? Was it a betrayal?
11. In the final analysis, how do you come to think of Miss Brodie? Is she a noble figure? A tragic one? A visionary? Is she silly? Is she dangerous or well-meaning? What impact did she have on her girls, lasting or short-term?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Luncheon of the Boating Party
Susan Vreeland, 2007
Penguin Group USA
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143113522
Summary
Instantly recognizable, Auguste Renoir’s masterpiece depicts a gathering of his real friends enjoying a summer Sunday on a cafe terrace along the Seine near Paris. A wealthy painter, an art collector, an Italian journalist, a war hero, a celebrated actress, and Renoir’s future wife, among others, share this moment of la vie moderne, a time when social constraints were loosening and Paris was healing after the Franco-Prussian War.
Parisians were bursting with a desire for pleasure and a yearning to create something extraordinary out of life. Renoir shared these urges and took on this most challenging project at a time of personal crises in art and love, all the while facing issues of loyalty and the diverging styles that were tearing apart the Impressionist group.
Narrated by Renoir and seven of the models and using settings in Paris and on the Seine, Vreeland illuminates the gusto, hedonism, and art of the era. With a gorgeous palette of vibrant, captivating characters, she paints their lives, loves, losses, and triumphs in a brilliant portrait of her own. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 20, 1946
• Where—Racine, Wisconsin, USA
• Death—August 23, 2017
• Where—San Diego, California
• Education—San Diego State University
• Awards—Inkwell Grand Prize, Fiction, 1999; San Diego Book Awards' Theodore Geisel Award and Best Novel of the Year, 2002.
Susan Vreeland's short fiction has appeared in journals such as The New England Review, The Missouri Review, Confrontation, Calyx, Manoa, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her first novel, What Love Sees, was broadcast as a CBS Sunday night movie in 1996. Ms. Vreeland is the recipient of several awards, including a Women's National Book Association First Place Award in Short Fiction (1991) and a First Place in Short Fiction from New Voices (1993). Inkwell Magazine for her short story, "Gifts". She teaches English literature, creative writing, and art in San Diego public schools, where she has taught since 1969. (From the publisher.)
More
"When I was nine, my great-grandfather, a landscape painter, taught me to mix colors," Susan Vreeland recalls in an interview on her publisher's web site. "With his strong hand surrounding my small one, he guided the brush until a calla lily appeared as if by magic on a page of textured watercolor paper. How many girls throughout history would have longed to be taught that, but had to do washing and mending instead?"
As a grown woman, Vreeland found her own magical way of translating her vision of the world into art. While teaching high school English in the 1980s, she began to write, publishing magazine articles, short stories, and her first novel, What Love Sees. In 1996, Vreeland was diagnosed with lymphoma, which forced her to take time off from teaching—time she spent undergoing medical treatment and writing stories about a fictional Vermeer painting.
Creative endeavor can aid healing because it lifts us out of self-absorption and gives us a goal," she later wrote. In Vreeland's case, her goal "was to live long enough to finish this set of stories that reflected my sensibilities, so that my writing group of twelve dear friends might be given these and know that in my last months I was happy—because I was creating."
Vreeland recovered from her illness and wove her stories into a novel, Girl in Hyacinth Blue. The book was a national bestseller, praised by the New York Times as "intelligent, searching and unusual" and by Kirkus Reviews as "extraordinarily skilled historical fiction: deft, perceptive, full of learning, deeply moving." Its interrelated stories move backward in time, creating what Marion Lignana Rosenberg in Salon called "a kind of Chinese box unfolding from the contemporary hiding-place of a painting attributed to Vermeer all the way back to the moment the work was conceived."
Vreeland's next novel, The Passion of Artemisia, was based on the life of the 17th-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi, often regarded as the first woman to hold a significant place in the history of European art. "Forthright and imaginative, Vreeland's deft recreation ably showcases art and life," noted Publishers Weekly.
Love for the visual arts, especially painting, continues to fire Vreeland's literary imagination. Her new novel, The Forest Lover, is a fictional exploration of the life of the 20th-century Canadian artist Emily Carr. She has also written a series of art-related short stories. For Vreeland, art provides inspiration for living as well as for literature. As she put it in an autobiographical essay, "I hope that by writing art-related fiction, I might bring readers who may not recognize the enriching and uplifting power of art to the realization that it can serve them as it has so richly served me."
Extras
• Two other novels relating to Vermeer were published within a year of Girl in Hyacinth Blue: The Music Lesson by Katharine Weber and Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier.
• Vreeland taught high school English and ceramics for 30 years before retiring to become a full-time writer. She lived in San Diego, California, and died in 2017. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Vreeland takes the big bold brush strokes of Renoir's personal and artistic oeuvre and displays them with her usual vividness in this eponymous novel.... Sensual and provocative.
Baltimore Sun
Exquisitely wrought.... This summer's most satisfying historical novel.
Seattle Times
Imagining the banks of the Seine in the thick of la vie moderne, Vreeland (Girl in Hyacinth Blue) tracks Auguste Renoir as he conceives, plans and paints the 1880 masterpiece that gives her vivid fourth novel its title. Renoir, then 39, pays the rent on his Montmartre garret by painting "overbred society women in their fussy parlors," but, goaded by negative criticism from Emile Zola, he dreams of doing a breakout work. On July 20, the daughter of a resort innkeeper close to Paris suggests that Auguste paint from the restaurant's terrace. The party of 13 subjects Renoir puts together (with difficulty) eventually spends several Sundays drinking and flirting under the spell of the painter's brush. Renoir, who declares, "I only want to paint women I love," falls desperately for his newest models, while trying to win his last subject back from her rich fiance. But Auguste and his friends only have two months to catch the light he wants and fend off charges that he and his fellow Impressionists see the world "through rose-colored glasses." Vreeland achieves a detailed and surprising group portrait, individualized and immediate.
Publishers Weekly
Here, Vreeland uses words to paint the changing world of late 19th-century France. After being stung by remarks in an essay written by French novelist Émile Zola concerning the inadequacies of Impressionism, Pierre-Auguste Renoir is goaded to paint a masterpiece surpassing his Montmartre spectacle Bal au Moulin de la Galette, which will finally establish this school as heir to the artistic traditions of France and Italy. He uses models, allowing the listener to experience la vie moderne, the new modes of living, thinking, and expressing that transformed the social world of the late 19th century into the one we inhabit today. Alphonsine, daughter of the proprietor of La Maison Fournaise, and Angèle, a debauched child of Montmartre, are naturals. The beautiful yet spoiled Circe, fobbed off on Renoir by a jaded Parisian socialite, provokes a crisis when she quits midstream, refusing to be painted in profile. Renoir finds her replacement in Aline, a 19-year-old seamstress he will one day marry. Other models add their own piquancy. Karen White brings a cadenced elegance to her reading that is set off by her irreverent over-the-top voicing of the snobby Circe and the naïve innocence of Aline. Recommended for libraries with a commitment to historical fiction and books about art.
David Fauacheux - Library Journal
Critics agree that the concept (tracing Renoir's steps back from this joyous painting) and the research (combining facts not only about Renoir's inner circle but also details about French café society, culture, and painting techniques) demonstrate considerable skill and dedication.... Despite this perhaps overabundance of historical material, Luncheon succeeds as a portrait of both a man and an era.
Bookmarks
(Starred review.) Once again—to the delight of her legion of fans—the best-selling author of Girl in Hyacinth Blue (1999) and The Passion of Artemesia (2002) imaginatively uses art history as the basis for a carefully constructed historical novel.... [R]iveting, complex novel. —Brad Hooper
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. How do you think Renoir’s humble beginnings affected his life and his painting?
2. Describe what you think was going through Renoir’s mind as he took on the technical challenge of this painting. Was he ready for this? How was he to achieve the perspective? Position the figures? Anchor the terrace? Convey the river below?
3. Besides Renoir, how do other characters explore the issue of creative expression? In whom is this yearning most deeply felt? What effect does the gathering of these people have on each other? While reading this book, could you imagine being a model in the painting? What would it have been like for you? Elaborate on how you would have fit in or not.
4. Discuss the level of commitment each character had to the painting. How did their involvement affect the painting? Do you relate to any one of the characters in the painting Luncheon of the Boating Party?
5. How do the separate models’ plots act upon the progress of the painting and enlighten a single common theme? Which of the male models is your favorite? And of the female models? Why does each hold a place in your affections?
6. How did the fact that there was time pressure to finish the painting affect its result? Would the painting have turned out differently if Renoir had had more time to work on it?
7. Renoir seems to fall in love over and over again with the two things he most adored: the female form and the riverscape. He saw one woman as color, another as line. Was there something about the season in which he was painting and his relationships with Aline and Alphonsine that contributed to the overall effect of the image?
8. Why did Renoir hate the term “Impressionist” so much?
9. What does Luncheon of the Boating Party suggest about finding oneself in life and in love? Is there something unique about the way an artist finds his or her way?
10. In what ways, if any, did the novel surprise you? How do you react to a novel that incorporates real and well-known people as characters? Did anything in the novel affect the way you had previously thought about Renoir? Impressionism? French culture?
11. What in the story of this painting gives you a fresh perspective on understanding and developing the relationships and creative inclinations in your own life?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Pretend Wife
Bridget Asher, 2008
Random House
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385341929
Summary
What would life be like with the one who got away? From the author of My Husband’s Sweethearts—hailed as “a laugh-and-cry novel” that’s “whip-smart, tender.... An undiluted joy to read”—comes this bighearted, funny, fiercely perceptive tale about a happily married woman and the little white lie that changed everything.
For Gwen Merchant, love has always been doled out in little packets—from her father, a marine biologist who buried himself in work after her mother’s death; and from her husband, Peter, who’s always been respectable and safe. But when an old college boyfriend, the irrepressible Elliot Hull, invites himself back into Gwen’s life, she starts to remember a time when love was an ocean.
What does Elliot want? In fact, he has a rather surprising proposition: he wants Gwen to become his wife. His pretend wife. Just for a few days. To accompany him to his family’s lake house for the weekend so that he can fulfill his dying mother’s last wish. Reluctantly Gwen agrees to play along—with her husband Peter’s full support. It’s just one weekend—what harm could come of it?
But as Gwen is drawn into Elliot’s quirky, wonderful family—his astonishingly wise and open mother, his warm and welcoming sister, and his adorable, precocious niece—she starts questioning everything she’s ever expected from love. And as she begins to uncover a few secrets about her own family, it suddenly looks like a pretend relationship just might turn out to be the most real thing she’s ever known. (From the publisher.
Author Bio
Bridget Asher is a high-powered neurotic with an anxious heart that sometimes kicks up unexpectedly like a lawnmower motor in her chest. And because she's looked at the bios and author photos of a large number of other authors, she believes that she needs to attach a warning label or an advisory report or an apologia of some sort because...
- She does not have an authentically dingy T-shirt a la Colson Whitehead.
- She does not have teeth as grand and white and straight as Lolly Winston.
- She cannot pull off funky striped leggings for an author photo like Myla Goldberg nor has she been able to pose with a pet bear on a leash like Gary Shteyngart. (In general, she balks at stunts with animals.)
On the positive:
- Her name is easier to pronounce than Gary Shteyngart.
- She can buy the leggings and hope for the best!
- She is not opposed to cosmetic dentistry—as an art form.
And now she feels much better and can move onto her actual bio: In some ways, Bridget Asher is much like her heroine Lucy. She has fallen in love with loveable cheats. She has adored the wrong men for all the right reasons. She's as guilty as anyone. And, yes, like Lucy, her mistakes have made her who she is, and she's someone she's become fond of—except when she gets flustered ordering elaborate side dishes in sushi restaurants, in which case, she's overbearing.
She wanted to write a novel that, at its heart, focused on loving those we love for reasons we can't always fully rationalize; about friendships between women running deep; about dealing with compulsive mothers in velour sweat suits; about sweet liars and tenderhearted cheaters; about forgiveness of sorts, absolution and acceptance in the form of honesty and love.
Asher lives in Florida where she hopes she is being partially preserved by air conditioning and is married to a lovable, sweet man who has given her no reason to inquire about his former sweethearts (but, still, she's agonizingly curious). They have multiple children who are high-strung like their mother and sweet like their father.
That's the short bio. There's more, of course. There's much more. But she hopes this serves as some explanation for herself. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Gwen is happily married until her dreamy ex asks if she’ll act as his wife—just for the weekend, to please his dying mom. A cut above chick-lit.
People
Balances the lighter side of life with the sadder realities. Surprising, poignant moments pave the way for a...satisfyingly happy ending.
Booklist
With still more to say about marriage, fidelity and the importance of being wittily earnest, Asher (My Husband's Sweethearts)—Julianna Baggott's adult fiction pseudonym— brings an abundance of warmth and wisdom to this tale of lost-and-found love. Married woman Gwen Merchant agrees to pretend to be the newlywed of former beau Elliott Hull to appease his dying mom. Gwen, smothering in a marriage to Peter, jumps at the chance for a redo at an abruptly ended college romance, and it's a slippery slope that Gwen slides down with passion and verve, falling in love with Elliott and becoming attached to his sister and her precocious kids and the imperious and uncannily perceptive matriarch, Vivian. But while weaving one faux relationship, Gwen unthreads the very real sadness in her own tattered family, including a widowed dad and a marriage that hides more than it confides. It's more than a little disappointing, if not surprising, that Asher inserts an improbably happy ending to push the sweet and funny Gwen into a trite epiphany.
Publishers Weekly
Flippancy gives way to more affecting emotions in a second novel from Asher (My Husband's Sweethearts, 2008) about a married woman who, as a favor, pretends to be the wife of her ex-boyfriend. Gwen Merchant lost her mother when she was five in a drowning accident from which she was mysteriously saved. Her caring but undemonstrative father spoke little of the tragedy and never filled Gwen's emotional gap, and neither does Peter, her perfectly nice yet somehow underwhelming anesthesiologist husband of three years. Then Gwen bumps into Elliot, a boyfriend from college days, and ends up agreeing to stand in as the wife he lied about to his cancer-stricken mother Vivian. The weekend visit to Vivian at her lovely lake house is both idyllic and disconcerting, throwing into the air many of Gwen's ideas about family and marriage. Vivian sees through the deception but gives her blessing to Gwen, who must now come to terms with her feelings for Elliot, Peter and most of all her mother. Some clunky bits of plot mechanism and meditations on love and commitment are required before all players are liberated to reach desired conclusions. Although the book could have used a stronger foundation, it largely succeeds with the aid of humor, insight and an appealing heroine. If this one has not yet been optioned for film, it soon will be.
Kirkus Reviews
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Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Pretend Wife:
1. How does the death of her mother and her father's taciturn nature affect the now adult Gwen? What does she find missing in her life?
2. What is the state of Gwen and Peter's marriage? What is lacking in their relationship?
3. Talk about Gwen's decision to step in as Elliot's wife—does she have ulterior motives in accepting his proposal, or is she totally above board?
4. What about the weekend at the lake with Elliot's mother? Describe the characters Gwen meets there, starting, of course, with Vivian—how does she penetrate Gwen and Elliot's deception? What draws Gwen to Elliot's sister and her two children?
5. Ultimately, what does Gwen come to understand about love, family, and commitment? What do all characters learn? Are you satisfied with the way the book ends?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Light in August
William Faulkner, 1932
Knopf Doubleday
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679732266
Summary
Light in August interweaves the stories of several major characters. Lena Grove, orphaned as a young girl and living with her brother’s family, becomes pregnant by a man named Lucas Burch. Burch has gone away, supposedly to look for work, promising to send for her. Having waited for six months without a word, she sets out on foot to find him and arrives, eight months pregnant, at the town of Jefferson, Mississippi. There she finds the similarly named Byron Bunch, a man who has sought to keep himself free from sin by filling his life with work and churchgoing. At first sight, he falls in love with Lena.
Bunch’s friend, the Reverend Gail Hightower, is otherwise completely friendless in the community where he has lived for years. Haunted by a heroic vision of his great-grandfather who died in the Civil War, Hightower has forsaken his life to live in the unreal past.
The novel’s central figure is Joe Christmas, a drifter and bootlegger who has settled for a time in Jefferson. He has taken up with a garrulous new arrival called Joe Brown, who sells the whiskey for him. The two men live in an old slave cabin behind the house of Joanna Burden, an unmarried woman whose abolitionist family came to Jefferson decades before. A local man killed her grandfather and brother for interfering in the affairs of slaveholders.
Faulkner eventually draws all of these characters into the drama surrounding Joe Christmas, which accelerates to a harrowing climax. Illuminating two grim legacies in American history—fanatical Calvinism and fanatical race hatred—Light in August is a mesmerizing journey into the nightmare of race, religion, and violence in the national psyche. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 25, 1897
• Where—New Albany, Mississippi, USA
• Death—July 6, 1962
• Where—Byhalia, Mississippi
• Awards—Nobel Prize, 1950; 2 Pulitizer prizes; others
William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. His family was rooted in local history: his great-grandfather, a Confederate colonel and state politician, was assassinated by a former partner in 1889, and his grandfather was a wealth lawyer who owned a railroad. When Faulkner was five his parents moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where he received a desultory education in local schools, dropping out of high school in 1915. Rejected for pilot training in the U.S. Army, he passed himself off as British and joined the Canadian Royal Air Force in 1918, but the war ended before he saw any service. After the war, he took some classes at the University of Mississippi and worked for a time at the university post office. Mostly, however, he educated himself by reading promiscuously.
Faulkner had begun writing poems when he was a schoolboy, and in 1924 he published a poetry collection, The Marble Faun, at his own expense. His literary aspirations were fueled by his close friendship with Sherwood Anderson, whom he met during a stay in New Orleans. Faulkner's first novel, Soldier's Pay, was published in 1926, followed a year later by Mosquitoes, a literary satire. His next book, Flags in the Dust, was heavily cut and rearranged at the publisher's insistence and appeared finally as Sartoris in 1929. In the meantime he had completed The Sound and the Fury, and when it appeared at the end of 1929 he had finished Sanctuary and was ready to begin writing As I Lay Dying. That same year he married Estelle Oldham, whom he had courted a decade earlier.
Although Faulkner gained literary acclaim from these and subsequent novels—Light in August (1932), Pylon (1935), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (1939), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942)—and continued to publish stories regularly in magazines, he was unable to support himself solely by writing fiction. he worked as a screenwriter for MGM, Twentieth Century-Fox, and Warner Brothers, forming a close relationship with director Howard Hawks, with whom he worked on To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, and Land of the Pharaohs, among other films. In 1944 all but one of Faulkner's novels were out of print, and his personal life was at low ebb due in part to his chronic heavy drinking. During the war he had been discovered by Sartre and Camus and others in the French literary world. In the postwar period his reputation rebounded, as Malcolm Cowley's anthology The Portable Faulkner brought him fresh attention in America, and the immense esteem in which he was held in Europe consolidated his worldwide stature.
Faulkner wrote seventeen books set in the mythical Yoknapatawpha County, home of the Compson family in The Sound and the Fury. "No land in all fiction lives more vividly in its physical presence than this county of Faulkner's imagination," Robert Penn Warren wrote in an essay on Cowley's anthology. "The descendants of the old families, the descendants of bushwhackers and carpetbaggers, the swamp rats, the Negro cooks and farm hands, the bootleggers and gangsters, tenant farmers, college boys, county-seat lawyers, country storekeepers, peddlers--all are here in their fullness of life and their complicated interrelations." In 1950, Faulkner traveled to Sweden to accept the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. In later books—Intruder in the Dust (1948), Requiem for a Nun (1951), A Fable (1954), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962)—he continued to explore what he had called "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself," but did so in the context of Yoknapatawpha's increasing connection with the modern world. He died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
To say that Light in August is an astonishing performance is not the use the word lightly.... Not only does Faulkner emerge from this book a stylist of striking strength and beauty: he permits some of his people, if not his chief protagonist, to act sometimes out of motives which are human in their decency.... In a word, Faulkner has admitted justice and compassion to his scheme of things.
J. Donald Adams - New York Times (10/9/1932)
The critics...now tell us that his style is florid, that his plots are hard to follow, that he sometimes shows bad taste in his choice of material.... On the other hand, I can think of no other living American author who writes with the same intensity or who carries us so completely into a world of his own. There is no American author or our time who has undertaken and partly completed a more ambitious series of novels and stories..... Faulkner has been writing a sort of human comedy that was partly inspired by his reading of Balzac.
Malcolm Cowley - New York Times ( 10/29/1944)
Faulkner...belongs to the full-dressed post-Flaubert group of Conrad, Joyce, and Proust.
Edmund Wilson
For all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must return to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics.
Ralph Ellison
For all the range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity, [Faulkner's works] are without equal in our time and country.
Robert Penn Warren
Discussion Questions
1. The opening chapter belongs to Lena Grove as she arrives in Jefferson. What are the core elements of Lena’s character? Does she change during the course of the novel? If Lena has a symbolic function, what is it? What, if anything, does Lena’s background explain about her character, motivations, and desires?
2. The story contains many flashbacks, shifts in temporal sequence, and shifts in the narrative point of view. How does the book’s structure affect the reading experience? In terms of prose style, what is most striking about Faulkner’s use of language and imagery?
3. Byron Bunch is a man who has tried to live in such a way that “the chance to do harm could not have found him” [p. 77]. He says to Hightower, early in the story, “a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he’s already got. He’ll cling to trouble he’s used to before he’ll risk a change” [p. 75]. Yet Byron changes more than any other character. He falls in love and, in pursuit of Lena, completely alters his life. Is Byron an admirable character, and if so, how and why?
4. The critic Malcolm Cowley felt that the novel “dissolved too much into the three separate stories” [The Faulkner-Cowley File, p. 28] of Lena, Gail Hightower, and Joe Christmas. Would you agree or disagree? Do their stories come together, and if so, how? Do these characters belong in the same novel?
5. Byron says, “A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he cant escape from” [p. 75]. How does this statement relate to Joe Christmas, Joanna Burden, and Reverend Hightower? What are the various ways in which their enslavement to “dead folks” and past history determines their lives?
6. Before he kills Joanna Burden, Joe thinks, “Something is going to happen to me. I am going to do something” [p. 104]. Notice the passive and active modes of those two juxtaposed thoughts. Does Joe actively seek the fulfillment of “something awful” that he believes to be his fate? The narrator tells us, “He believed with calm paradox that he was the volitionless servant of the fatality in which he believed that he did not believe” [p. 280]. Faulkner seems to be interested in the relationship between volition and passivity in the novel; how do you understand the “paradox” of will and fate as it embraced by Joe Christmas? Are other characters similarly caught between will and fate?
7. One of Faulkner’s central preoccupations in Light in August is the legacy of Calvinism in the American psyche. In which characters is this stringent, unforgiving strain of thinking most apparent, and what are its effects? How are guilt and Calvinism linked?
8. In Light in August, womanhood and female sexuality are often described with a combination of fascination, desire, and loathing. Does this psychological attitude originate in certain characters, or does it seem to emanate from the author? Consider this question in the context of the following quotes: “He began to look about the womanroom as if he had never seen one before: the close room, warm, littered, womanpinksmelling” [Doc Hines, p. 132]; “the bodiless fecundmellow voice of negro women murmured. It was as though he and all other manshaped life about him had been returned to the lightless hot wet primogenitive Female” [Joe Christmas, p. 115]; and “Now and then she appointed trysts beneath certain shrubs about the grounds, where he would find her naked, or with her clothing half torn to ribbons upon her, in the wild throes of nymphomania” [Joanna Burden, p. 259].
9. As he takes a whipping from his foster father, Joe’s body “might have been wood or stone; a post or a tower upon which the sentient part of him mused like a hermit, contemplative and remote with ecstasy and selfcrucifixion” [pp. 159–60]. Why does Joe seek punishment from McEachern and reject the love offered by McEachern’s wife [pp. 166–69)]? Why are the fanatical and sadistic patriarchs of the novel, like Simon McEachern, Calvin Burden, and Doc Hines, so powerful?
10. What are the most startling and memorable scenes in the novel? Are these scenes extremely visual in their effects? Do they seem appropriate to, or influenced by, the genre of film?
11. Chapter 5 is told from Joe’s point of view; what insight does the reader gain into Joe’s reason for killing Joanna Burden? Does he have a clear motive? Joanna is depicted as a masculine woman, a spinster, a Northerner and a nymphomaniac. What is at the heart of Joanna’s desire for Joe, and of his desire for her?
12. Critic Eric Sundquist has remarked that “violence and sexuality determine the contours of the South’s romance of blood” and that Joe is “a character whose very physical and emotional self embodies the sexual violence of racial conflict” [William Faulkner: The House Divided, pp. 89–90]. Discuss this yoking of violence, race, and sexual thinking in the novel, particularly as it is reflected in Joe’s relationship with Joanna Burden and in Percy Grimm’s murder and castration of Joe [pp. 464–65].
13. With Percy Grimm, Faulkner himself said that he had “created a Nazi,” a “Fascist galahad who saved the white race by murdering Christmas” [qtd. in William Faulkner: The House Divided, p. 93]. “I wrote [Light in August] in 1932 before I’d ever heard of Hitler’s Storm Troopers” [Faulkner in the University, p. 41]. Discuss the ways in which Chapter 19 explores the fantasies and fanaticism of both the individual and the group. Does Grimm intend to lead a lynching or to prevent one? Does Grimm function as the executioner whose fantasy is merely an exaggerated version of what the community also believes?
14. Joe’s life is figured repeatedly as a journey along a road; returning to Mottstown, Joe feels that “he is entering it again, the street which ran for thirty years.... It had made a circle and he is still inside of it” [p. 339]. Should we see a thematic link between Lena’s journey and Joe’s? How do their wanderings differ in spirit and in function?
15. Light in August is primarily a book about racial identity, race hatred, and hysteria. Faulkner commented later that Joe “didn’t know what he was, and so he was nothing. He deliberately evicted himself from the human race because he didn’t know which he was...which to me is the most tragic condition a man could find himself in—not to know what he is and to know that he will never know” (qtd. in Light in August and the Critical Spectrum, p. 1). Are the coldness and violence in Joe’s character explained by Faulkner’s statement? How does the reader react to Joe Christmas—with empathy, with distaste, with bewilderment?
16. In The Sound and the Fury Quentin Compson says, “a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among” [p. 86]. Discuss the ways in which Joe Christmas functions among the white community as an idea, a symbol, a negative image of their own ideal selves, and not as a person. What is the effect of this function on Joe’s own subjectivity?
17. Chapter 19, which tells of Joe Christmas’s death and castration, is followed by a chapter narrated from the perspective of Gail Hightower which tells the story of his past life and his failures, ending in the present moment. What might Faulkner have meant to do by juxtaposing Hightower’s meditation with the horror that has come just before? What role does Hightower play in the novel?
18. A furniture dealer who gave Lena and Byron a lift in his wagon is the narrator of the final chapter, and their courtship is the subject of the comical tale he is telling his wife. Lena’s pursuit of the feckless Lucas Burch has also been a source of comedy. Why might Faulkner have chosen to end the novel on this note of optimism and good-humored comedy?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen, 1813
480 pp.
Penguin Random House
ISBN-13: 9780141439518
Summary
This rich social commentary—Pride and Prejudice—is sometimes considered to be Jane Austen's finest novel. It is certainly among her more famous ones.
Austen sets her entertaining study of manners and misconceptions against the backdrop of a class-conscious society in 18th-century England.
Spirited, intelligent Elizabeth Bennet is alternately enchanted and affronted by Mr. Darcy. She is quick to suspend her usual, more rational judgment when it comes to him.
She also is quick to believe the worst gossip about this haughty, opinionated man, who soon manages to alienate Elizabeth and her family.
But is the condescending air that Mr. Darcy wars an indication of his real character? Or has Elizabeth's pride gotten in the way of her chance for true romance? (From Norton Critical Editions .)
Author Bio
• Born—December 16, 1775
• Where—Steventon in Hampshire, UK
• Death—July 18, 1817
• Where—Winchester, Hampshire
• Education—taught at home by her father
In 1801, George Austen retired from the clergy, and Jane, Cassandra, and their parents took up residence in Bath, a fashionable town Jane liked far less than her native village. Jane seems to have written little during this period. When Mr. Austen died in 1805, the three women, Mrs. Austen and her daughters, moved first to Southampton and then, partly subsidized by Jane's brothers, occupied a house in Chawton, a village not unlike Jane's first home. There she began to work on writing and pursued publishing once more, leading to the anonymous publication of Sense and Sensibility in 1811 and Pride and Prejudice in 1813, to modestly good reviews.
Known for her cheerful, modest, and witty character, Jane Austen had a busy family and social life, but as far as we know very little direct romantic experience. There were early flirtations, a quickly retracted agreement to marry the wealthy brother of a friend, and a rumored short-lived attachment—while she was traveling—that has not been verified. Her last years were quiet and devoted to family, friends, and writing her final novels. In 1817 she had to interrupt work on her last and unfinished novel, Sanditon, because she fell ill. She died on July 18, 1817, in Winchester, where she had been taken for medical treatment. After her death, her novels Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published, together with a biographical notice, due to the efforts of her brother Henry. Austen is buried in Winchester Cathedral.
Jane Austen's delightful, carefully wrought novels of manners remain surprisingly relevant, nearly 200 years after they were first published. Her novels—Pride and Prejudice and Emma among them—are those rare books that offer us a glimpse at the mores of a specific period while addressing the complexities of love, honor, and responsibility that still intrigue us today. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
(Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Pride and Prejudice has always been, since its publication in 1813, Austen's most popular novel. The story of a sparkling, irrepressible heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, the behavior of whose family leaves much to be desired, and Mr. Darcy, a very rich and seemingly rude young man who initially finds Elizabeth "tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me," is, in the words of the Penguin Classics edition editor Tony Tanner, a novel about how a man changes his manners and a woman changes her mind. Through the ages, its chief delights for readers have been its flawed but charming heroine ("I think [Elizabeth] as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print," Austen herself wrote to her sister, Cassandra); its humorous treatment of a serious subject; brilliant and witty dialogue laced with irony; a cast of humorous minor characters; and Austen's nearly magical development of a complex but believable love relationship between two complex people.
Penguin Classics (Introduction to Mansfield Park)
Discussion Questions
1. Pride and Prejudice is probably Austen's most famous, most beloved book. One element, the initial mutual dislike of two people destined to love each other, has become a cliché of the Hollywood romance. I'm sure you can think of numerous examples.
This book has been described by scholars as a very conservative text. Did you find it so? What sort of position do you see it taking on the class system? It has also been described as Austen's most idealistic book. What do you suppose is meant by that?
2. In 1814 Mary Russell Mitford wrote: "It is impossible not to feel in every line of Pride and Prejudice...the entire want of taste which could produce so pert, so worldly a heroine as the beloved of such a man as Darcy.... Darcy should have married Jane."
- Would you have liked the book as well if Jane were its heroine?
- Have you ever seen a movie version in which the woman playing Jane was, as Austen imagined her, truly more beautiful than the woman playing Elizabeth?
Who doesn't love Elizabeth Bennet?!!
3. Two central characters in Austen have her own first name.
- In Emma: Jane Fairfax is a decorous, talented, beautiful woman.
- In Pride and Prejudice: Jane Bennet is everything lovely.
What do you make of that?
4. Lydia and Wickham pose a danger to the Bennet family as long as they are unmarried and unchecked. But as a married couple, with little improvement in their behavior, this danger vanishes.
In Pride and Prejudice marriage serves many functions. It is a romantic union, a financial merger, and a vehicle for social regulation. Scholar and writer Mary Poovey said that Austen's goal "is to make propriety and romantic desire absolutely congruent."
- Think about all the marriages in the book with respect to how well they are fulfilling those functions.
- Is marriage today still an institution of social regulation?
- What about it would change if gay marriage were legally recognized?
5. Austen suggests that in order to marry well a woman must be pretty, respectable, and have money. In the world of Pride and Prejudice, which of these is most important? Spare a thought for some of the unmarried women in the book—Mary and Kitty Bennet, Miss de Bourgh, Miss Georgiana Darcy, poor, disappointed Caroline Bingley. Which of them do you picture marrying some day? Which of them do you picture marrying well?
6. Was Charlotte Lucas right to marry Reverend Collins?
7. What are your feelings about Mr. Bennet? Is he a good father? A good husband? A good man?
8. Darcy says that one of Wickham's motivations in his attempted elopement with Georgiana was revenge. What motivations might he have had for running off with Lydia? (Besides the obvious...)
9. Elizabeth Bennet says,".... people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever."
- Do any of the characters in the book change substantially? Or do they, as Elizabeth says of Darcy, "in essentials" remain much as they ever were?
10. Elizabeth is furious with Darcy for breaking up the match between Jane and Mr. Bingley. Although he initially defends himself, she changes his mind. Later when Lady Catherine attempts to interfere in his own courtship, he describes this as unjustifiable.
- Should you tell a friend if you think they're about to make a big mistake romantically?
- Have you ever done so? How did that work out for you?
(Questions issued by Penguin Classics edition.)
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