By Pat Rogers

There’s never been a shortage of readers to love and admire Alexander Pope. But if you think you don’t, or wouldn’t, like his poetry, you’re in good company there too. Ever since his own day, detractors have stuck their oar in, some blasting the work and some determined to write off the writer.  A noted poet and anthologist, James Reeves, wrote an entire book in 1976 to assail Pope’s achievement and influence. But it has never succeeded; Pope, a combative as well as a marvellously skilled author, keeps coming back for more. He produced more first-rate poems than anyone else in the eighteenth century, as we might guess from his fame across Europe and his huge appeal in America before and after the Revolution.

In truth, much of the hostility he faced in his lifetime had to with fear of his scathing wit. “Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see / Men not afraid of God, afraid of me,” he wrote late in his career. The stark clarity with which he states the idea must have made quite a few contemporaries shuffle another step backwards.

It doesn’t take much more to enjoy Pope than a reasonably good ear and a feeling for language. To read his works carefully will give anyone a grounding in how lines sing, how to make words bend and let meanings fold into each other. It will spare you a whole module on the creative writing course. Sound and sense are delicately adjusted, rhyme and rhythm subtly integrated, wit and wisdom dispersed with the utmost economy.

The most single brilliant item is The Rape of the Lock, completed in 1714 when he was only twenty-five. On the surface this relates how a brutal upper-class twit attacks an airhead socialite. You can find the tale amusingly retold by Sophie Gee in her novel The Scandal of the Season (2007). Actually the ravishing of a beauty in this ravishingly beautiful poem amounts to cutting off just one of her curls, but the text constantly insists that a more serious violation has gone on.

Queen Anne, whose court is satirized in Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’.

The main trick is to build up this critique from a phrase, a verse, a couplet, a paragraph, and a canto, all serving as fractals which contain within themselves the central paradox announced in the first two lines: “What dire offence from am’rous causes springs, / What mighty contests rise from trivial things.” The contrasting terms here form what we call antithesis, borrowing an expression originally used in classical rhetoric. Pope extends antithesis to his grammar, his versification, his metaphors, and his narrative.

A single bit of wordplay encapsulates this process. It comes in the famous pun that describes the queen’s routine at Hampton Court, where she “sometimes counsel take[s] — and sometimes tea.” In the previous couplet, British statesmen plot the fall of “foreign tyrants,” but also of “nymphs at home.” Everything from the tiniest unit up to the overall shape of the work is designed to enforce the same balanced oppositions between the grand and the slight. And none of it ever ceases to be funny.

Pope’s supreme technique meant he could excel in almost every genre available to him. His powerful satire The Dunciad makes mincemeat of the vapid scribblers in Grub Street. You don’t have to know who they were to get most of the jokes. An Epistle to a Lady might have been written as a set text for modern feminists, so provocatively does it raise issues on the gender front for debate and appraisal. An Epistle to Bathurst provides a telling picture of the repercussions of the South Sea Bubble in 1720. While Pope doesn’t forget the investors who lost everything, he bothers less about perpetrators in the financial industry than about the hypocrisy of a corrupt crew in government and parliament whose regulatory touch was so light as to be invisible.

For a long time An Essay on Man was about the most cited treatise worldwide on morals and metaphysics, while An Essay on Criticism wittily expounds – well, criticism. Pope’s version of Homer remains among the few translations of a masterpiece to constitute a major work in its own right when converted to the host language. He also wrote superb prose, for example in his good humoured but damning retorts to the scandalous publisher Edmund Curll.

In case you thought Pope sounds a bit remote, you might recall when you last heard someone use phrases like these: “To err is human, to forgive divine” ; “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread” ; “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” ; “Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” ; “A little learning is a dangerous thing” ; “Damn with faint praise.” We owe them all to one man. These and many more have entered the stock of colloquial language, an idiom Pope learnt to utilize in sparkling poems that explore the full range of the human comedy.

Pat Rogers, Distinguished University Professor, University of South Florida, editor of The Major Works of Alexander Pope for the Oxford World’s Classics, and author of works on Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Johnson, Boswell, and Austen among others.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Portrait of Queen Anne by John Smith (1652–1742) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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The failures of leadership… the destructive power of beauty… the quest for fame… the plight of women… the brutality of war… Such themes have endured for over 2,700 years in Homer’s classic The Iliad — from the flight of Helen and Paris, to the fury of Menelaus and Agamemnon, to the fight between Hector and Achilles. We sat down with Barbara Graziosi and Anthony Verity, the writer of the introduction and translator respectively, to discuss the new Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Iliad.

How did the Ancient Greek performance tradition inform the text of The Iliad?

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What can you tell us about the writer of The Iliad?

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How is the anger of Achilles portrayed in the poem?

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How is war, violence, and death portrayed in the poem?

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Describe the translation process.

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Barbara Graziosi is Professor of Classics at Durham University. She has written extensively on Homer.

Anthony Verity taught Classics in several schools in England, his last job being Master of Dulwich College. He has translated Theocritus and Pindar for Oxford World’s Classics, his OWC edition of The Illiad was published in September, and he is currently working on a version of Homer’s Odyssey. Read his previous blog post: “Who needs another translation of Homer’s Iliad?”

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.

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By Kirsty Doole

In this month’s Oxford World’s Classics reading list, we decided to celebrate National Short Story Month by selecting some of favourite story collections. We have everything here from Gaskell to Cervantes, Fitzgerald to Kafka. But have we missed your favourite? Let us know.

Exemplary Stories by Miguel de Cervantes

While Cervantes is best known for Don Quixote, he also wrote stories, which were actually much more popular in his day than the larger work. The Exemplary Stories range from the picaresque to the satirical, and skilfully draw on colloquial language and farce to create a tension between the everyday and the literary. While Cervantes wants his readers to reach their own moral conclusions, he also paints vivid pictures of the coincidental and the incredible, such as a young nobleman undergoing a change of identity at the behest of a gipsy girl, and two young boys indulging in a life of crime. There are also talking dogs philosophizing in a ward full of syphilitics… and who doesn’t want to read that?

Tales of the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Everyone knows that Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby (especially after the release of Baz Luhrmann’s film) but he was also a short story writer. Tales of the Jazz Age was his second short story collection, and it contains some of the best examples of his talent as a writer of short fiction. These stories demonstrate the same originality and inventive range as his great novels, as he chronicles the hedonistic 1920s. This collection contains two of his greatest stories, ‘May Day’ and ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’.

Cousin Phillis and Other Stories by Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell has long been one of the most popular of Victorian novelists, yet in her lifetime her shorter fictions were just as admired as North and South or Wives and Daughters. This edition’s title story, Cousin Phillis, is a lyrical depiction of a vanishing way of life and a girl’s disappointment in love. The other five stories were all written during the 1850s for Dickens’s periodical Household Words. They range from a quietly original tale of urban poverty and a fallen woman in ‘Lizzie Leigh’ to an historical tale of a great family in ‘Morton Hall’; echoes of the French Revolution, the bleakness of winter in Westmorland, and a tragic secret are brought vividly to life.

A Hunger Artist and Other Stories by Franz Kafka

Enigmatic, satirical, often bleakly humorous, these stories approach human experience at a tangent: a singing mouse, an ape, an inquisitive dog, and a paranoid burrowing creature are among the protagonists, as well as the professional starvation artist. A patient seems to be dying from a metaphysical wound; the war-horse of Alexander the Great steps aside from history and adopts a quiet profession as a lawyer. Fictional meditations on art and artists, and a series of aphorisms that come close to expressing Kafka’s philosophy of life, further explore themes that recur in his major novels.

A portrait of Katherine Mansfield in 1918, by Anne Estelle Rice [public domain]

Selected Stories by Katherine Mansfield

Virginia Woolf was a keen admirer of Katherine Mansfield’s work, saying it was “the only writing I have ever been jealous of”. Other admirers included Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, and Elizabeth Bowen.

Our edition of her Selected Stories covers the full range of Mansfield’s fiction, from her early satirical stories to the nuanced comedy of ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ and the macabre and ominous ‘A Married Man’s Story’. Ranging between Europe and her native New Zealand, disruption is a constant theme, whether the tone is comic, tragic, nostalgic, or domestic, echoing Mansfield’s disrupted life and the fractured expressions of Modernism.

The Complete Short Stories by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was already famous as a wit and raconteur when he first began to publish his short stories in the late 1880s. The stories are full to the brim with Wilde’s originality, literary skill, and sophistication. They include poignant fairy-tales such as ‘The Happy Prince’ and ‘The Selfish Giant’, and the extravagant comedy and social observation of ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ and ‘The Canterville Ghost’. They also encompass the daring narrative experiments of ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’, Wilde’s fictional investigation into the identity of the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and the ‘Poems in Prose’, based on the Gospels.

French Decadent Tales

While ‘Decadence’ was a movement that swept most of Europe, its epicentre was Paris.  On the eve of Freud’s early discoveries, writers such as Gourmont, Lorrain, Maupassant, Mirbeau, Richepin, Schwob, and Villiers engaged in a species of wild analysis of their own, perfecting the art of short fiction as they did so. Their stories teem with addicts, maniacs, and murderers as they strive to outdo each other. This selection of tales includes well-known writers such as those mentioned above, as well as lesser known figures such as Léon Bloy, Jean Richepin, and the Belgian Georges Rodenbach.

Kirsty Doole is Publicity Manager for Oxford World’s Classics, amongst other things.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Portrait of Katherine Mansfield (1918). By Anne Estelle Rice [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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When did you first read Jekyll & Hyde?
Well, being Scottish I was brought up with an innate respect for Robert Louis Stevenson, but really fell in love with his books when I was about 17; Kidnapped and Catriona were my first reads. I was becoming really attracted to the romantic and gothic novels — The Mysteries of Udolpho for example — and so turned to Jekyll and Hyde feeling pretty confident of what to expect. It left me shocked. Being a novella it has the ability to really absorb you but with an economy of style and a necessity to get to the essence of the action that leaves you feeling slightly stunned. You are thoroughly immersed in the world and then spat out feeling dazed and, without sounding too melodramatic, grief-struck. I went straight back to the start and read it all again, desperate to re-visit the people and places, and seek to understand more of the hows and whys of Jekyll’s downfall.

Do you think gothic fiction translates naturally to stage adaptations?
There are definitely elements of gothic writing which lend themselves to a theatrical context; strong characterisations and the hugely atmospheric settings for a start. There is always a latent sense of danger too, whether that is danger from an outside source, or an inner conflict within our hero or heroine leading them into nail-biting situations. The fact that Jekyll and Hyde is a gripping thriller, full of suspense, certainly helps to keep an audience on the edge of their seats.

Do you think it is possible to be completely good or evil? Is it as simple as Jekyll is the hero and Hyde is the villain?
No — is the simple answer! Stevenson puts man’s evil nature centre stage (excuse the pun) and not only that, he makes it flesh; gives that evil a face, a name, and even feelings. It is Hyde who weeps in fear of the gallows in his last few days, Poole the butler even feels pity, so is Stevenson asking us to feel pity for a murderer and abuser? It is a complex interpretation of the baser elements of man’s character — shocking even now. In making Jekyll such a flawed hero, Stevenson forces the reader to question the pillars of society. The letters after Jekyll’s name signal him as a man of the highest achievement and learning in British society and if those at the top can court their evil nature, encourage it, and let it loose on society, then whom can we trust? Stevenson digs deep into the most pressing fears of Victorian Britain and strips it of the facade of gentility. In many ways Jekyll is the villain for giving Hyde life and then shielding his deeds, Hyde is just being Hyde.

What do you think is Stevenson’s conclusion on the concept of good and evil?
Well I reckon Stevenson was a canny Scot and knew that a book too overtly controversial would end up banned and he wanted a bestseller. Of course there is the moral at the end, that man trying to play God and dabbling with evil can only lead to doom and great unhappiness. But he raises so many questions within the book that it is impossible to suggest where his sympathies lay. It would take a thesis to break down these arguments fully but I would tentatively suggest that Stevenson was trying to raise the lid on repressed feelings in a society where people cannot be self-expressed leading to internalisation, festering desires, and therefore greater moral depravity. Early on in Jekyll’s confession he states that his desire to be respected amongst his peers led him to hide his true nature; in essence and quite by accident he became innately a liar and a fraud in all his relations. Stevenson lays the blame at the feet of a society rigid in its conformity. I think it’s a call for change and a call to re-evaluate the nature of man and desire.

What are your thoughts on the physical representation of Hyde written by Stevenson, and how will it be portrayed in your adaptation?
Well, it is a tricky one as there have been so many interpretations of the story over the years. Particularly successful are the film adaptations as the outward transformation is a make-up artist’s and designer’s dream. But I think the challenge in production is to capture the inner essence of Hyde. Stevenson mentions physical traits such as ‘troglodytic’ and ‘deformed’ — although no-one can say quite what the physical deformity is — but what is more important to Stevenson is the feeling Hyde evokes in people. It is almost as if buried deep in our human nature we can sense evil, like a dog can smell fear. Also, Hyde walks the streets of London, he takes hansom-cabs, goes to the bank. (In today’s banking establishments one could argue he would fit right in!) The point is he is not so physically repugnant that he can’t function on a day-to day basis. Utterson summarises that it is the ‘radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through and transfigures its clay continent’ — so not too much of a challenge for the actor!

The novel is very descriptive of the Victorian era. How is this incorporated in your adaptation?
It is a brave picture of London that Stevenson paints: brave in that it is very unflattering. It is an isolated, overcrowded, seedy heart of the Empire; the great and the good living cheek-by-jowl with the lowest of the low. It is a dangerous London where a young man can lose himself in the dead of night; absently wandering abandoned streets. It is also a London that is a playground for Hyde to act out all his debased, violent impulses and as Jekyll describes, ‘Pleasures which…soon began to turn towards the monstrous’. So it is that dangerous London, a London that undercuts the Victorian image of middle-class pleasantry that I want to evoke. In a way London becomes a metaphor for Jekyll’s problem, how he wants to appear, and how he really is.

Creation Theatre’s new production of Jekyll and Hyde will be held in Blackwell’s Bookshop from 8 June-6 July 2013.

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet, and traveler. The Oxford World’s Classics edition of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales is edited by Roger Luckhurst, Senior Lecturer in English, Birkbeck College, University of London. Stevenson’s short novel, published in 1886, became an instant classic. It was a Gothic horror that originated in a feverish nightmare, whose hallucinatory setting in the murky back streets of London gripped a nation mesmerized by crime and violence.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Official poster for ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ provided by Creation Theatre.

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By Hal Gladfelder

The opening-night audience at John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera—first performed on 29 January 1728 at the Theatre Royal, Lincoln’s Inn Fields—can’t fully have known what sort of theatrical experience awaited them. The play’s title, for a start, must have struck them as nonsensical. What could a beggar have to do with an opera? To London audiences of the time, opera was a form of entertainment for the elite: prohibitively expensive to attend; composed and performed by foreign artists in a language, Italian, which few understood; musically and dramatically over-sophisticated and abstruse. Meanwhile, far from the heroic and mythic realms in which operas of the time were set, beggars belonged to the squalid realm of the modern city—especially, the megalopolis of London, with its poverty, violence, hubbub, and filth. To bring those realms together was absurd. Even Gay’s close friends Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and William Congreve were unsure what he was up to, and uneasy as to how this “odd thing” The Beggar’s Opera would be received.

As things turned out, they needn’t have worried: Gay’s odd, hybrid work was to prove the hit not just of the year but of the century, running for a record-breaking sixty-two performances in its first season, and revived countless times since, including performances by a troupe of child actors, “The Lilliputians,” in season two. What drew audiences may at first have been the mere novelty of the piece, its incongruous mix of elements from disparate pre-existing forms, which is reflected in the name of the genre Gay had invented: the ballad opera. As Gay conceived it, the ballad opera alternates spoken dialogue with songs set to familiar tunes, chiefly folk tunes or street ballads, but also songs stolen or parodied from other, current plays and operas. In formal terms, the ballad opera was the model for all those later works that combined spoken and sung elements: the German Singspiel, the Savoy operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, and the Broadway musical. But one of Gay’s cheekiest, and most commercially astute, moves was to use melodies his audience already knew and loved. Doing so not only saved him the expense of hiring a new composer but allowed playgoers the pleasures of the familiar. The music offset the harshness of the play’s satirical equation of high and low life, whereby the underworld of thieves and whores is just a mirror image of the elite world of politicians and courtiers, both of them run according to a system of mercenary betrayal. Building his story around some of the most popular tunes of the day, Gay created not only the first musical but the first jukebox musical: precursor, unlikely as it may seem, to such theatrical hits as Mamma Mia! and Jersey Boys, and such television and film works as Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven and the Gene Kelly-Stanley Donen classic, Singin’ in the Rain, all of which reused songs that were already well known in other contexts.

A scene from The Beggar’s Opera painted by William Hogarth [public domain]

In such moments of cynicism and disquiet, The Beggar’s Opera exhibits affinities not only with the satire of Gay’s cronies Pope and Swift, but with the seeming misanthropic darkness of such later musicals as Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera (unsurprising, as this is an update of Gay’s work to reflect the social conditions of 1920s Berlin) and Stephen Sondheim’s bloody horror show Sweeney Todd. Sondheim’s musical might seem an extreme case of late twentieth-century angst, with its homicidal mayhem and cannibalism, and its vision of London as a hellish city of night. As he puts it in one number, “There’s a hole in the world / Like a great black pit / And the vermin of the world / Inhabit it, / And its morals aren’t worth / What a pig could spit, / And it goes by the name of London.” But these darker elements were already vividly present in The Beggar’s Opera, set in the shadow of Newgate Prison. Gay, too, sees cannibalistic predation as integral to modern urban life: in the words of Lockit, Newgate’s jailor, “Lions, Wolves, and Vulturs don’t live together in Herds, Droves or Flocks. —Of all Animals of Prey, Man is the only sociable one. Every one of us preys upon his Neighbour, and yet we herd together.” But it is not all darkness: in both plays, humor and especially music are sources of pleasure, by turns touching and exuberant. Sondheim has called Sweeney Todd a “love letter to London,” and Gay could have said the same of The Beggar’s Opera, with its comic vitality and anarchic spirit of fun.

Hal Gladfelder is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester. His books include Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law (2001) and Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland (2012), as well as the Broadview edition of Cleland’s Memoirs of a Coxcomb (2005) and the Oxford World’s Classics edition of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and Polly (2013).

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: A scene from The Beggar’s Opera, by William Hogarth [public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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By Gary Kelly

A recent book on the essayist William Hazlitt calls him the ‘first modern man’. If he was, perhaps Mary Wollstonecraft was the first modern woman. By ‘modern’ I mean someone with ideas on how to cope with what sociologist Anthony Giddens calls ‘the consequences of modernity’. These include frighteningly accelerated, seemingly uncontrollable change; heightened risk of all kinds, from food supply through epidemics to weapons of mass destruction and ecological catastrophe; increased dependence on ‘abstract systems’ of unknowable complexity, from banking to government, medical science to the economy; greater migration, voluntary and involuntary, across countries and continents, classes and cultures; and, in meeting these challenges, increased dependence on ‘pure’, supposedly unselfish relationships in private and social life and on a flexible yet stable, self-reflexive and adaptable personal identity.

Wollstonecraft lived through the onset of modernity as Giddens defines it. She observed personally, analyzed incisively, and looked beyond one of modernity’s major initial crises, what many then saw as the greatest social and political cataclysm in history. She saw the blood of the guillotine on the Paris pavements and protested, at her peril. More, she understood this cataclysm from the situation of her sex, what she called ‘the wrongs of woman’, and protested, despite the peril.

Wollstonecraft certainly opposed unmodernity — the ‘Old Order’, the ancien régime — and promoted modernisation, but like her daughter Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, she understood its costs, especially to the marginalized and powerless. Among other things, Frankenstein gave powerful mythic form to a vision of modernity as human catastrophe. Wollstonecraft tried to envisage a modernity that would benefit all, from which women and other marginalized groups would not be excluded and by which they would not be victimized.

To this end, as a self-educated, militantly independent young woman, she set out to become what she called the ‘first of a new genus’, a ‘female philosopher’. Many at the time would have derided this phrase as an oxymoron, but by it she meant a comprehensive social, cultural, and political critic, what we now call a public intellectual, representing women in particular and thereby all of the exploited and oppressed.

As a ‘female philosopher’ Wollstonecraft communicated her vision of modernity, responding to the prolonged crisis of her time, in a wide range of writing including education manuals, novels, criticism and essays, political and social polemic, historiography of the present, and political travelogue. Part of this political and cultural work required both modernizing these forms, reinventing them better to serve her vision of modernity, and inventing a new form of discourse, that of the ‘female philosopher’ rather than of the intellectual woman as some kind of ‘honorary man’. So radical was her invention, so modern, that still today many find it confused and confusing rather than ahead of its time, and perhaps ahead of ours.

Hazlitt knew Wollstonecraft’s circle of radical reformers, intellectuals, artists, writers, and publishers and what they tried to achieve. He circulated among such a circle of his own, one that included Byron, Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Percy and Mary Shelley, as well as artists and intellectuals, modernizers of all kinds, in contending interests. Hazlitt’s liberal views, increasingly celebrated in recent years, owed much to those of Wollstonecraft’s circle, with their zeal for social justice, modernization of institutions, political reform, democratic access to the arts, and concern for human value in all aspects of life, of all forms of life.

Notoriously, however, Hazlitt did not attend to Wollstonecraft’s feminism; in fact, many today see him as a misogynist. Yet I think Hazlitt’s distinctive, celebrated, and modern-seeming style, with its sharp declarations, vivid illustrations, sudden turns, personal tone and reference, lyrical passages, sarcasm and satire, owed much to Wollstonecraft’s. At the least, it was a later correlative to hers.

Wollstonecraft, much more than Hazlitt, was relegated after her death to the margins of literature and public discourse, perhaps for similar reasons; perhaps the first modern woman and man were too ‘strong’ for what became an influential Victorian and early twentieth-century consensus. Wollstonecraft was rediscovered by successive feminist movements, most recently in the 1970s; Hazlitt has received renewed attention in the past decade as a public intellectual for what Giddens calls ‘late’ modernity, and others ‘post-modernity’, our age of crisis, of ‘recession’, and ‘austerity’, and worse. In this we need all the help we can get. We could do worse than renew a conversation with the first modern woman.

Gary Kelly is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. He has edited Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary and The Wrongs of Woman for Oxford World’s Classics, and published a book on her radically innovative style of thinking and writing, Revolutionary Feminism. He is General Editor of the ongoing multi-volume Oxford History of Popular Print Culture.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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By David Roberts

It’s one of the great misunderstandings in English fiction:

It happen’d one Day about Noon going towards my Boat, I was exceedingly surpriz’d with the Print of a Man’s naked Foot on the Shore, which was very plain to be seen in the Sand: I stood like one Thunder-struck, or as if I had seen an Apparition; I listen’d, I look’d round me, I could hear nothing, nor see any Thing.

A swift retreat to the ‘castle’ follows. With sleep come the nightmares: fantasies of pursuit by ‘savages,’ dreams of the devil himself setting foot out there on the sand. The Bible provides some comfort: Wait on the Lord, and be of cheer, he reads. Then, days later, the truth dawns. It was his own footprint.

This celebrated moment in the life of the runaway, castaway sailor of York called Robinson Crusoe is the more surprising and powerful because it was written by a man who spent most of his life in — and in one way or another writing about — a sprawling metropolis. What more paradoxical subject for the lifelong Londoner, Daniel Defoe, than the horror of thinking that the island you’d thought deserted might harbour another life, or the satisfaction of knowing that it didn’t?

Defoe is often described as a realist. Ian Watt’s seminal book, The Rise of the Novel, went so far as make his ‘realism’ a pre-condition for the development of the novel. But when it came to cities, and to London in particular, Defoe was often drawn to ghosts and shadows: to dreams of emptiness as much as crowds and the great business of daily life. As Edward Hopper found the essence of New York in stray people hunched over night-time drinks amid darkened streets, so the London of Defoe’s writing often turns out to be an inversion of the place his readers knew, perhaps because he knew it better than anyone else.

Daniel Defoe was born in the parish of St Giles, Cripplegate, the son of a butcher, and grew up listening to the preachings of Samuel Annesley, a non-conformist pastor in Bishopsgate. Schooled at Newington Green by another non-conformist, Charles Morton, he went into business in 1685, dealing in hosiery. By 1688 he was a proud liveryman of the City of London. Future ventures would take him to France and Spain, to Hertfordshire and Essex, but he always returned to London and died there in 1731.

More than any other writer, his knowledge came from the bottom up. His taste for political diatribe landed him in Newgate prison; for his defence of religious dissenters he stood in the pillory during three July days in 1703 (people stood around with flowers, forming a guard of honour). Businessman, low-church militant, and journalist, his nose for the instincts and interest of ordinary people was a shock to writers who thought literature should imitate the noble forms of classical Greece and Rome. To read his prose is to experience not the choreography of a turn round St James’s Park, but the tumbling bustle of a walk through Cheapside.

Yet his greatest tribute to his home city is not the magnificent chapter on London in A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, published in 1726, which celebrates the capital’s resources of money, trade, history and people. It is the book he had brought out four years earlier, in which he imagined what had happened when the city had been brought to the edge of oblivion during the Great Plague of 1665. A Journal of the Plague Year builds on a fascination with disaster that had gripped Defoe at least since 1708, when he published The Storm. Using old maps, mortality bills, government edicts, oral history and a host of other documents he pieced together a narrative that recreated the past in order to send out a dire warning about the future: if Londoners did not heed the threat of plague from Southern Europe, it could face extinction.

The result is an extraordinary hybrid of historical fiction and dystopian dreaming, the work of a man who could stand in the middle of a busy street and imagine himself, like Robinson Crusoe, perfectly alone.

Professor David Roberts teaches English Literature at Birmingham City University. He has taught at the universities of Bristol, Oxford, Kyoto, Osaka, and Worcester, and in 2008/09 he was the inaugural holder of the John Henry Newman Chair at Newman University College, Birmingham. He has published extensively in the fields of seventeenth and eighteenth century drama and literature, and is the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. He has previously written about disaster writing for OUPblog.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Daniel Defoe. By Michael Van der Gucht (Flemish, 1660-1725) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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In this month’s Oxford World’s Classics reading list, we decided to celebrate National Poetry Month by selecting some of our bilingual poetry editions. In each of the below books, the poems are laid out as parallel texts, with the original language on the left and the English translation on the right. This means that you can enjoy the works either in the original language, in translation, or even compare the two. Do you have another favourite non-English language poet? Let us know in the comments below.

Arthur Rimbaud – Collected Poems

Rimbaud is the enfant terrible of French literature, the precocious genius whose extraordinary poetry is revolutionary in its visionary, hallucinatory content and its often liberated forms. He wrote all his poems between the ages of about 15 and 21, after which he turned his back on family, friends, and France to roam the world. In his final years he was a trader in the Horn of Africa. Out of the brief, colourful life and the poetry of sensory wildness has been created the myth of Rimbaud, an enduring icon of youth, rebellion, and freedom. But behind the myth lies a poetic adventure of high ambition and painful rigour, poignant yet heroic. Rimbaud is one of the greatest French poets of all times.

Federico Garcia Lorca – Selected Poems

Federico García Lorca is perhaps the most celebrated of all twentieth-century Spanish writers, known not only for his plays but also for several collections of poems published both in his short lifetime and after. Lorca’s poetry is steeped in the land, climate, and folklore of his native Andalusia, though he writes memorably of New York and Cuba too. Often in modernist idiom, and full of startling imagery, he evokes a world of intense feelings, silent suffering, and dangerous love.

Stéphane Mallarmé – Collected Poems and Other Verse

Stéphane Mallarmé was the most radically innovative of nineteenth-century poets. His writings, with their richly sensuous texture and air of slyly intangible mystery, perplexed or outraged many early readers; yet no writer has more profoundly influenced the course of modern poetry – in English as well as in French. In both form and content, his poems created new ways of conveying existential doubt, fragmentation, and discontinuity.

Rainer Maria Rilke – Selected Poems

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one of the leading poets of European Modernism, and one of the greatest twentieth-century lyric poets in German. From The Book of Hours in 1905 to the Sonnets of Orpheus written in 1922, his poetry explores themes of death, love, and loss. He strives constantly to interrogate the relationship between his art and the world around him, moving from the neo-romantic and the mystic towards the precise craft of expressing the everyday in poetry.

Paul Verlaine (far left) and Arthur Rimbaud (next to Verlaine) and others, in a portrait by Henri Fantin-Latour

Editorial censorship has long obscured the true form and content of the Elegies, which were inspired by Goethe’s sexual liberation in Italy and his love for the woman he took as his unofficial wife on his return to Germany. They are here presented as Goethe boldly conceived them together with the long-surpressed narrative poem known as The Diary. Superficially the story of a failed sexual adventure by a man of 60, at another level this is a profound study of the psychology of desire and the nature of fidelity, as well as being one of the most beautiful and good-humoured poems in the German language.

C. P. Cavafy – Collected Poems

‘a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe’ 

E. M. Forster’s description of C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) perfectly encapsulates the unique perspective Cavafy brought to bear on history and geography, sexuality and language in his poems. Cavafy writes about people on the periphery, whose religious, ethnic, and cultural identities are blurred, and he was one of the pioneers in expressing a specifically homosexual sensibility. His poems present brief and vivid evocations of historical scenes and sensual moments, often infused with his distinctive sense of irony. They have established him as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century.

Paul Verlaine – Selected Poems

Verlaine ranks alongside Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud as one of the most outstanding poets of late nineteenth-century France whose work is associated with the early Symbolists, the Decadents, and the Parnassiens. Remarkable not only for his delicacy and exquisitely crafted verse, Verlaine is also the poet of strong emotions and appetites, with an unrivalled gift for the sheer music of poetry, and an inventive approach to its technique.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: By Henri Fantin-Latour [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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By Jane Garnett

Matthew Arnold is probably now most recalled for one phrase, the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the Sea of Faith in his poem “Dover Beach” (first published in 1867), and for having written the lectures which were published serially and then in book form (1869) as Culture and Anarchy. Both are cited more than considered, and the nature of Arnold’s cultural project is often misunderstood. His poem is too readily taken as representative of a general crisis of faith, and his vision of culture has reductively been attached both to a conservative canon of English literature and to the educational arm of the welfare state. It has also been anachronistically and inappropriately absorbed into the “two cultures” science vs. humanities debate fuelled by C.P. Snow in the late 1950s. In fact, Arnold’s idea of culture was a much broader one, and was intended to be dynamic and dialogic. He identified the good of culture through refuting essentialisation of it. It was an approach, a habit of mind, rather than a subject area.

Anarchy, to Arnold, lay in lack of critical reflection. This led to the confusion of means and ends, and the privileging of the simple and dogmatic over the complex. He saw his contemporaries pursuing material wealth as an end in itself, and putting faith in the mechanisms by which government, society, churches, or industries operated, rather than reflecting on whether the machinery in fact activated or inhibited the underlying values which it should be serving. At a time when these values themselves were subject to debate, Arnold wanted people, rather than promoting or defending their individual or sectional interests, to think more about how the whole society could function harmoniously. His role as a critic was to help in developing criteria for action and to argue for culture as an active principle of engagement to combat anarchy.

On the one hand Arnold defined culture as an internal principle, a way of thinking, rather than as an external set of accomplishments or badge of prestige. Culture was a reflective process – a route towards perfection: “not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming.” This certainly involved intellectual self-development, including the development of an understanding of the will of God, as well as that of a moral and social passion for doing good. But the emphasis was on the ways in which the experience of contemplating perfection in these different registers — which he defined as sweetness and light/beauty and intelligence — would naturally enlarge and make flexible people’s minds. This was partly an argument for wider reading (which he personally regarded as a devotional discipline). He was also trying to make an imaginative case for exposing people to the narrownesses and complacencies of contemporary society. The serial publication meant that each essay was in part a response to the developing criticism. The side-swipes at particular critics, the conversational style, the accumulation and repetition of dialectical oppositions all represented a playing out of the critical purpose. The idea was to engage the reader in the tos and fros of the argument, to capture them in its immediacy.

On the other hand Arnold wanted to establish the fundamental importance of this conception of culture as the necessary basis for right action — as he put it, to make the will of God prevail. He argued that the English, especially in the mid-nineteenth century, were too practical, too inclined to act without thought, to confuse means and ends. His emphasis was on confronting difficulty, and here he cited Goethe: “to act is easy, to think is hard.” In returning again and again to this point, he was tackling accusations that the sort of cultural criticism which he was offering was impractical, dilettantish, even effeminate.

Like many of his contemporaries, he moved away from conventional dogmatic faith, but continued to frame his life religiously and to regard religious sympathy as culturally crucial. What he opposed was religion understood as mechanism or as sectional interest. Hence his critique of Protestant nonconformity, to which he was in many respects unfair, and of religious hypocrisy: the ways in which Protestantism could buttress materialism in the “gospel” of free trade economics. Analogously, he was not opposed to science or technology, but to scientism, to absolute claims made for scientific paths to truth. His repeated call was for cultural breadth of outlook and sympathy, and for constant vigilance as to the ways in which such breadth could be threatened by exaggerated particularism.  Hence the different connotations (sometimes confusingly) attached to his critical terms in different contexts, when the cultural balance seemed to be tipping too far one way or another.

In celebrating the study of Celtic literature, Arnold commented: “I don’t want to find myself everywhere”. The power of his own interpretative lens somewhat distorted this aspiration. But precisely because his argument about culture and anarchy was intentionally unsystematic and suggestive, the core challenges identified — of pluralism vs. integration, of how to attain social and moral harmony, whilst incorporating the enriching force of cultural variety — remain fresh. How can tendencies to cultural introversion be modified without loss of positive energy? How can relativism be avoided and hegemonies resisted? How can religious seriousness be treated seriously in a plural society? Arnold’s terms of cultural incorporation were controversial in his day, but his embrace of the creative force of this controversy in literary form retains its capacity to sharpen critical questions today.

Jane Garnett, Fellow and Tutor in Modern History, Wadham College, Oxford, and editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Matthew Arnold, Project Gutenberg eText 16745. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Since today is April Fools’ Day, we wanted to take a look at some of the most famous fools in literature: those written by Shakespeare. Below is just a handful of Shakespearean fools from a selection of his tragedies, comedies, and more. Who are your favourite Shakespearean fools? Let us know in the comments.

Feste, Twelfth Night, or What You Will
“Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.”

Feste is a fool for the Countess Olivia and seems to have been attached to the household for some time, as a “fool that the Lady Olivia’s father took much delight in”. Feste claims that he wears “not motley” in his brain, so even though he dresses the part of the fool, he is not an idiot, and can see through the other characters. Indeed, there are times when he appears almost omnipresent, knowing more about Viola/Cesario’s disguise than he lets on. Certainly, he seems to leave Olivia’s house and return at his desire a little too freely for a servant, weaving in and out of the action with the sort of impunity reserved for a person nobody took seriously. He is referred to by name only once during the play, otherwise he is addressed only as “Fool,” while in the stage directions he is mentioned as “Clown.”

Touchstone, As You Like It
“The more pity, that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly.”

Touchstone is Duke Frederick’s court jester, notable for his quick wit. He is an observer of human nature, and comments on the other characters throughout the play, contributing to a better understanding of the action. Touchstone is a clever and somewhat cynical fool, although, it is referenced often in the text that he is a “natural” fool (“Fortune makes Nature’s natural the cutter-off of Nature’s wit” and “hath sent this natural for our whetstone”).

The Gravediggers, Hamlet
“What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?”

The Gravediggers (or Clowns) appear briefly in Hamlet, making their one and only appearance at the beginning of the first scene of Act V. We meet them as they dig a grave for the recently drowned Ophelia, discussing whether she deserves a Christian burial after having killed herself. Many major themes of the play are brought up by the Gravediggers in the short time they are on stage, but they use often dark humour to examine them, contrary to the rest of the tragic play.

Titania and Bottom in a scence from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by Edwin Landseer

Bottom provides comic relief throughout A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and is probably most famous for having his head transformed into that of an ass. He is a member of The Mechanicals, who are rehearsing a play, ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’, in the hope of performing it on Duke Theseus’s wedding day. Puck, a fairy, finds them in the woods rehearsing and decides to play tricks of them, such as the aforementioned transformation of Bottom’s head. The Fairy Queen, Titania, falls in love with him thanks to a potion created by her jealous husband Oberon. Later, once Titania has had the potion removed, and Puck is made to lift the ass’s head spell, Bottom wakes in a field wondering whether it was indeed a dream or not. In terms of performance, Bottom, like Horatio in Hamlet, is the only major part that can’t be doubled, meaning that the actor who plays him cannot play another character within the same play, since Bottom is present in scenes involving nearly every character

The Fool, King Lear
“Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise”

The relationship between Lear and his Fool is founded on friendship and dependency. The Fool commentates on events and points out the truths which are either missed or ignored. When Lear banishes Cordelia, the Fool is upset, but rather than leave the ridiculous King, the Fool accompanies him on his way to madness. The Fool realises that the only true madness is to recognize this world as rational.

Trinculo, The Tempest
“I shall laugh myself to death at this puppy-headed
monster. A most scurvy monster!”

Trinculo is Alonso’s servant, a drunken jester who provides plenty of comic relief throughout the play. Caliban takes an instant dislike to him and his drunken insults. However, Trinculo becomes part of Caliban’s plan to murder Prospero which ultimately fails.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. By Edwin Henry Landseer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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By Janet Gezari

I ordered the Kindle edition of Ellie Stevenson’s recent collection, Watching Charlotte Brontë Die: and Other Surreal Stories, because I was curious, and it cost only $2.99. In the title story, Charlotte Brontë dies (or seems to) while riding a bicycle, run down by a car on a cold, wet night. The narrator, a “writer’s researcher” who is obsessed with Charlotte and who lives near Haworth, Charlotte’s birthplace, perhaps 150 years later, remarks that he hadn’t known that Charlotte could ride a bike. The image of Charlotte riding a bicycle is more fanciful than surreal. Although the ancestor of our modern bicycle, the velocipede, was invented in 1817, it was only in the last decades of the nineteenth century that Victorians embraced the bicycle. Even these improved, later bicycles wouldn’t have been a useful means of transportation in the village of Haworth with its steep, cobbled main road, or on the squishy moors nearby where the Brontës walked in all weathers.

The Brontë family vault at Haworth Church

Her actual death followed a debilitating illness and occurred almost exactly nine months after her marriage to her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. The death certificate states its cause as “Phthisis” or acute tuberculosis, the same disease that killed Emily and Anne. We know that Charlotte could eat or drink almost nothing until a few weeks before her death and that she was rapidly losing weight. Lyndall Gordon suggests she had a bacterial infection like typhoid, noting that Tabitha Ackroyd, the Brontës’ servant, had died from a digestive infection six weeks earlier and could have communicated it to Charlotte. During Charlotte’s and Tabby’s lifetimes, contaminated water and inadequate sewerage made Haworth one of the unhealthiest places to live in England. Charlotte may have been pregnant (in a letter, she suggests that she was), even though her death certificate omits this information. One conjecture is that she was suffering from hyperemesis gravidarum, an extreme form of morning sickness that affects no more than 2% of women in the early stages of their pregnancy and is rarely fatal. This past December, when Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, was admitted to hospital with a diagnosis of hyperemesis gravidarum, an evolutionary biologist applauded its adaptive virtues and declared that women suffering from it have a reduced risk of miscarriage. (This is a welcome antidote to the myth that associates morning sickness with a neurotic rejection of pregnancy.) It’s hard to know how Charlotte, who saw herself as a daughter, a sister, and at last a wife, would have managed as a mother. Jane Eyre is the only one of her heroines who gives birth to a child, and Jane spends no narrative time on either her agency in this event or her life after it. The novel’s only reference to Jane’s child calls our attention to his eyes, which resemble his father’s “as they once were — large, brilliant, and black.” Like the Duchess of Cambridge, Jane accepts her reproductive mission in life, and many readers have been unable to forgive her for trading so much thrilling rebellion for happy conformity in the end.

Unlike either Anne or Emily, Charlotte was an avid letter-writer, but she was too ill to keep up with her correspondence in the weeks before her death. The few letters she wrote are mainly concerned with other peoples’ illnesses. Even if she had not written her novels, Charlotte’s correspondence—about 950 of her letters have survived—would have made her memorable. Like her novels, her letters convey the social isolation she felt and combatted. Emily thrived in her isolation, and Anne escaped it by finding steady employment as a governess in a busy household, but Charlotte could not feel alive without loving companionship. Her most notorious letters are the ones she wrote to her married Belgian professor, Constantin Heger, revealing what she would have called her monomania and what we would today call a desperate crush. We don’t have Charlotte’s letters to Arthur Bell Nicholls or his to her. Charlotte’s decision to marry him was a healthy response to the intensified barrenness of her life after Anne’s and especially Emily’s death. When she accepted Nicholls, she knew that she was not gaining a husband with “fine talents” and “congenial” views (Gaskell, who approved of the marriage, described him as “very stern and bigoted”), but she believed, rightly, that she would gain a devotion that was passionate and steady. Since only her father, her husband, and two former servants were at her bedside when she died, we lack an account of her death to match her fiercely truthful accounts of the deaths of Anne and Emily. There was no one watching Charlotte Brontë die who could register the awfulness and the ordinariness of her dying.

Janet Gezari is Lucretia L. Allyn Professor of Literatures in English at Connecticut College. She is the author of Charlotte Brontë and Defensive Conduct, Last Things: Emily Brontë’s Poems, and the introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Charlotte Brontë’s Selected Letters. She is currently editing The Annotated Wuthering Heights (forthcoming from Harvard University Press).

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was born in St Paul, Minnesota, and named after his second cousin three times removed, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner”. He went to Princeton University, but dropped out, eventually joining the Army in 1917. While in the service he began writing a novel, and also met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre, of Montgomery, Alabama, whom he married in the spring of 1920, the year in which he published his first novel, This Side of Paradise. The novel, a thinly disguised fictional account of Fitzgerald’s Princeton years, made its author an instant literary success and a celebrity as well. In honor of the anniversary of the publication of This Side of Paradise on 26 March 1920, we dug up this excerpt from this great novel.

Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worthwhile. His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit of drowsing over the Encyclopædia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice O’Hara. In consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory. For many years he hovered in the background of his family’s life, an unassertive figure with a face half-obliterated by lifeless, silky hair, continually occupied in “taking care” of his wife, continually harassed by the idea that he didn’t and couldn’t understand her. But Beatrice Blaine! There was a woman! Early pictures taken on her father’s estate at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, or in Rome at the Sacred Heart Convent — an educational extravagance that in her youth was only for the daughters of the exceptionally wealthy — showed the exquisite delicacy of her features, the consummate art and simplicity of her clothes. A brilliant education she had — her youth passed in renaissance glory, she was versed in the latest gossip of the Older Roman Families; known by name as a fabulously wealthy American girl to Cardinal Vitori and Queen Margherita and more subtle celebrities that one must have had some culture even to have heard of. She learned in England to prefer whiskey and soda to wine, and her small talk was broadened in two senses during a winter in Vienna. All in all Beatrice O’Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all ideas, in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.

In her less important moments she returned to America, met Stephen Blaine and married him — this almost entirely because she was a little bit weary, a little bit sad. Her only child was carried through a tiresome season and brought into the world on a spring day in ninety-six. When Amory was five he was already a delightful companion for her. He was an auburn-haired boy, with great, handsome eyes which he would grow up to in time, a facile imaginative mind and a taste for fancy dress. From his fourth to his tenth year he did the country with his mother in her father’s private car, from Coronado, where his mother became so bored that she had a nervous breakdown in a fashionable hotel, down to Mexico City, where she took a mild, almost epidemic consumption. This trouble pleased her, and later she made use of it as an intrinsic part of her atmosphere — especially after several astounding bracers. So, while more or less fortunate little rich boys were defying governesses on the beach at Newport, or being spanked or tutored or read to from “Do and Dare,” or “Frank on the Lower Mississippi,” Amory was biting acquiescent bell-boys in the Waldorf, outgrowing a natural repugnance to chamber music and symphonies, and deriving a highly specialized education from his mother.

“Amory.”

“Yes, Beatrice.” (Such a quaint name for his mother; she encouraged it.)

“Dear, don’t think of getting out of bed yet. I’ve always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous. Clothilde is having your breakfast brought up.”

“All right.”

“I am feeling very old to-day, Amory,” she would sigh, her face a rare cameo of pathos, her voice exquisitely modulated, her hands as facile as Bernhardt’s. “My nerves are on edge — on edge. We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.”

Amory’s penetrating green eyes would look out through tangled hair at his mother. Even at this age he had no illusions about her.

“Amory.”

“Oh, yes.”

“I want you to take a red-hot bath — as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.”

She fed him sections of the “Fêtes Galantes” before he was ten; at eleven he could talk glibly, if rather reminiscently, of Brahms and Mozart and Beethoven. One afternoon, when left alone in the hotel at Hot Springs, he sampled his mother’s apricot cordial, and as the taste pleased him, he became quite tipsy. This was fun for a while, but he essayed a cigarette in his exaltation, and succumbed to a vulgar, plebeian reaction. Though this incident horrified Beatrice, it also secretly amused her and became part of what in a later generation would have been termed her “line.”

“This son of mine,” he heard her tell a room full of awe-struck, admiring women one day, “is entirely sophisticated and quite charming — but delicate — we’re all delicate; here, you know.” Her hand was radiantly outlined against her beautiful bosom; then sinking her voice to a whisper, she told them of the apricot cordial.

They rejoiced, for she was a brave raconteuse, but many were the keys turned in sideboard locks that night against the possible defection of little Bobby or Barbara. . . . These domestic pilgrimages were invariably in state; two maids, the private car, or Mr. Blaine when available, and very often a physician. When Amory had the whooping-cough four disgusted specialists glared at each other hunched around his bed; when he took scarlet fever the number of attendants, including physicians and nurses, totalled fourteen. However, blood being thicker than broth, he was pulled through.

The Blaines were attached to no city. They were the Blaines of Lake Geneva; they had quite enough relatives to serve in place of friends, and an enviable standing from Pasadena to Cape Cod. But Beatrice grew more and more prone to like only new acquaintances, as there were certain stories, such as the history of her constitution and its many amendments, memories of her years abroad, that it was necessary for her to repeat at regular intervals. Like Freudian dreams, they must be thrown off, else they would sweep in and lay siege to her nerves. But Beatrice was critical about American women, especially the floating population of ex-Westerners.

“They have accents, my dear,” she told Amory, “not Southern accents or Boston accents, not an accent attached to any locality, just an accent” — she became dreamy. “They pick up old, moth eaten London accents that are down on their luck and have to be used by someone. They talk as an English butler might after several years in a Chicago grand-opera company.” She became almost incoherent — “Suppose — time in every Western woman’s life — she feels her husband is prosperous enough for her to have — accent — they try to impress me, my dear —- ”

Though she thought of her body as a mass of frailties, she considered her soul quite as ill, and therefore important in her life. She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in process of losing or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude. Often she deplored the bourgeois quality of the American Catholic clergy, and was quite sure that had she lived in the shadow of the great Continental cathedrals her soul would still be a thin flame on the mighty altar of Rome. Still, next to doctors, priests were her favorite sport.

“Ah, Bishop Wiston,” she would declare, “I do not want to talk of myself. I can imagine the stream of hysterical women fluttering at your doors, beseeching you to be simpatico” — then after an interlude filled by the clergyman — “but my mood — is — oddly dissimilar.”

Only to bishops and above did she divulge her clerical romance. When she had first returned to her country there had been a pagan, Swinburnian young man in Asheville, for whose passionate kisses and unsentimental conversations she had taken a decided penchant — they had discussed the matter pro and con with an intellectual romancing quite devoid of soppiness. Eventually she had decided to marry for background, and the young pagan from Asheville had gone through a spiritual crisis, joined the Catholic Church, and was now — Monsignor Darcy. “Indeed, Mrs. Blaine, he is still delightful company — quite the cardinal’s right-hand man.”

“Amory will go to him one day, I know,” breathed the beautiful lady, “and Monsignor Darcy will understand him as he understood me.”

Amory became thirteen, rather tall and slender, and more than ever on to his Celtic mother. He had tutored occasionally — the idea being that he was to “keep up,” at each place “taking up the work where he left off,” yet as no tutor ever found the place he left off, his mind was still in very good shape. What a few more years of this life would have made of him is problematical. However, four hours out from land, Italy bound, with Beatrice, his appendix burst, probably from too many meals in bed, and after a series of frantic telegrams to Europe and America, to the amazement of the passengers the great ship slowly wheeled around and returned to New York to deposit Amory at the pier. You will admit that if it was not life it was magnificent. After the operation Beatrice had a nervous breakdown that bore a suspicious resemblance to delirium tremens, and Amory was left in Minneapolis, destined to spend the ensuing two years with his aunt and uncle. There the crude, vulgar air of Western civilization first catches him — in his underwear, so to speak.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a writer whose fiction is one of the most eloquent expressions of the American Jazz Age of the 1920s. Jackson R. Bryer is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland. He has published widely on F. Scott Fitzgerald, including an edition of the love letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda (2002), and he has been President of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society since 1990. For Oxford World’s Classics he has edited This Side of Paradise.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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By Jerome Loving

Walt Whitman died 121 years ago today. The Bruce Springsteen of his age, he sang about and celebrated what he called “the Divine Average”. And it was always on equal terms, the woman the same as the man, as he suggests in “America”. Shortly before his death, the aging bard may have spoken the poem into one of the Thomas Edison’s devices that made wax cylinder recordings. It authenticity is suggested by the fact that the recording which survives, readily available on the web, is one of the late poems of Leaves of Grass (1855-1892) instead of something earlier and today greater. Poets always think they’re working on their best poem, and “America” is a late poem for Whitman.

Walt Whitman in 1872

Today Whitman has become something of a cultural artifact. Levi uses the “America” poem in one of its advertisements. Walt Whitman used to “sing the body electric,” writes Tom Geier. “Now, the late poet is singing the praises of denim-clad bodies in a new advertising campaign for Levi’s . . . . It’s not the first time that dead authors have been used to shill products, though I can’t help finding the whole concept a little creepy and unsettling”. The poet’s image has also been used in a number of cinemas, including, most famously, in Dead Poets Society. The actor Rip Torn has starred in a CBS special in the 1970s entitled Song of Myself. There he played the poet as he was about to publish his first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855. Torn also appeared as the older Whitman in the movie Beautiful Dreamers (1990); there the older Whitman visits a Canadian Mental Hospital, where his first biographer, Richard Maurice Bucke, was superintendent. The poet engages the inmates, finding sanity in their diagnosed insanity.

“This is what you shall do,” Whitman wrote in the famous preface to the first edition of his book: “Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.”

He also wrote in the 1855 Preface that “America” was “essentially the greatest poem.” He meant that nature itself was a poem of which we were all a miraculous part:

Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;
How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?

“Take my leaves America, take them South and take them North,” the poet urges us in “Starting From Paumanok.” The leaves, or spears of grass, are Whitman’s stand-in for nature itself, which as Ralph Waldo Emerson had taught him, was the emblem of God. The grass was also green, the color of hope, and perennial, reflecting the endless recycling of lives. These symbols were dropped into our existence by God the way a lady would drop her handkerchief to attract the notice of a man:

Jerome Loving, Distinguished Professor of English at Texas A&M University, is the editor of Oxford World Classics edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. He is the author of a number of biographies, including Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself.  His Confederate Bushwhacker: Mark Twain in the Shadow of the Civil War will be published in the fall of 2013.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Walt Whitman. Photographer: G. Frank E. Pearsall (1860-1899) (NYPL Digital Gallery) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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By David Leopold

William Morris (1834-1896) is widely recognized as the greatest ever English designer, a poet ranked by contemporaries alongside Tennyson and Browning, and an internationally renowned figure in the history of socialism. However, since the year 2013 offers no ‘big’ anniversary as a pretext to survey these various major achievements, I will instead use 24 March (his birthday) as an excuse to look at how Morris actually spent some of his own birthdays. We might not share his achievements, but, in certain respects at least, his birthdays might look rather like our own. Not least, they were occasions on which to be reminded of family, friends, and one’s own mortality.

Appropriately enough, Morris’s mother Emma emerges (from correspondence at least) as perhaps the most reliable celebrant and gift-giver; a ‘very nicely worked’ cloth in 1885, a pair of candlesticks three years later. Morris had moved some considerable political and cultural distance from his conventional bourgeois upbringing, but his mother remained a lively and supportive presence throughout nearly his entire life. In 1890 (when her health had finally begun to fail), Morris feigned a stern tone in responding to her birthday greetings, warning that ‘I shall have to scold you if you talk of presents. Your love is the best present I can have’. Her death in 1894 (aged 89) hit Morris unexpectedly hard; he confided to Georgiana Burne-Jones that even his ‘old and callous heart’ had been touched by the absence of ‘what had been so kind to me and fond of me’.

Birthdays were also, of course, an occasion for Morris’s more immediate family, especially since his daughter May was born on 25 March and they often held a joint celebration. If Morris was away, he would report back on his birthday to his family. An 1878 letter to his (two) daughters shows parental kindness moderating, but not effacing, Morris’s critical eye for design detail; he thanks May for her gift of a very pretty ‘baccy pouch’ but insists that the cotton strings will need replacing with silk to avoid setting his teeth on edge when opening it. In the same year, he provided his wife Jane with a humorous sketch of the morning after his birthday dinner with his mother and (second) sister Henrietta in Much Hadham, in Hertfordshire. Rogers (his mother’s maid) had cut his hair in the presence of not only his ‘kinswomen’ but also his mother’s parrot; the latter, at least, was seemingly delighted with the entertainment and ‘mewed & barked & swore & sang at the top of his vulgar voice’.

William Morris, aged 53

Birthdays also provide a reminder of our own mortality. Morris met middle-age with a familiar mixture of melancholy and resignation. On his thirty-ninth birthday he complained (to Charles Eliot Norton) that his hair was turning grey. A year later he described turning forty (to Louisa Baldwin) as a ‘sad occasion’ despite the fact that he felt no older. As the years passed, a sense of acquiescing in the inevitable seems to have displaced that earlier angst. By 1887, Morris could be found simply confiding to his diary: ‘fifty-three years old today – no use grumbling at that’.

And lastly, at least beyond childhood, birthdays are often simply days like any other. Morris’s own daily routine typically took a fiercely energetic form, involving work and politics. In 1874, he told one birthday correspondent that the day itself had been ‘solemnized’ only by his laboring hard at the illuminations (probably of The Odes of Horace) which were currently his chief joy. And in 1888, his birthday fell during a socialist tour of the more ‘wretched’ parts of Scotland, and Morris spent the day lecturing in the mining town of West Caldor, in West Lothian.

In thanking Louisa Baldwin for her birthday greetings of 1875, Morris speculated on some connections between two of these themes – politics and mortality – and wondered whether our failure to have created a better world might not reflect the shortness of our mortal coil. Perhaps, he mused, we are simply not here long enough to turn sufficient attention towards making the world a more rational and humane place. However, by the time he came to write News From Nowhere (1890), the great utopian novel of his later years, Morris had reversed the putative connection here, turning idle regret into realistic aspiration in the process. It was only after they had created a society embodying equality and community that the inhabitants of Nowhere came to live much longer lives. When a visitor expresses surprise at the vigour and vitality of a man in his nineties (but looking much younger), he is told that in Nowhere they have beaten the three-score and ten of ‘the old Jewish proverb book’, and, more importantly, that those lives now contain much more in the way of health and happiness.

David Leopold is University Lecturer in Political Theory, University of Oxford, and John Milton Fellow, Mansfield College, Oxford. He has edited William Morris’s News From Nowhere, for Oxford World’s Classics.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: William Morris, aged 53. By Frederick Hollyer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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By Robert Morrison

According to Gerard Manley Hopkins, when Thomas De Quincey was living in Glasgow in the mid-1840s he “would wake blue and trembling in the morning and languidly ask the servant ‘Would you pour out some of that black mixture from the bottle there.’ The servant would give it him, generally not knowing what it was. After this he would revive.” What “it” was, of course, was opium, the drug that De Quincey became addicted to in 1813 — two hundred years ago this year — and which he stayed dependent upon until his death in 1859. On several occasions during these years De Quincey stopped taking opium for a sustained period of time, untwisting the “accursed chain” of his habit almost to “its final links.” But he always started up again, reviving over and over a struggle in which he performed “manoeuvres the most intricate, dances the most elaborate, receding or approaching, round my great central sun of opium,” as he himself put it in 1856, more than half a century after he first tampered with the drug. Like millions of other habitués, De Quincey could get off opium. What he and so many of them could not do was stay off opium. His complicated struggle with addiction is perhaps better conceived as a heartbreakingly futile struggle against relapse.

For centuries opium was the principal analgesic known to medicine, and consumed in various forms and under various names. In Britain, at the turn of the nineteenth-century, it was cheap, legal, widely available, and ubiquitously consumed by people of every age and class for self-medication in much the same way as aspirin is used today. Robert Southey took it for hay fever; Jane Austen’s mother took it for travel sickness; Charles Lamb took it for a bad cold. Laudanum — De Quincey’s drug of choice — was a tincture prepared by dissolving opium in alcohol (making De Quincey, technically speaking, a “laudanum drinker” rather than an “opium eater”). Morphine, the principal active agent in opium, was commercially available by the early 1820s and, with the introduction of the hypodermic syringe in the mid-1850s, was broadly celebrated for its unparalleled efficacy in dealing with severe pain. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, opium has been better known in the form of one of its chief derivatives: heroin.

A toothache in the autumn of 1804, De Quincey claimed, induced him to try the drug. Its effects were astonishing. “I took it,” he recalls in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821): “and in an hour, oh! Heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me!” In addition to helping him cope with recurrent bouts of physical and mental anguish, opium in the early years filled him with an overwhelming sense of euphoria, and greatly enhanced his enjoyment of conversation, music, books, and solitude, as he details in “The Pleasures of Opium” section of the Confessions. Yet after eight years of recreational use, addiction inevitably set in, and in “The Pains of Opium” section De Quincey describes states of gloom “amounting at last to utter darkness,” and lurid nightmares of persecution, violence, incarceration, and death. For most readers, these terrors only heightened opium’s allure. In the Confessions there is, as De Quincey himself concedes, “an overbalance on the side of the pleasures of opium; and…the very horrors themselves, described as connected with the use of opium, do not pass the limit of pleasure.”

Privately, however, De Quincey often gave accounts of his addiction that were no doubt designed in part to elicit the sympathy of friends or buy more time from anxious publishers, but that also presented the terrors of the drug in more unvarnished and unnerving terms than the stylized descriptions of the Confessions. “If I take no laudanum, I am in a state of semi-distraction — and cannot arrange my old thoughts, still less pursue fresh trains of thought,” he explained to his publisher J. A. Hessey: “ — on the other hand, if I take even 12 or 15 drops of laudanum — a violent indigestion comes on in 2 or 3 hours, and after that a return of bilious symptoms.” To his close friend John Wilson he observed that “one consequence of my Opium has been that the sensibility of my stomach is so much diminished, that even now…nothing ever stimulates my animal system into any pleasure. Suffer I do not any longer: but my condition is pretty uniformly = 0.” In a letter to Alfred Tennyson’s brother-in-law Edward Lushington, De Quincey describes the ways in which his addiction has undone him. “The nexus is wanting, and life and the central principle which should bind together all the parts at the centre…are wanting,” he asserts. “Infinite incoherence, ropes of sand, gloomy incapacity of vital pervasion by some one plastic principle, that is the hideous incubus upon my mind always.”

Faced with these miseries, De Quincey repeatedly vowed to defeat his addiction: “conquer it I must…or it will conquer me.” On many occasions he seems to have come close to breaking free: “for six months ‘opium’ was a word unknown.” Sometimes he even announced victory: “I am totally weaned from it.” Yet all his attempts to quit ended in failure. In the short term, the pains of withdrawal drove him back to the drug (though modern pharmacology tells us that he greatly exaggerated the depth and duration of his sufferings). In the longer term, stresses of various kinds triggered De Quincey’s relapses (and he found nothing more stressful than trying to renounce opium). Wedged for decades between “the collision of both evils — that from the laudanum, and that from the want of laudanum” — De Quincey chose laudanum. For all the horrors brought on by drug dependence, he ultimately felt — or convinced himself that he felt — that opiates were his best response to the pressures of work, debt, shame, and grief. In the deeply perplexed logic of addiction, opium was “at the root” of De Quincey’s “unimaginable hell,” yet after weeks or even months of trying to live without it, he was always “glad” to return to the drug and “get back under shelter.”

Robert Morrison is Queen’s National Scholar at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where he maintains the Thomas De Quincey homepage. For Oxford World’s Classics, he has edited (with Chris Baldick) The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre, as well as Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, and three essays On Murder. Morrison is the author of The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey, which was a finalist for the James Black Memorial Prize. His annotated edition of Jane Austen’s Persuasion was published by Harvard University Press. For Palgrave, he edited (with Daniel Sanjiv Roberts) a collection of essays entitled Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine: ‘An Unprecedented Phenomenon’.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image Credits: (1) Les Morphinées by Georges Moreau de Tours, 1891. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
(2) Advertisement for curing morphine addictions from Overland Monthly, January 1900. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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• Inside flap

   

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  1928 edition of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey

• Title page

   

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  1928 edition of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey

• Introduction by Virginia Woolf

   

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  1928 edition of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey

• Introduction by Virginia Woolf

   

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  1928 edition of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey

• Introduction by Virginia Woolf

   

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  1928 edition of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey

• Introduction by Virginia Woolf

   

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  1928 edition of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey

• Introduction by Virginia Woolf

   

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  1928 edition of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey

• Introduction by Virginia Woolf

   

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  1928 edition of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey

• Introduction by Virginia Woolf

   

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  1928 edition of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey

Celebrated in its own day as the progenitor of ‘a school of sentimental writers’, A Sentimental Journey has outlasted its many imitators because of the humour and mischievous eroticism that inform Mr Yorick’s travels. Setting out to journey to France and Italy he gets little further than Lyons but finds much to appreciate, in contrast to contemporary travel writers whom Sterne satirizes in the figures of Smelfungus and Mundungus. A master of ambiguity and double entendre, Sterne is nevertheless as concerned as his peers with exploring the nature of virtue; unlike other writers of sentimental fiction Sterne insists on the inseparability of desire and feeling.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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By Kirsty Doole

March is International Women’s History Month, so what better time to suggest some feminist-friendly classics from our Oxford World’s Classics series? Below you’ll find a mixture of fiction, politics, and religion, and while some will probably be familiar, I’ve thrown in a couple of less conventional choices for a feminist list. Agree with these choices? Disagree? What have I missed out? Let us know in the comments.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

This seminal 18^th century work reveals Wollstonecraft’s developing understanding of women’s involvement in the political and social life of the nation and her growing awareness of the relationship between politics and economics and between political institutions and the individual. It is her response to those who did not believe women should get an education. She argues that women ought to have an education commensurate with their position in society, claiming that women are essential to the nation because they educate its children and because they could be “companions” to their husbands, rather than mere wives.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

One of the most famous novels in English Literature, Jane Eyre is sometimes called a proto-feminist novel. Yes, Reader, Jane does marry Mr Rochester, but only on her own terms. As Jane herself says, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.”

A Room of One’s Own, and Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf

In A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf considers with energy and wit the implications of the historical exclusion of women from education and from economic independence. In A Room of One’s Own (1929), she examines the work of past women writers, and looks ahead to a time when women’s creativity will not be hampered by poverty, or by oppression. In Three Guineas (1938), however, Woolf argues that women’s historical exclusion offers them the chance to form a political and cultural identity which could challenge the drive towards fascism and war.

Kate Chopin

“She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.”

Kate Chopin was one of the most individual and adventurous of nineteenth-century American writers, whose fiction explored new and often startling territory. When her most famous story, The Awakening, was first published in 1899, it stunned readers with its frank portrayal of the inner word of Edna Pontellier, and its daring criticisms of the limits of marriage and motherhood. The subtle beauty of her writing was contrasted with her unwomanly and sordid subject-matter: Edna’s rejection of her domestic role, and her passionate quest for spiritual, sexual, and artistic freedom.

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

“’But it’s bad – it’s bad,’ Mr Tulliver added – `a woman’s no business wi’ being so clever; it’ll turn to trouble, I doubt.’”

Rebellious and affectionate, Maggie Tulliver is always in trouble. Recalling her own experiences as a girl, George Eliot describes Maggie’s turbulent childhood with a sympathetic engagement that makes the early chapters of The Mill on the Floss among the most immediately attractive she ever wrote. As Maggie Tulliver approaches adulthood, her spirited temperament brings her into conflict with her family, her community, and her much-loved brother Tom. Still more painfully, she finds her own nature divided between the claims of moral responsibility and her passionate hunger for self-fulfilment.

Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell’s second novel challenged contemporary social attitudes by taking as its heroine a fallen woman. Ruth Hilton is an orphan and an overworked seamstress, an innocent preyed upon by a weak, wealthy seducer. When he heartlessly abandons her she finds shelter and kindness in the home of a dissenting minister and his sister, who do not reject her when she gives birth to an illegitimate child. But Ruth’s self-sacrificing love and devotion are tested to the limit by a twist of fate that brings her past back to haunt her.

Gaskell’s depiction of Ruth lays bare Victorian hypocrisy and sexual double-standards, and her novel is a remarkable story of love, of the sanctuary and tyranny of the family, and of the consequences of lies and deception.

The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner

Lyndall, Schreiner’s articulate young feminist, marks the entry of the controversial New Woman into nineteenth-century fiction. Raised as an orphan amid a makeshift family, she witnesses an intolerable world of colonial exploitation.

Desiring a formal education, she leaves the isolated farm for boarding school in her early teens, only to return four years later from an unhappy relationship. Unable to meet the demands of her mysterious lover, Lyndall retires to a house in Bloemfontein, where, delirious with exhaustion, she is unknowingly tended by an English farmer disguised as her female nurse. This is the devoted Gregory Rose, Schreiner’s daring embodiment of the sensitive New Man

A cause célèbre when it appeared in London, The Story of an African Farm transformed the shape and course of the late-Victorian novel. From the haunting plains of South Africa’s high Karoo, Schreiner boldly addresses her society’s greatest fears: the loss of faith, the dissolution of marriage, and women’s social and political independence.

The Life of Christina of Markyate

While not a conventional choice for a list of feminist works, this is a remarkable story of a woman who knew her own mind and stuck to her principles come what may. The twelfth-century recluse Christina became prioress of Markyate, near St Albans in Hertfordshire. Determined to devote her life to God and to remain a virgin, Christina repulses the sexual advances of the bishop of Durham. In revenge he arranges her betrothal to a young nobleman but Christina steadfastly refuses to consummate the marriage and defies her parents’ cruel coercion. Sustained by visions, she finds refuge with the hermit Roger, and lives concealed at Markyate for four years, enduring terrible physical and emotional torment. Although Christina is supported by the abbot of St Albans, she never achieves the recognition that he intended for her.

The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was America’s leading feminist intellectual of the early twentieth century. Her 6000-word story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” — in which an apparently depressed woman is shut up in her room and not allowed to read or work, leading to a descent into madness — is regarded as one of the most important early works of American feminist literature, illustrating nineteenth-century attitudes towards women’s physical and mental health.

Kirsty Doole is Publicity Manager for Oxford World’s Classics, amongst other things.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Portrait of Kate Chopin [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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Along with Plato, Aristotle (384–322 bc) was one of the two greatest philosophers of antiquity, and in the view of many he was the greatest philosopher of all time. Aristotle lived and taught in Athens for most of his career. He began as a pupil of Plato, and for some time acted as tutor to Alexander the Great. He left writings on a prodigious variety of subjects, covering the whole field of knowledge from biology and astronomy to rhetoric and literary criticism, from political theory to the most abstract reaches of philosophy. His Poetics is the most influential book on poetry ever written and is a founding text of European aesthetics and literary criticism. We present a brief extract from Republic, Books Two and Three.

‘We must begin by controlling the fable-makers, and admit only the good fables they compose, not the bad. We shall then persuade nurses and mothers to tell children the admitted fables, and mould their minds with fable much more than they now mould their bodies with the hand. Most of the tales they tell now will have to be thrown out.’

‘Which?’

‘If we look at the big fables, we shall also see the little ones. Big and little need to be of the same type and have the same effect. Don’t you agree?’

‘Yes: but I don’t see what you mean by the big ones.’

‘Those that Hesiod and Homer told, and the other poets. For it’s the poets who told men, and still tell them, the false stories they themselves compose.’

‘What stories? And what fault do you find with them?’

‘The fault one must find, first and foremost, especially when someone tells falsehoods wrongly.’

‘But what is it?’

‘Making bad verbal likenesses of gods and heroes — just like a painter making a picture unlike the object he wants to paint.’

‘Well, it’s certainly right to find fault with that sort of thing. But just what do we mean?’

‘To begin with, the greatest falsehood, involving the greatest issues, was wrongly told by the person who said that Ouranos did what Hesiod said he did, and that Kronos took his revenge upon him. What Kronos did and what happened to him at his son’s hands is something I should not want to be told without precaution to the young and foolish, even if it had been true. If possible, it should have been veiled in silence; but if there had been great need to tell it, it should have been made a secret, for as small an audience as possible — and they should have had to sacrifice not a pig, but some expensive and inaccessible victim, so that as few people as possible should hear the tale.’

‘These stories are indeed difficult.’

‘They are not to be repeated in our city, Adimantus. Nor is it to be said in a young man’s hearing that if he committed the most outrageous crimes, or chastised an erring father by the direst means, he would be doing nothing remarkable, but only what the first and greatest of the gods have done.’

‘I don’t myself think that these are suitable stories.’

‘It’s the same with all the tales of how gods war, plot, and fight against gods— not that they’re true anyway— if our future city-guardians are to believe that readiness to hate one another is the greatest scandal. Still less must they be told elaborate fables of battles of giants, and all the other various hostilities of gods and heroes towards their kith and kin. If we are somehow to convince them that no citizen has ever been the enemy of another, nor is it right that he should be, then that is the lesson that older men and women must impress on the children from the start, the lesson (more or less) that poets too must be forced to impress on the adult population. Hera tied up by her son, Hephaestus thrown out by his father because he was proposing to defend his mother against a beating, Homer’s battles of gods — all this is inadmissible, whether it was composed allegorically or not. Young people can’t distinguish the allegorical from the non-allegorical, and what enters the mind at that age tends to become indelible and irremovable. Hence the prime need to make sure that what they first hear is devised as well as possible for the implanting of virtue.’

‘That makes sense. But if we were to be asked what these things are, what the stories are, what should we say?’

‘You and I, Adimantus, are not poets, at the moment: we are founders of a city. Founders have to know the patterns within which poets are to be made to construct fables, and beyond which they must not be allowed to go, but they don’t have to make up fables themselves.’

‘True enough: but just what are the patterns for an account of the gods?’

‘Something like this, I fancy. God must always be represented as he is, whether in epic or in lyric or in tragedy.’

‘Yes indeed.’

‘Now God is in truth good and must be so described.’

‘Of course.’

‘And nothing good is harmful, is it?’

‘No.’

‘Does the non-harmful harm?’

‘No.’

‘And does what doesn’t harm do any evil?’

‘No.’

‘And what does no evil is cause of no evil?’

‘Of course.’

‘Now again. The good is useful?’

‘Yes.’

‘Therefore the cause of felicity?’

‘Yes.’

‘The good therefore is not the cause of everything, but only of what is well.’

‘Certainly.’

‘God, therefore, being good, cannot be responsible for everything, as is the common opinion, but only of some things in human life. There is much for which he bears no responsibility. Our blessings are far fewer than our troubles, and while none but God is responsible for the blessings, we must seek other causes for the troubles.’

‘That seems perfectly right.’

‘We must therefore not allow Homer or any other poet to make foolish mistakes about the gods.” [ … ]

Aristotle is important in the early history of Western linguistics both for his general contributions to logic, rhetoric, and poetics and for a specific classification of speech units. Sir Anthony Kenny is a distinguished philosopher whose books include The Aristotelian Ethics (1978), Aristotle’s Theory of the Will (1979), and Aristotle on the Perfect Life (1992). His most recent book is A New History of Western Philosophy (2010). For Oxford World’s Classics he has translated Aristotle’s Poetics and Eudemian Ethics.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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By Keith Bosley

In the original final Finnish version of the Kalevala, published in 1849 (17: 523 – 526):

Ei sanat salahan joua
eikä luottehet lovehen;
mahti ei joua maan rakohon,
vaikka mahtajat menevät.

Before we translate, certain features can be pointed out: a line has eight syllables; stress always falls on the first syllable of a word; every line has alliteration. Soon after the Kalevala came out in its final version, the Baltic German linguist Franz Anton Schiefner (1817 – 1879) published the first German translation in 1852. He ironed out the metre into a trochaic tetrameter, and disregarded the alliteration. Later German translations have followed his example. Hans and Lore Fromm’s 1967 edition (from Finnish) also recast the text into pairs of lines:

Worte werden nicht verborgen, Sprüche fallen nicht in Spalten,
Zauber stürzt nicht in die Erdschlucht, wenn auch Zauberwisser gehen.

Elias Lönnrot and Kalevala heroes on the monument by Emil Wikström in Helsinki

Till no spells are hidden from me,
Nor the spells of magic hidden,
That in caves their power is lost not,
Even though the wizards perish.

The original Kalevala metre remains a mystery — see the opening quotation. Many Finns and translators into a variety of languages make matters worse by following Schiefner. The present English translator has learnt from his native tradition, begun by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’s (1516/17 – 1547) sixteenth-century versions of Virgil, by avoiding original metres. Thousands of lines before tackling the Kalevala, I developed a syllabic line of seven — sometimes five, less often nine — owing something to medieval Welsh. This has enabled me, in my Oxford World’s Classics edition, to translate almost literally:

The Kalevala’s influence lies not only in Finnish history — such as its essential role in fostering a distinct sense of national cultural identity that resulted in its independence in 1917 following the Russian Revolution — but elsewhere too. One of the more famous examples may be found in J.R.R. Tolkien, who credited several aspects of the Finnish epic and the language as part of the inspiration behind The Lord of the Rings. Väinämöinen, the wise old sage, was a source of inspiration for the character of Gandalf, and Tolkien was rapt with excitement upon discovering a Finnish Grammar, as he noted in a letter to W.H. Auden, also one-time professor at the University of Oxford:

It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me; and I gave up the attempt to invent an ‘unrecorded’ Germanic language, and my ‘own language’ – or series of invented languages – became heavily Finnicized [sic] in phonetic pattern and structure.

The Kalevala remains a source of only semi-discovered beauty and incredible imagination. Have you ever been challenged to tie an egg into invisible knots? (You may use magic.)

Keith Bosley has published several collections of poems and a number of translation, mainly from French, Portuguese, German, and Finnish. In 1991 he was made a Knight, First Class, of the Order of the White Rose of Finland. An audio book of his edition of the Kalevala was published by Naxos this month. The cover art for the audio book is by Ben Bosley.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Elias Lönnrot and Kalevala heroes on the monument by Emil Wikström in Helsinki. Photo by Дар Ветер [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

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By Max Saunders

One definition of a classic book is a work which inspires repeated metamorphoses. Romeo and Juliet, Gulliver’s Travels, Frankenstein, Dracula, The Great Gatsby don’t just wait in their original forms to be watched or read, but continually migrate from one medium to another: painting, opera, melodrama, dramatization, film, comic-strip. New technologies inspire further reincarnations. Sometimes it’s a matter of transferring a version from one medium to another — audio recordings to digital files, say. More often, different technologies and different markets encourage new realisations: Hitchcock’s Psycho re-shot in colour; French or German films remade for American audiences; widescreen or 3D remakes of classic movies or stories.

Cinema is notoriously hungry for adaptations of literary works. The adaptation that’s been preoccupying me lately is the BBC/HBO version of Parade’s End, the series of four novels about the Edwardian era and the First World War, written by Ford Madox Ford. Ford was British, but an unusually cosmopolitan and bohemian kind of Brit. His father was a German émigré, a musicologist who ended up as music critic for the London Times. His mother was an artist, the daughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. Ford was educated trilingually, in French and German as well as English. When he was introduced to Joseph Conrad at the turn of the century, they decided to collaborate on a novel, and went on over a decade to produce three collaborative books. He also got to know Henry James and Stephen Crane at this time — the two Americans were also living nearby, on the Southeast coast of England. Americans were to prove increasingly important in Ford’s life. He moved to London in 1907, and soon set up the literary magazine that helped define pre-war modernism: the English Review. He had a gift for discovering new talent, and was soon publishing D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis alongside James and Conrad. But it was Ezra Pound, who he also met and published at this time, who was to become his most important literary friend after Conrad.

Ford served in the First World War, getting injured and suffering from shell shock in the Battle of the Somme. He moved to France after the war, where he soon joined forces with Pound again, to form another influential modernist magazine, the transatlantic review, which published Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Rhys. Ford took on another young American, Ernest Hemingway, as his sub-editor. Ford held regular soirees, either in a working class dance-hall with a bar that he’d commandeered, or in the studio he lived in with his partner, the Australian painter Stella Bowen. He found himself at the centre of the (largely American) expatriate artist community in the Paris of the 20s. And it was there, and in Provence in the winters, and partly in New York, that he wrote the four novels of Parade’s End, that made him a celebrity in the US. He spent an increasing amount of time in the US through the 20s and 30s, based on Fifth Avenue in New York, becoming a writer in residence in the small liberal arts Olivet College in Michigan, spending time with writer-friends like Theodore Dreiser and William Carlos Williams, and among the younger generation, Robert Lowell and e. e. cummings.

Parade’s End (1924-28) has been dramatized for TV by Sir Tom Stoppard. It has to be one of the most challenging books to film; but Stoppard has the theatrical ingenuity, and experience, to bring it off. It’s a classic work of Modernism: with a non-linear time-scheme that can jump around in disconcerting ways; dense experimental writing that plays with styles and techniques. Though it includes some of the most brilliant conversations in the British novel, and its characters have a strong dramatic presence, much of it is inherently un-dramatic and, you might have thought, unfilmable: long interior monologues, descriptions of what characters see and feel; and — perhaps hardest of all to convey in drama — moments when they don’t say what they feel, or do what we might expect of them. Imagine T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, populated by Chekhovian characters, but set on the Western Front.

I’ve worked on Ford for some years, yet still find him engaging, tantalising, often incomprehensibly rewarding, so I was watching Parade’s End with fascination. [Warning: Spoilers ahead.]

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stoppard and the director, Susanna White, have done an extraordinary job in transforming this rich and complex text into a dramatic line that is at once lucid and moving. Sometimes where Ford just mentions an event in passing, the adaptation dramatizes the scene for us. The protagonist is Christopher Tietjens, a man of high-Tory principle — a paradoxical mix of extreme formality and unconventional intelligence – is played outstandingly by Benedict Cumberbatch, with a rare gift to convey thought behind Tietjens’ taciturn exterior. In the novel’s backstory, Christopher has been seduced in a railway carriage by Sylvia, who thinks she’s pregnant by another man. The TV version adds a conversation as they meet in the train; then cuts rapidly to a sex scene. It’s more than just a hook for viewers unconcerned about textual fidelity, though. What it establishes is what Ford only hints at through the novel, and what would be missed without Tietjen’s brooding thoughts about Sylvia: that her outrageousness turns him on as much as it torments him. In another example, where the novelist can describe the gossip circulating like wildfire in this select upper-class social world, the dramatist needs to give it a location; so Stoppard invents a scene at an Eton cricket match for several of the characters to meet, and insult Valentine Wannop, while she and Tietjens are trying not to have the affair that everyone assumes they are already having. Valentine is an ardent suffragette. In the novel, she and Tietjens argue about women and politics and education. Stoppard introduces a real historical event from the period — a Suffragette slashing Velasquez’s ‘Rokeby Venus’ in the National Gallery — as a way of saying it visually; and then complicating it beautifully with another intensely visual interpolated moment. In the book Ford has Valentine unconcsciously rearranging the cushions on her sofa as she waits to see Tietjens the evening before he’s posted back to the war. When she becomes aware that she’s fiddling with the cushions because she’s anticipating a love-scene with him, the adaptation disconcertingly places Valentine nude on her sofa in the same position as the ‘Rokeby Venus’ — in a flash both sexualizing her politics and politicizing her sexuality.

Such changes cause a double-take in viewers who know the novels. But they’re never gratuitous, and always respond to something genuine in the writing.

Perhaps the most striking transformation comes during one of the most amazing moments in the second volume, No More Parades. Tietjens is back in France, stationed at a Base Camp in Rouen, struggling against the military bureaucracy to get drafts of troops ready to be sent to the Front Line. Sylvia, who can’t help loving Tietjens though he drives her mad, has somehow managed to get across the Channel and pursue him to his Regiment. She has been unfaithful, and he is determined not to sleep with her; but because his principles won’t let a man divorce a woman, he feels obliged to share her hotel room so as not to humiliate her publicly. She is determined to seduce him once more; but has been flirting with other officers in the hotel, two of whom also end up in their bedroom in a drunken brawl. It’s an extraordinary moment of frustration, hysteria, terror (there has been a bombardment that evening), confusion, and farce. In the book we sense Sylvia’s seductive power, and that Tietjens isn’t immune to it, even though by then in love with Valentine. He resists. But in the film version, they kiss passionately before being interrupted.

Valentine and Christopher. Adelaide Clemens and Benedict Cumberbatch in Parade’s End. (c) BBC/HBO.

The scene may have been changed to emphasize the power she still has over Tietjens: as if, paradoxically, he needs to be seen to succumb for a moment to make his resistance to her the more heroic. The change that’s going to exercise enthusiasts of the novels, though, is the way three of the five episodes were devoted to the first novel, Some Do Not…; and roughly one each to the second and third; with very little of the fourth volume, Last Post, being included at all. The third volume, A Man Could Stand Up — ends where the adaptation does, with Christopher and Valentine finally being united on Armistice night, a suitably dramatic and symbolic as well as romantic climax. Last Post is set in the 1920s and deals with post-war reconstruction. One can see why it would have been the hardest to film: much of it is interior monologue, and though Tietjens is often the subject of it he is absent for most of the book. Some crucial scenes from the action of the earlier books is only supplied as characters remember them in Last Post, such as when Syliva turns up after the Armistice night party lying to Christopher and Valentine that  she has cancer in an attempt to frustrate their union. Stoppard incorporates this into the last episode, but he writes new dialogue for it to give it a kind of closure the novels studiedly resist. Valentine challenges her as a liar, and from Tietjens’ reaction, Sylvia appears to recognize the reality of his love for her and gives her their blessing.

Rebecca Hall, playing Sylvia, has been so brilliantly and scathingly sarcastic all the way through that this change of heart — moving though it is — might seem out of character: even the character the film gives her, which is arguably more sympathetic than the one most readers find in the novel. Yet her reversal is in Last Post. But what triggers it there, much later on, is when she confronts Valentine but finds her pregnant. Even the genius of Tom Stoppard couldn’t make that happen before Valentine and Christopher have been able to make love. But there are two other factors, which he was able to shift from the post-war time of Last Post into the war’s endgame of the last episode. One is that Sylvia has focused her plotting on a new object. Refusing the role of the abandoned wife of Tietjens, she has now set her sights on General Campion, and begun scheming to get him made Viceroy of India. The other is that she feels she has already dealt Tietjens a devastating blow, in getting the ‘Great Tree’ at his ancestral stately home of Groby cut down. In the book she does this after the war by encouraging the American who’s leasing it to get it felled. In the film she’s done it before the Armistice; she’s at Groby; Tietjens visits there; has a Stoppard scene with Sylvia arranged in her bed like a Pre-Raphaelite vision in a last attempt to re-seduce him, which fails partly because of his anger over the tree. In the books the Great Tree represents the Tietjens family, continuity, even history itself. Ford writes a sentence about how the villagers “would ask permission to hang rags and things from the boughs,” but Stoppard and White make that image of the tree, all decorated with trinkets and charms, a much more prominent motif, returning to it throughout the series, and turning it into a symbol of superstition and magic. But then Stoppard characteristically plays on the motif, and has Christopher take a couple of blocks of wood from the felled tree back to London. One he gives to his brother, in a wonderfully tangible and taciturn gesture of renouncing the whole estate and the history it stands for. The other he uses in his flat, throwing whisky over it in the fireplace to light a fire to keep himself and Valentine warm. That gesture shows how it isn’t just Sylvia who is saying ‘Goodbye to All That’, but all the major characters are anticipating the life that, though the series doesn’t show it, Ford presents in the beautifully elegiac Last Post.

Max Saunders is author of Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life (OUP, 1996/2012), and editor of Some Do Not . . ., the first volume of Ford’s Parade’s End (Manchester: Carcanet, 2010) and Ford’s The Good Soldier (Oxford: OUP, 2012). He was interviewed by Alan Yentob for the Culture Show’s ‘Who on Earth was Ford Madox Ford’ (BBC 2; 1 September 2012), and his blog on Ford’s life and work can be read on the OUPblog and New Statesman.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credits: (1) Portrait of Ford Madox Ford (Source: Wikimedia Commons); (2) Still from BBC2 adaption of Parade’s End. (Source: bbc.co.uk).

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True love in opposition: Levin and Kitty’s match set against the triangle of Anna, her husband Karenin, and her lover Vronsky. How can Tolstoy’s crushing rejection scene (drawn from his own life) be portrayed on screen? The film adaptation of Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightly and directed by Joe Wright, is contending for four Oscars tonight (Production Design, Cinematography, Costume Design, and Original Score). Let’s see how they do compared to the Oxford World Classic edition before the cinematic contest this evening.

DURING the interval between dinner and the beginning of the evening party, Kitty experienced something resembling a young man’s feelings before a battle. Her heart was beating violently and she could not fix her thoughts on anything.

She felt that this evening, when those two men were to meet for the first time, would decide her fate; and she kept picturing them to herself, now individually and now together. When she thought of the past, she dwelt with pleasure and tenderness on her former relations with Levin. Memories of childhood and of Levin’s friendship with her dead brother lent a peculiar poetic charm to her relations with him. His love for her, of which she felt sure, flattered and rejoiced her, and she could think of him with a light heart. With her thought of Vronsky was mingled some uneasiness, though he was an extremely well-bred and quiet-mannered man; a sense of something false, not in him, for he was very simple and kindly, but in herself; whereas in relation to Levin she felt herself quite simple and clear. On the other hand when she pictured to herself a future with Vronsky a brilliant vision of happiness rose up before her, while a future with Levin appeared wrapped in mist.

On going upstairs to dress for the evening and looking in the glass, she noticed with pleasure that this was one of her best days, and that she was in full possession of all her forces, which would be so much wanted for what lay before her. She was conscious of external calmness and of freedom and grace in her movements.

At half-past seven, as soon as she had come down into the drawing-room, the footman announced ‘Constantine Dmitrich Levin!’ The Princess was still in her bedroom, nor had the Prince yet come down.

‘So it’s to be!’ thought Kitty and the blood rushed to her heart. Glancing at the mirror she was horrified at her pallor.

She felt sure that he had come so early on purpose to see her alone and to propose to her. And now for the first time the matter presented itself to her in a different and entirely new light. Only now did she realize that this matter (with whom she would be happy, who was the man she loved) did not concern herself alone, but that in a moment she would have to wound a man she cared for, and to wound him cruelly…. Why? Because the dear fellow was in love with her. But it could not be helped, it was necessary and had to be done.

‘Oh God, must I tell him so myself?’ she thought. ‘Must I really tell him that I don’t care for him? That would not be true. What then shall I say? Shall I say that I love another? No, that’s impossible! I’ll go away. Yes, I will.’

She was already approaching the door when she heard his step. ‘No, it would be dishonest! What have I to fear? I have done nothing wrong. I’ll tell the truth, come what may! Besides, it’s impossible to feel awkward with him. Here he is!’ she thought, as she saw his powerful diffident figure before her and his shining eyes gazing at her. She looked straight into his face as if entreating him to spare her, and gave him her hand.

Click here to view the embedded video.

‘I don’t think I’ve come at the right time, I’m too early,’ he said gazing round the empty drawing-room. When he saw that his expectation was fulfilled and that nothing prevented his speaking to her, his face clouded over.

‘Not at all,’ said Kitty and sat down at the table.

‘But all I wanted was to find you alone,’ he began, still standing and avoiding her face so as not to lose courage.

‘Mama will be down in a minute. She was so tired yesterday …’ She spoke without knowing what she was saying, her eyes fixed on him with a caressing look full of entreaty.

He glanced at her; she blushed and was silent.

‘I told you that I did not know how long I should stay … that it depends on you.’

Her head dropped lower and lower, knowing the answer she would give to what was coming.

‘That it would depend on you,’ he repeated. ‘I want to say … I want to say … I came on purpose … that … to be my wife !’ he uttered hardly knowing what he said; but feeling that the worst was out he stopped and looked at her.

She was breathing heavily and not looking at him. She was filled with rapture. Her soul was overflowing with happiness. She had not at all expected that his declaration of love would make so strong an impression on her. But that lasted only for an instant. She remembered Vronsky, lifted her clear, truthful eyes to Levin’s face, and noticing his despair she replied quickly:

‘It cannot be … forgive me.’

How near to him she had been a minute ago, how important in his life! And how estranged and distant she seemed now!

‘Nothing else was possible,’ he said, without looking at her, and bowing he turned to go …

One of the greatest novels ever written, Anna Karenina illuminates the questions that face humanity. A classic of Russian literature, this new edition of Anna Karenina uses the acclaimed Louise and Alymer Maude translation, and offers a new introduction and notes which provide completely up-to-date perspectives on Tolstoy’s classic work.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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By Robert Morrison

In The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Immanuel Kant gives the standard eighteenth-century line on opium. Its “dreamy euphoria,” he declares, makes one “taciturn, withdrawn, and uncommunicative,” and it is “therefore… permitted only as a medicine.” Eighty-five years later, in The Gay Science (1882), Friedrich Nietzsche too discusses drugs, but he has a very different story to tell. “Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica?” he asks pointedly. “It is almost the history of ‘culture’, of so-called high culture.” What caused this seismic shift in attitude? How did opium, in less than a century, pass from a drug understood primarily as a medicine to a drug used and abused recreationally, not just in “high culture”, but across the social strata?

The short answer is Thomas De Quincey. In his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, first published in the London Magazine for September and October 1821, he transformed our perception of drugs. De Quincey invented recreational drug-taking, not because he was the first to swallow opiates for non-medical reasons (he was hardly that), but because he was the first to commemorate his drug experience in a compelling narrative that was consciously aimed at — and consumed by — a broad commercial audience. Further, in knitting together intellectualism, unconventionality, drugs, and the city, De Quincey mapped in the counter-cultural figure of the bohemian. He was also the first flâneur, high and anonymous, graceful and detached, strolling through crowded urban sprawls trying to decipher the spectacles, faces, and memories that reside there. Most strikingly, as the self-proclaimed “Pope” of “the true church on the subject of opium,” he initiated the tradition of the literature of intoxication with his portrait of the addict as a young man. De Quincey is the first modern artist, at once prophet and exile, riven by a drug that both inspired and eviscerated him.

The Confessions warned some early readers off opium, as De Quincey claimed he intended. “Better, a thousand times better, die than have anything to do with such a Devil’s own drug!” Thomas Carlyle commented after reading the work, while De Quincey’s erstwhile friend and fellow opium addict Samuel Taylor Coleridge insisted that he read the Confessions with “unutterable sorrow…The writer with morbid vanity, makes a boast of what was my misfortune.” But for many other readers, De Quincey’s account of opium was an invitation to experimentation — his drugged highs almost irresistible, and the gothic gloom of his lows even more so. Within months of publication, John Wilson, De Quincey’s closest friend and the lead writer for the powerful Blackwood’s Magazine, heard alarming reports of people recklessly attempting to emulate De Quincey’s drug experiences. “Pray, is it true…that your Confessions have caused about fifty unintentional suicides?” he inquires in a flamboyant Blackwood’s sketch. “I should think not,” the Opium Eater replies indignantly. “I have read of six only; and they rested on no solid foundation.”

Others, however, did not find the situation funny. One doctor recorded a sharp increase in the number of people overdosing on opium “in consequence of a little book that has been published by a man of literature.” The authors of The Family Oracle of Health (1824) were even angrier. “The use of opium has been recently much increased by a wild, absurd, and romancing production, called the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” they declared. “We observe, that at some late inquests this wicked book has been severely censured, as the source of misery and torment, and even of suicide itself, to those who have been seduced to take opium by its lying stories about celestial dreams, and similar nonsense.”

De Quincey was characteristically divided on the influence of his Confessions. In the work itself he states that his primary objective is to reveal the powers of the drug: opium is “the true hero of the tale,” and “the legitimate centre on which the interest revolves.” Yet in Suspiria de Profundis (1845), the sequel to the Confessions, he maintains that its “true hero” is, not opium, but the powers of his imaginative — and especially of his dreaming — mind. Elsewhere, De Quincey denied the charges that his writings had encouraged drug abuse: “Teach opium-eating! – Did I teach wine drinking? Did I reveal the mystery of sleeping? Did I inaugurate the infirmity of laughter? . . . My faith is – that no man is likely to adopt opium or to lay it aside in consequence of anything he may read in a book.” In still other instances De Quincey regarded his drug habit as a source of amusement. “Since leaving off opium,” he noted wryly, “I take a great deal too much of it for my health.” More commonly, though, he was horrified by the damage it was inflicting. “It is as if ivory carvings and elaborate fretwork and fair enamelling should be found with worms and ashes amongst coffins and the wrecks of some forgotten life,” he wrote in the midst of one of his many attempts to abjure the drug.

De Quincey’s account of his opiated experiences has left on indelible print on the literature of addiction, and modern commentators continue to grapple with his legacy, though there is no agreement on whether he should be blamed, or absolved, or lauded. In Romancing Opiates (2006), Theodore Dalrymple lambasts him. “In modern society the main cause of drug addiction…is a literary tradition of romantic claptrap, started by Coleridge and De Quincey, and continued without serious interruption ever since,” he asserts. “This claptrap is the main source of popular and medical misconceptions on the subject.” Will Self, however, argues vigorously against such a view. “The truth is that books like…De Quincey’s Confessions no more create drug addicts than video nasties engender prepubescent murderers,” he declares in Junk Mail (1995). “Rather, culture, in this wider sense, is a hall of mirrors in which cause and effect endlessly reciprocate one another in a diminuendo that tends ineluctably towards the trivial.”

Ann Marlowe takes yet another position on the “brilliant, unsurpassed Confessions.” “Ever since I read De Quincey in my early teens,” she writes in How to Stop Time (1999), “I’d planned to try opium,” a far more direct account of “cause and effect” than Self’s halls of opium smoke and mirrors. Yet Marlowe and Self agree that they were both drawn to the drug because of its close association with intellectualism and insight, for both “hoped to pass through the portals of dope” into the “honoured company” of Coleridge and De Quincey. Such reasoning, Marlowe recognizes later, is “the sorriest cliche,” or what Dalrymple would call “claptrap”. But these accounts make plain that De Quincey’s potent memorialization of his drug experience has proven at least as seductive as the drug itself. His Confessions loosed the recreational genies from the medicine bottle and made opiates for the masses. De Quincey was lucky. The drug battered him, but it never finally defeated his creativity or his resolve. Many have not been that fortunate. Diagnosed at aged twenty with an opiate addiction, Self was “appalled to discover that I was not a famous underground writer. Indeed, far from being a writer at all, I was simply underground.”

Robert Morrison is Queen’s National Scholar at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where he maintains the Thomas De Quincey homepage. For Oxford World’s Classics, he has edited (with Chris Baldick) The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre, as well as Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, and three essays On Murder. Morrison is the author of The English Opium-Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey, which was a finalist for the James Black Memorial Prize. His annotated edition of Jane Austen’s Persuasion was published by Harvard University Press. For Palgrave, he edited (with Daniel Sanjiv Roberts) a collection of essays entitled Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine: ‘An Unprecedented Phenomenon’. Read his previous blog posts: “De Quincey’s fine art” and “Vampyre Rising.”

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image Credits: (1) Thomas de Quincey – Project Gutenberg eText 19222 via Wikimedia Commons. (2) “A New Vice: Opium Dens in France”, cover of Le Petit Journal, 5 July 1903. via Wikimedia Commons. (3) Cropped screenshot from the film trailer Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962) via Wikimedia Commons

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By Maya Slater

The farce is at its height: the old clown in the armchair is surrounded by whirling figures in outlandish doctors’ costumes, welcoming him into their brotherhood with a mock initiation ceremony. He takes the Latin oath: ‘Juro’, falters. His face crumples. The audience gasps – is something wrong? But the clown is grinning now, all is well, the dancing grows frenzied, the play rushes on to its end.

Not till the next day will the audience find out what happened afterwards. They carried the clown off the stage in his chair, and rushed him home. He was coughing blood, dying. He asked for his wife, and for a priest to confess him. They failed to arrive before he died.

It happened 340 years ago, on 17 February 1673, but his magnificently ironic death is still central to the French understanding of Molière. He is their greatest comic playwright, unique in that he also directed his own plays and wrote his greatest parts for himself. Centuries later, this still gives the modern audience a frisson. In The Hypochondriac, sick with TB (he had his fatal seizure during the fourth performance), Molière himself spoke the following words:

‘Your Molière’s an impertinent fellow… If I were a doctor, I’d have my revenge… when he fell ill, I’d let him die without helping him. I’d say: “Go on, drop dead!”

Writing those words anticipating his own death was surely tempting fate, but long before his last play, audiences had got used to seeing Molière on stage speaking lines which seemed to cast an ironic light on his own life. Nine years earlier, in The School for Wives (1662), the first of his great verse comedies, he played the part of a ridiculous old bachelor determined to marry an innocent young girl decades younger than him. Instead, the girl escapes with a young man her own age. The audience knew that Molière himself had recently married Armande – he was 40, she was 22. What must they have thought when he portrayed a thwarted older lover, gnashing his teeth in rage and frustration as his young bride escaped from his clutches?

A year later, Molière’s self-mockery has grown more explicit. The new play is The School for Wives Criticised, a short, informal sketch, ridiculing Molière’s critics in an argument about The School for Wives. Significantly, Molière didn’t defend his own play onstage.  Instead, he himself played an absurd Marquis, who attacks Molière and his work: ‘I’ve just been to see it… It’s detestable.’ ‘Talk to us about its faults,’ says someone. ‘How should I know? I didn’t even bother to listen,’ replies the Marquis.

Molière’s second riposte to his critics, which again took the form of a short polemic play, The Impromptu at Versailles, was strikingly new, and still feels fresh and exciting today. We see Molière (who just this once played himself) and his troupe in rehearsal, trying desperately to get a performance together for the King and Court to see. The actors are uncooperative and annoying, which enables Molière to show himself trying to cope with them. He presents himself as unable to keep control of his unruly cast, breaking out in frustration: ‘Don’t you realise, I’m the one who carries the can…?’ When they finally start their rehearsal, Molière interrupts it to comment on The School for Wives, and to make some interesting general observations on acting. The play they are rehearsing  is a conversation between two stupid courtiers. Molière again takes the part of the silly Marquis, and once more launches a comic attack on himself: ‘You’re desperate to justify Molière… don’t you think your Molière is played out [?]’ And then comes a moment unique in his work, where he takes over another actor’s part, and speaks as himself, in defence of his own art: ‘Wait a minute, You want to say all that a bit more emphatically. Listen, this is how I want it spoken…’

Of course the burning question must be: what was Molière like as an actor, and how did he perform his roles? We know he wore a heavy black moustache. We can assume that he excelled at portraying comic rage and frustration, from the number of furious outbursts he wrote for himself to perform. He put himself in ridiculous situations, hiding under the table in Tartuffe, performing a clumsy dance in The Bourgeois Gentleman, fleeing in terror dressed as a woman in M. de Pourceaugnac. But perhaps the most vivid account of his acting is found in a malicious satirical portrait written by the son of a rival actor:

‘He enters, nose to the wind, on bow legs, one shoulder thrust forward. His wig trails behind, stuffed full of bayleaves like a ham. He dangles his hands rather carelessly by his sides. His head sits on his back like a pack on a mule. He rolls his eyes. When he speaks his lines, the words are punctuated by endless hiccoughs.’

By the end, racked with TB, his performances had become less physically demanding. And performing the role which killed him that February night 350 years ago, that of the ludicrous hypochondriac, he was having to insert lines to excuse his own coughing, and played the part sitting in the red velvet chair which is still preserved as their most precious relic by the Comédie française theatre.

Maya Slater is Senior Reseach Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. She also writes fiction and reviews theatre and books. She is the editor and translator of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and Other Plays by Molière.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: Portrait of Molière as Julius Cesar by Nicolas Mignard [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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It’s Valentine’s Day on Thursday, so let us celebrate the happiness of brief, all-encompassing love. We’ve paired a scene from the recent film adaptation of Anna Karenina, currently nominated for fours Oscars, with an excerpt of the novel below. In it, Anna and Vronsky discuss the happiness of their newfound love.

IT was already past five, and in order not to be late and not to use his own horses, which were known to everybody, Vronsky took Yashvin’s hired carriage and told the coachman to drive as fast as possible. The old four-seated hired vehicle was very roomy; he sat down in a corner, put his legs on the opposite seat, and began to think. A vague sense of the accomplished cleaning up of his affairs, a vague memory of Serpukhovskoy’s friendship for him, and the flattering thought that the latter considered him a necessary man, and above all the anticipation of the coming meeting, merged into one general feeling of joyful vitality. This feeling was so strong that he could not help smiling. He put down his legs, threw one of them over the other, and placing his arm across it felt its firm calf, where he had hurt it in the fall the day before, and then, throwing himself back, sighed deeply several times.

‘Delightful! O delightful!’ he thought. He had often before been joyfully conscious of his body, but had never loved himself, his own body, as he did now. It gave him pleasure to feel the slight pain in his strong leg, to be conscious of the muscles of his chest moving as he breathed. That clear, cool August day which made Anna feel so hopeless seemed exhilarating and invigorating to him and refreshed his face and neck, which were glowing after their washing and rubbing. The scent of brilliantine given off by his moustache seemed peculiarly pleasant in the fresh air. All that he saw from the carriage window through the cold pure air in the pale light of the evening sky seemed as fresh, bright and vigorous as he was himself. The roofs of the houses glittered in the evening sun; the sharp outlines of the fences and the corners of buildings, the figures of people and vehicles they occasionally met, the motionless verdure of the grass and trees, the fields of potatoes with their clear-cut ridges, the slanting shadows of the houses and trees, the bushes and even the potato ridges—it was all pleasant and like a landscape newly painted and varnished.

‘Get on, get on!’ he shouted to the coachman, thrusting himself out of the window; and taking a three-rouble note from his pocket he put it into the man’s hand as the latter turned round. The coachman felt something in his hand, the whip cracked, and the carriage rolled quickly along the smooth macadamized high road.

‘I want nothing, nothing but that happiness,’ he thought, staring at the ivory knob of the bell between the front windows of the carriage, his mind full of Anna as he had last seen her.

‘And the longer it continues the more I love her! And here is the garden of Vrede’s country house. Where is she? Where? Why? Why has she given me an appointment here, in a letter from Betsy?’ he thought; but there was no longer any time for thinking. Before reaching the avenue he ordered the coachman to stop, opened the carriage door, jumped out while the carriage was still moving, and went up the avenue leading to the house. There was no one in the avenue, but turning to the right he saw her. Her face was veiled, but his joyous glance took in that special manner of walking peculiar to her alone: the droop of her shoulders, the poise of her head; and immediately a thrill passed like an electric current through his body, and with renewed force he became conscious of himself from the elastic movement of his firm legs to the motion of his lungs as he breathed, and of something tickling his lips. On reaching him she clasped his hand firmly.

‘You are not angry that I told you to come? It was absolutely necessary for me to see you,’ she said; and at sight of the serious and severe expression of her mouth under her veil his mood changed at once.

‘I angry? But how did you get here?’

‘Never mind!’ she said, putting her hand on his arm. ‘Come, I must speak to you.’

He felt that something had happened, and that this interview would not be a happy one. In her presence he had no will of his own: without knowing the cause of her agitation he became infected by it.

‘What is it? What?’ he asked, pressing her hand against his side with his elbow and trying to read her face.

She took a few steps in silence to gather courage, and then suddenly stopped.

‘I did not tell you last night,’ she began, breathing quickly and heavily, ‘that on my way back with Alexis Alexandrovich I told him everything … said I could not be his wife, and … I told him all.’

He listened, involuntarily leaning forward with his whole body as if trying to ease her burden. But as soon as she had spoken he straightened himself and his face assumed a proud and stern expression.

‘Yes, yes, that is better! A thousand times better! I understand how hard it must have been for you’ he said, but she was not listening to his words—only trying to read his thoughts from his face. She could not guess that it expressed the first idea that had entered Vronsky’s mind: the thought of an inevitable duel; therefore she explained that momentary look of severity in another way. After reading her husband’s letter she knew in the depths of her heart that all would remain as it was, that she would not have the courage to disregard her position and give up her son in order to be united with her lover. The afternoon spent at the Princess Tverskaya’s house had confirmed that thought. Yet this interview was still of extreme importance to her. She hoped that the meeting might bring about a change in her position and save her. If at this news he would firmly, passionately, and without a moment’s hesitation say to her: ‘Give up everything and fly with me!’ she would abandon her son and go with him. But the news had not the effect on him that she had desired: he only looked as if he had been offended by something. ‘It was not at all hard for me — it all came about of itself,’ she said, irritably. ‘And here …’ she pulled her husband’s note from under her glove.

Click here to view the embedded video.

‘I understand, I understand,’ he interrupted, taking the note but not reading it, and trying to soothe her. ‘I only want one thing, I only ask for one thing: to destroy this situation in order to devote my life to your happiness.’

‘Why do you tell me this?’ she said. ‘Do you think I could doubt it? If I doubted it …’

‘Who’s that coming?’ said Vronsky, pointing to two ladies who were coming toward them. ‘They may know us!’ and he moved quickly in the direction of a sidewalk, drawing her along with him.

‘Oh, I don’t care!’ she said. Her lips trembled and her eyes seemed to him to be looking at him with strange malevolence from under the veil. ‘As I was saying, that’s not the point! I cannot doubt that, but see what he writes to me. Read—’ she stopped again.

Again, as at the first moment when he heard the news of her having spoken to her husband, Vronsky yielded to the natural feeling produced by the thoughts of his relation to the injured husband. Now that he held his letter he could not help imagining to himself the challenge that he would no doubt find waiting for him that evening or next day, and the duel, when he would be standing with the same cold proud look as his face bore that moment, and having fired into the air would be awaiting the shot from the injured husband. And at that instant the thought of what Serpukhovskoy had just been saying to him and of what had occurred to him that morning (that it was better not to bind himself) flashed through his mind, and he knew that he could not pass on the thought to her.

After he had read the letter he looked up at her, but his look was not firm. She understood at once that he had already considered this by himself, knew that whatever he might say he would not tell her all that he was thinking, and knew that her last hopes had been deceived. This was not what she had expected.

‘You see what a man he is!’ she said in a trembling voice. ‘He …’

‘Forgive, me, but I am glad of it!’ Vronsky interrupted. ‘For God’s sake hear me out!’ he added, with an air of entreaty that she would let him explain his words. ‘I am glad because I know that it is impossible, quite impossible for things to remain as they are, as he imagines.’

‘Why impossible?’ said Anna, forcing back her tears and clearly no longer attaching any importance to what he would say. She felt that her fate was decided.

Vronsky wanted to say that after what he considered to be the inevitable duel it could not continue; but he said something else.

‘It cannot continue. I hope that you will now leave him. I hope …’ he became confused and blushed, ‘that you will allow me to arrange, and to think out a life for ourselves. To-morrow …’ he began, but she did not let him finish.

‘And my son?’ she exclaimed. ‘You see what he writes? I must leave him, and I cannot do that and do not want to.’

‘But for heaven’s sake, which is better? To leave your son, or to continue in this degrading situation?’

‘Degrading for whom?’

‘For everybody, and especially for you.’

‘You call it degrading! do not call it that; such words have no meaning for me,’ she replied tremulously. She did not wish him to tell untruths now. She had only his love left, and she wanted to love him. ‘Try to understand that since I loved you everything has changed for me. There is only one single thing in the world for me: your love ! If I have it, I feel so high and firm that nothing can be degrading for me. I am proud of my position because … proud of … proud …’ she could not say what she was proud of. Tears of shame and despair choked her. She stopped and burst into sobs. He also felt something rising in his throat, and for the first time in his life he felt ready to cry. He could not explain what it was that had so moved him; he was sorry for her and felt that he could not help her, because he knew that he was the cause of her trouble, that he had done wrong.

‘Would divorce be impossible?’ he asked weakly. She silently shook her head. ‘Would it not be possible to take your son away with you and go away all the same?’

‘Yes, but all that depends on him. Now I go back to him,’ she said dryly. Her foreboding that everything would remain as it was had not deceived her.

‘On Tuesday I shall go back to Petersburg and everything will be decided. Yes,’ she said, ‘but don’t let us talk about it.’

Anna’s carriage, which she had sent away and ordered to return to the gate of the Vrede Garden, drove up. Anna took leave of Vronsky and went home.

A classic of Russian literature, this new edition of Anna Karenina uses the acclaimed Louise and Alymer Maude translation, and offers a new introduction and notes which provide completely up-to-date perspectives on Tolstoy’s classic work.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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Sinclair Lewis was the first US writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Known for his insightful and critical depictions of American society, one of Lewis’ most famous works was Babbitt. Amusing and tragic by turn, this classic novel is a biting satire of middle-American values whose title has entered the language as a byword for smug complacency, conformity, and materialism, and whose suburban targets are still much in evidence. In honor of the anniversary of Lewis’ birth (7 February 1885), we’ve crept into the archives and dug up some pages from Babbitt for you to enjoy.

His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

His large head was pink, his brown hair thin and dry. His face was babyish in slumber, despite his wrinkles and the red spectacle-dents on the slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed; his cheeks were pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless upon the khaki-colored blanket was slightly puffy. He seemed prosperous, extremely married and unromantic; and altogether unromantic appeared this sleeping-porch, which looked on one sizable elm, two respectable grass-plots, a cement driveway, and a corrugated iron garage. Yet Babbitt was again dreaming of the fairy child, a dream more romantic than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea. For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but Georgie Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth. She waited for him, in the darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could slip away from the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring friends, sought to follow, but he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and they crouched together on a shadowy hillside. She was so slim, so white, so eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant, that she would wait for him, that they would sail —Rumble and bang of the milk-truck.

Babbitt moaned, turned over, struggled back toward his dream. He could see only her face now, beyond misty waters. The furnaceman slammed the basement door. A dog barked in the next yard.

As Babbitt sank blissfully into a dim warm tide, the paper-carrier went by whistling, and the rolled-up Advocate thumped the front door. Babbitt roused, his stomach constricted with alarm. As he relaxed, he was pierced by the familiar and irritating rattle of someone cranking a Ford: snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah. Himself a pious motorist, Babbitt cranked with the unseen driver, with him waited through taut hours for the roar of the starting engine, with him agonized as the roar ceased and again began the infernal patient snap-ah-ah — a round, flat sound, a shivering cold-morning sound, a sound infuriating and inescapable. Not till the rising voice of the motor told him that the Ford was moving was he released from the panting tension. He glanced once at his favorite tree, elm twigs against the gold patina of sky, and fumbled for sleep as for a drug. He who had been a boy very credulous of life was no longer greatly interested in the possible and improbable adventures of each new day. He escaped from reality till the alarm-clock rang, at seven-twenty.

It was the best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm-clocks, with all modern attachments, including cathedral chime, intermittent alarm, and a phosphorescent dial. Babbitt was proud of being awakened by such a rich device. Socially it was almost as creditable as buying expensive cord tires. He sulkily admitted now that there was no more escape, but he lay and detested the grind of the real-estate business, and disliked his family, and disliked himself for disliking them. The evening before, he had played poker at Vergil Gunch’s till midnight, and after such holidays he was irritable before breakfast. It may have been the tremendous home-brewed beer of the prohibition-era and the cigars to which that beer enticed him; it may have been resentment of return from this fi ne, bold man-world to a restricted region of wives and stenographers, and of suggestions not to smoke so much.

From the bedroom beside the sleeping-porch, his wife’s detestably cheerful “Time to get up, Georgie boy,” and the itchy sound, the brisk and scratchy sound, of combing hairs out of a stiff brush.

He grunted; he dragged his thick legs, in faded baby-blue pajamas, from under the khaki blanket; he sat on the edge of the cot, running his fingers through his wild hair, while his plump feet mechanically felt for his slippers. He looked regretfully at the blanket—forever a suggestion to him of freedom and heroism. He had bought it for a camping trip which had never come off. It symbolized gorgeous loafing, gorgeous cursing, virile flannel shirts. He creaked to his feet, groaning at the waves of pain which passed behind his eyeballs. Though he waited for their scorching recurrence, he looked blurrily out at the yard. It delighted him, as always; it was the neat yard of a successful business man of Zenith, that is, it was perfection, and made him also perfect. He regarded the corrugated iron garage. For the three-hundred-and-sixty-fifth time in a year he reflected, “No class to that tin shack. Have to build me a frame garage. But by golly it’s the only thing on the place that isn’t up-to-date!” While he stared he thought of a community garage for his acreage development, Glen Oriole. He stopped puffing and jiggling.

His arms were akimbo. His petulant, sleep-swollen face was set in harder lines. He suddenly seemed capable, an official, a man to contrive, to direct, to get things done. On the vigor of his idea he was carried down the hard, clean, unused-looking hall into the bathroom. Though the house was not large it had, like all houses on Floral Heights, an altogether royal bathroom of porcelain and glazed tile and metal sleek as silver. The towel-rack was a rod of clear glass set in nickel. The tub was long enough for a Prussian Guard, and above the set bowl was a sensational exhibit of tooth-brush holder, shaving-brush holder, soap-dish, sponge-dish, and medicine-cabinet, so glittering and so ingenious that they resembled an electrical instrument-board. But the Babbitt whose god was Modern Appliances was not pleased. The air of the bathroom was thick with the smell of a heathen toothpaste. “Verona been at it again! ’Stead of sticking to Lilidol, like I’ve re-peat-ed-ly asked her, she’s gone and gotten some confounded stinkum stuff that makes you sick!” The bath-mat was wrinkled and the floor was wet. (His daughter Verona eccentrically took baths in the morning, now and then.) He slipped on the mat, and slid against the tub. He said “Damn!” Furiously he snatched up his tube of shaving-cream, furiously he lathered, with a belligerent slapping of the unctuous brush, furiously he raked his plump cheeks with a safety-razor. It pulled. The blade was dull. He said, “Damn — oh — oh — damn it!” He hunted through the medicine-cabinet for a packet of new razor-blades (reflecting, as invariably, “Be cheaper to buy one of these dinguses and strop your own blades,”) and when he discovered the packet, behind the round box of bicarbonate of soda, he thought ill of his wife for putting it there and very well of himself for not saying

“Damn.” But he did say it, immediately afterward, when with wet and soap-slippery fingers he tried to remove the horrible little envelope and crisp clinging oiled paper from the new blade. Then there was the problem, oft-pondered, never solved, of what to do with the old blade, which might imperil the fingers of his young. As usual, he tossed it on top of the medicine-cabinet, with a mental note that some day he must remove the fifty or sixty other blades that were also temporarily, piled up there. He finished his shaving in a growing testiness increased by his spinning headache and by the emptiness in his stomach. When he was done, his round face smooth and streamy and his eyes stinging from soapy water, he reached for a towel. The family towels were wet, wet and clammy and vile, all of them wet, he found, as he blindly snatched them — his own facetowel, his wife’s, Verona’s, Ted’s, Tinka’s, and the lone bath-towel with the huge welt of initial. Then George F. Babbitt did a dismaying thing. He wiped his face on the guest-towel! It was a pansyembroidered trifle which always hung there to indicate that the Babbitts were in the best Floral Heights society. No one had ever used it. No guest had ever dared to. Guests secretively took a corner of the nearest regular towel.

He was raging, “By golly, here they go and use up all the towels, every doggone one of ’em, and they use ’em and get ’em all wet and sopping, and never put out a dry one for me —of course, I’m the goat! — and then I want one and — I’m the only person in the doggone house that’s got the slightest doggone bit of consideration for other people and thoughtfulness and consider there may be others that may want to use the doggone bathroom after me and consider — ” He was pitching the chill abominations into the bath-tub, pleased by the vindictiveness of that desolate flapping sound; and in the midst his wife serenely trotted in, observed serenely, “Why Georgie dear, what are you doing? Are you going to wash out the towels? Why, you needn’t wash out the towels. Oh, Georgie, you didn’t go and use the guest-towel, did you?” It is not recorded that he was able to answer. For the first time in weeks he was sufficiently roused by his wife to look at her.

A successful real estate agent, George F. Babbitt is a member of all the right clubs, and unquestioningly shares the same aspirations and ideas as his friends and fellow Boosters. Yet even Babbitt dreams of romance and escape, and when his best friend does something to throw his world upside down, he rebels, and tries to find fulfillment in romantic adventures and liberal thinking. Hilarious and poignant, Babbitt turns the spotlight on middle America and strips bare the hypocrisy of business practice, social mores, politics, and religious institutions. In his introduction and notes, Gordon Hutner explores the novel’s historical and literary contexts, and highlights its rich cultural and social references. The Oxford World’s Classics edition also features an up-to-date bibliography and explanatory notes that document and gloss the rich social history of the period. Sinclair Lewis was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith in 1926 but refused it, claiming there were worthier contenders than himself, a self-deprecating disclaimer he repeated in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize in Stockholm in 1930.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter and Facebook.

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