2022 Back to the Classics Wrap Up

For this year's 2022 Back to the Classics Challenge I didn't make it to all 12 categories.  So here is a recap of the 9 classics I did read: 

Choose a 19th Century Classic:  Frankenstein by Mary Shelley -  My favorite book from this year's classic's challenge.  A wonderfully written gothic masterpiece.  It's also a novel of ideas in which the author takes on the 18th Century Age of Enlightment and Scientific Progress by creating a doctor, Victor Frankenstein, who decides he can create the perfect man with tragic results.

Choose a 20th Century Classic: Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier - The writing was excellent but I did not care for the heroine, the second Mrs. DeWinter.  Beneath her timidity and shyness I found her to be snobby in many ways, inwardly cringing at  those she considers forward and low class.  Where Mrs DeWinter's judgment fails her is with her husband Maxim DeWinter.  Once he reveals his secret she is more okay with it then she should have been in my opinion.

Classic by a Woman Author:  Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen - No book will equal Pride and Prejudice for me but Sense and Sensibility I really enjoyed.  Persuasion is probably the better book but I was somewhat bored.  Next year on to Emma!

Choose a Classic Mystery or Crime Novel:  Laura by Vera Caspary - A classic crime noir novel from the 1940's.  I enjoyed it and it's rare to find a mid-twentieth century crime noir novel written by a woman.

Choose a Classic Written before 1800: Coquette by Hannah Webster Foster - One of the earliest American novels to be published and based loosely on a true story.  It's interesting from a historical perspective.

Choose a Classic from a Place You Would Like to Visit: Breakfast at Tiffany's  by Truman Capote - People who have seen the film and Audrey Hepburn's charming and quirky performance as Holly Golightly are going to be suprised by Truman Capote's book.  The Holly in the novel has a much harder edge than the screen version and of the two I prefer the screen version.

Choose a Classic Short Story Collection: Hungry Hearts by Anzia Yezierska - Published in 1920 Hungry Hearts is a collection of short stories set on the Lower East Side of NYC in the early 1900's focusing on immigrant Jewish American women and girls trying to build a better life despite the sweatshops, poverty and heartbreak.  It's a moving collection of stories about how though the dreams one started out with may not match the reality, with hope and determination, new dreams are possible.

Choose a Non-Fiction Classic: Walking by Henry David Thoreau - I have been meaning to read Thoreau for years and Walking is a very short book about walking, the natural world and humanity's place in it.  It's a good introduction to Thoreau although the classic he is known for is Walden.  

Choose a Wild Card Classic:  Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe - Published 1958, the year I was born, a classic of mid-twentieth century British fiction.  This novel was one of the most prominent works to come out of the Angry Young Man movement dealing with the lives of the working class in Britain in the years after World War II.  This novel is realistic, gritty, very disturbing in certain parts but also the writing is first rate.

If Karen at Books and Choclate decides to host the Classics Challenge next year I'm up for it.  I owe this challenge so much because most of the classics I have read since taking the challenge 5 years ago I would probably never have gotten around to reading.

Walking by Henry David Thoreau

For the 2022 Back to the Classics category- choose a nonfiction classic I decided to go with Walking by Henry David Thoreau (1851).  At only forty pages, its a nice introduction to Thoreau's writing, his views about the natural world and humanity's place in it and the importance of walking.  Here is Thoreau on these subjects: 

"We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man—then you are ready for a walk.       

"I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights—any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi".

"At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the PUBLIC road, and walking over the surfarce of God's earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman's grounds".

I enjoyed Walking and underlined quite a few passages as I read through the book.  Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) is remarkably relevant today.  He was a writer, an abolitionist, a naturalist, a philosopher and as has been pointed out his one room cabin on Walden Pond could be considered the forerunner of the tiny house movement.  I recommend Walking and I am definitely planning to give Thoreau's great classic Walden a try. 

Hungry Hearts by Anzia Yezierska

"Was it then only a dream—a mirage of the hungry-hearted people in the desert lands of oppression—this age-old faith in America—the beloved, the prayed-for “golden country”? Had the starved villagers of Sukovoly lifted above their sorrows a mere rainbow vision that led them—where—where? To the stifling submission of the sweatshop or the desperation of the streets!"

Many years ago I read Anzia Yezierska's novel Bread Givers (1925) about a Russian Jewish family who move to New York's Lower East Side in the early 1900's.  The daughter, Sara Somilinsky, is in conflict with her father who wants her to stay home and lead a traditional life.  But Sara has dreams and wants an education and a chance for a brighter future.  I really enjoyed Bread Givers and I always meant to read more by Anzia Yezierska and so for the 2022 Back to the Classics category- choose a classic short story collection I decided to go with Hungry Hearts (1920) by Anzia Yezerskia.

Hungry Hearts consists of 10 stories set on the Lower East side of Manhattan.  Her characters are immigrant Jewish women and we learn about their dreams of finding love, happiness and belonging.  Each character in Hungry Hearts wants more out of life and to feel a part of America but it's not easy.  The tenements are bleak and the work when one can find it is exhausting.  Who has the time and the energy to dream and get an education?  And yet many of the women in Hungry Hearts are able to see a way to a brighter future.  But not all.  Some are ground down by poverty, landlords, sweatshops, bosses and the charity organizations that instead of helping treat the immigrants and the poor with condescension.

And yet, in the final story, How I Found America, we meet a young woman working long hours in a sweatshop with other immigrant women and the boss decides to cut their salaries. The young woman decides that she will say something to the boss and is promptly fired.  Leaving the factory upset she gets into a traffic accident, recovers and decides that she is not going back to the machines and enrolls instead in school.  She meets a teacher who really listens to her and the teacher reads a poem Our America by Waldo Frank:

"All the way home the words she read flamed before me: “We go forth all to seek America. And in the seeking we create her. In the quality of our search shall be the nature of the America that we create.” ... How glad I was that I had not stopped at the husk—a good job—a good living—but pressed on, through the barriers of materialism. Through my inarticulate groping and reaching-out I had found the soul—the spirit—of America"

Anzia Yezierska's novels and short stories like so many women writers from the 1920's fell into obscurity in the mid-twentieth century.  But thankfully her novels, memoir and short stories have had a revival.  I would start with Yezerskia's classic novel Bread Givers but Hungry Hearts is also well worth reading.  And though published in 1920 the issues tackled in Hungry Hearts: immigration, low wages, getting an education and finding your path in life regardless of the obstacles that others set up are as relevant today as they were one hundred years ago. 

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

"The dinner was a grand one, the servants were numerous, and every thing bespoke the Mistress’s inclination for show, and the Master’s ability to support it.  In spite of the improvements and additions which they were making to the Norland estate, and in spite of its owner having once been within some thousand pounds of being obliged to sell out at a loss, nothing gave any symptom of that indigence which he had tried to infer from it;—no poverty of any kind, except of conversation, appeared—but there, the deficiency was considerable".

I have read Pride and Prejudice twice in my life and loved the novel both times and when I get around to reading it again I know I will be just as enthralled. That said, in recent years I have also read Jane Austen's Persuasion and Northanger Abbey.   I was underwhelmed and so I approached Sense and Sensibility with trepidation.

But I am pleased to say I really enjoyed this book. The writing as always with Jane Austen is excellent and there was humor and the relationship between the two sisters at the center of this novel for me was the highlight of the book.  Elinor Dashwood representing rationality, decorum and common sense and her younger sister Marianne Dashwood representing heart on her sleeve romantic feeling was a nice contrast.

And I think Austen was making a point in Sense and Sensibility that in matters of the heart common sense and decorum are important but the courage to express one's emotions, what one is really feeling, is also needed, maybe not to the extent that Marianne does it but keeping everything bottled up as Elinor does throughout most of the book can have its drawbacks as well.  

Of course this is Jane Austen so I don't think I am giving away much of the plot when I say that it all ends happily.  And though a part of me wishes that Austen would have taken more risks in her books,  I must remember the era in which she lived, the early 19th century.  Jane Austen died in 1817 and never lived to see the arrival of railroad travel or the industrialization age.  What she knew was the world of the landed gentry in Britain and the families just a rung or two below.  As Austen once wrote to her niece: "Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on". 

Sense and Sensibility (2011) is my choice for the 2022 Back to the Classics category -choose a classic by a woman author

Night - A poem by Anne Bronte

I am continuing with my Victober Challenge.  I have read Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge and also My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell.  I recommend both.  We were also asked to read a poem from the Victorian Era.  I decided on Night by Anne Bronte which I like: 

Night by Anne Brone

I love the silent hour of night,

For blissful dreams may then arise,

Revealing to my charmed sight

What may not bless my waking eyes.

And then a voice may meet my ear,

That death has silenced long ago;

And hope and rapture may appear

Instead of solitude and woe.

Cold in the grave for years has lain

The form it was my bliss to see;

And only dreams can bring again,

The darling of my heart to me.

My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell

I decided to go with My Lady Ludlow by Elizabeth Gaskell (1858) for this year's Victober category -  choose a Victorian novel where chronic illness or disability is represented.  I was nervous about this category.  What would it have been like to be disabled in the 19th century?  But I finished My Lady Ludlow in good spirits.  This is a sweet and uplifting story about the impact a good person can make in the lives of others. 

The narrator of My Lady Ludlow is Margaret Dawson and when the novel begins she is an elderly woman looking back to 1800 when at age 16 she was sent to live with a distant relative, the Countess Ludlow of Hanbury Court.  Margaret's parents with nine children to raise had no choice but to accept Lady Ludlow's offer to have Margaret stay with her. 

When Margaret arrives at  Hanbury Court n the Village of Hanbury she meets other young women of aristocratic background who have fallen on hard times.  Lady Ludlow is running a kind of boarding school where the young women learn the skills one needs to get on in the world.  

Lady Ludlow can be strict in terms of how she likes things done but she is a decent, kind person.  The girls think highly of her and for Margaret, who narrates the book, this is particularly true because a year after Margaret Dawson arrives at Hanbury Court she starts to have trouble walking.  The situation deteriorates and Margaret is left crippled. 

Lady Ludlow could have sent Margaret back home to her parents. She doesn't do that.  Instead without ever mentioning Margaret's disability Lady Ludlow invites her to the office one day, gets a comfortable chair for Margaret to sit in, and explains that she has been needing an assistant and would Margaret be willing to help her out.  

As the years go by Margaret becomes a friend to Lady Ludlow and is often the sounding board for Lady Ludlow's opinions and she has strict opiions about the class system and people knowing their place.   A new young pastor for example, Mr. Gray, arrives in Hanbury with all kinds of revolutionary new ideas as Lady Ludlow sees it and she is not amused, particularly on the subject of educating the lower classes.  As she tells Margaret: 

"It was a right word,” she continued, “that I used, when I called reading and writing ‘edge-tools.’  If our lower orders have these edge-tools given to them, we shall have the terrible scenes of the French Revolution acted over again in England ... When I was a girl, one never heard of the rights of men, one only heard of the duties" 

Lady Ludlow is not perfect but she has empathy maybe because her own life despite her wealth and privilege has not been easy.  She is a widow and she lost all her children but one, her son Rudolph who lives in London.   She is rather lonely and one senses that the town of Hanbury is her family.  She keeps abreast of the goings on in the town and if anyone needs help no matter what class she will be there to see what she can do and as the times change, Lady Ludlow changes with them, including her views on educating the working classes.

Elizabeth Gaskell's great novels are North and South, Cranford, Wives and Daughters, Mary Barton and so if you have never read her that is where you should begin.  But I found My Lady Ludlow a heartwarming novel and what I have discovered in the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell is that she bridges the gap in her books between Jane Austen where  the lower classes are firmly off stage and Charlotte Bronte where if a Lord or Lady does show up in the text it's probably not in a flattering way.   Elizabeth Gaskell was more interested in bridging the divide knowing that people are not that different no matter their classs and that the times were changing.

The Mayor of Casterbridge: A Story Of A Man Of Character by Thomas Hardy

"Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.” - The Mayor of Casterbridge

I have been meaning to read Thomas Hardy for some time now and I figured when I finally got around to it I would start with Tess of the Ubervilles.  But this month I am taking the Victober Challenge and the group-read is The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and for someone like me who had never read Hardy before this book was quite the introduction.  The writing is brilliant, the characters are so memorable and it's a gripping read as well.  But having said this I am not sure how quickly I want to jump into my next Thomas Hardy novel and I will discuss why a bit later but first the plot.

The Mayor of Casterbridge takes place in rural England in the early part of the 19th century and the novel centers around Michael Henchard who is the mayor of the fictional town of Casterbridge.  Michael is a very successful man but he harbors a dark secret.  When he was twenty-one and living in another town he sold his wife and daughter to another man at the country fair.  How this could happen is that Michael Henchard's wife Susan was fed up with her drunken husband offering to sell her and their infant daughter Elizabeth Jane and so she agrees to go with the young sailor.

Michael wakes up the next morning and is horrified at what he did in his drunken state.  He tries to find Susan and his daughter Elizabeth Jane but they are gone.  No trace of them.  Eighteen years go by and Michael is the respected Mayor and business owner in the rural community of Casterbridge but he has never forgotten what he did when he was young.  He has never remarried and has sworn off alcohol.  The town knows nothing about his past.  He has become a lonely man.

And then one day Susan and Elizabeth Jane arrive in Casterbridge looking for Michael.  Susan is recently widowed from her sailor husband Richard Newson and Elizabeth Jane has never been told the truth about who Michael is and what happened that night in the tavern.  She thinks Michael is simply a distant relative that her mother is seeking out for help.

Susan and Michael reunite and marry but not long after the wedding Susan dies and leaves Michael a letter which is quite a revelation and the contents of this letter greatly affects his relationship with Elizabeth Jane.  Two other characters are also featured prominently in the novel.  The first is Donald Farfrae who starts out as Michael's friend and business assistant but Michael through his jealousy and suspicion turns Donald into a rival.  There is also Lucetta Templeman who Michael thoughtlessly dumps when Susan and Elizabeth Jane walk back into his life. But now that Susan is gone Michael assumes he can pick up with Lucetta where they left off.  

As the novel progresses Michael Henchard's fortunes take a nosedive on a level that I have rarely seen in a novel. Michael is a flawed man and his pride and temper lead to his downfall.  His past continues to stalk him as well.  But he is also capable of good and so the bad luck and the humiliations that continue to befall him I found increasingly hard to take.  

And so I came away from The Mayor of Casterbridge awed by Thomas Hardy's brilliance but hoping to find a Hardy novel where the outcome for the main character is a bit more uplifting and not so incredibly bleak as it was for poor Michael Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge.