10 favourite novels and some other lists about books

- 10 favourite novels (updated): 
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu 
Anna Karenina by Lev Tolstoy
War and Peace by Lev Tolstoy
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton 
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert 
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison 

- 3 favourite writers: 
Jane Austen 
Murasaki Shikibu 
Lev Tolstoy 

- 10 novels I feel worst for not having read:  
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 
Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe 
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman 
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
Hunger by Knut Hamsun 
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf 
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo 
The works of Emile Zola 

- 10 novels I very much want to read though won't read any time soon: 
Ulysses by James Joyce
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust 
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov 
Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac 
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco 
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray 
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk 
The Red and the Black by Stendhal  

Compare to my lists from 4 years ago.

Update on 27/12/2020: Less than half a year later, my top 10 favourite novels have been updated. 

The Tale of Genji: chapters 12-14, women

1/ Anyone who reads The Tale of Genji must sometimes wonder: but what does Murasaki Shikibu think? How does she really feel about Genji and his actions? Above all, what does she think about the patriarchal system she’s depicting? 
The novel is about the women in Genji’s life as much as it’s about him. Murasaki Shikibu seems to have sympathy for them all—from Fujitsubo, who lives in anguish because of fear and guilt and has to renounce life for her own safety, to Yugao, who goes into hiding because of threats from To no Chujo’s wife; from the Rokujo Haven, who feels neglected by Genji, humiliated by his wife, and tormented by her own jealousy, to the Reikeiden Consort, who isn’t among the Emperor’s favourites when he’s alive and forgotten after his death; from Suetsumuhana, who is paralysed with shyness because she has neither looks nor wit, to the Akashi Novice’s daughter, who is painfully conscious of her low rank and doesn’t want to be involved with Genji for fear of getting hurt; from the old staff woman, who still has sexual desire and cries about the treachery of time, to Murasaki, who is abducted as a small child then abandoned by her own father, and has nobody but Genji, etc. 
The Tale of Genji is so rich, so full of humanity, with a wide range of characters, especially female characters, and the author seems to love them all. The culture and social rules are alien, but the feelings are all recognisable—Murasaki Shikibu writes about love, loss, betrayal, jealousy, loneliness, grief, fear, guilt, shame, and so on. 
I do not know, at least for now, her feelings about the patriarchal system of Heian Japan, but her novel does depict a world in which women have confined roles, unable to do much and hidden away behind curtains and screens, whilst each men can have several wives and lovers, and can give other women night visits. Murasaki Shikibu writes about women yielding, or running away, or getting raped (in suggestive, subtle ways); she also writes about women suffering in loneliness and waiting for a man who never comes. 

2/ In chapter 10, Genji’s enemy (former Kokiden Consort, now Empress Mother) says she would cause his downfall. 
In chapter 11, there’s a little break, as Genji visits the Reikeiden Consort and her sister (Hanachirusato). 
But when we get to chapter 12, the downfall has happened. Murasaki Shikibu earlier has written at length about rituals, festivals, and death, but she chooses not to write about the events that led up to Genji’s banishment. 
I can’t help asking, what does she think? Indeed Genji is later restored to court, but does it necessarily mean that she sides with love, so to speak, and agrees with Genji that he is blameless and unjustly treated? Or does she think that the punishment is excessive and motivated by grudge, but Genji isn’t entirely blameless either and women have always been his main weakness? 

3/ See this quote from Virginia Woolf: 

“Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.” 

Let me change a bit: 

Here was a woman about the year 1000 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Murasaki Shikibu, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Murasaki and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Murasaki pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare. 

That is perhaps the only thing Murasaki Shikibu and Jane Austen have in common—they both write from a woman’s perspective, and thus write about conditions for women, without letting anger, resentment, or any preaching get in the way and distort their art. They become elusive. 
(Murasaki Shikibu has been called the medieval or Japanese Jane Austen—I myself have never understood these comparisons). 

4/ Speaking of Shakespeare, chapter 13 has such a Shakespearean moment. Did you expect it? I didn’t. It’s not exactly the same, but it made me think of King Lear. 
Powerful, intense, evocative images. 
The Tale of Genji, like Moby Dick or Tolstoy, makes most novels appear small and insignificant.

5/ We are told that Genji loves Murasaki more than anyone else—the characters too believe so. He moulds her into his ideal woman, and she turns out to be as he has wanted. 
Murasaki Shikibu doesn’t openly condemn the relationship, but she drops a few hints here and there. At the beginning, other characters are shocked by Genji’s interest in the girl, and he can get away with the abduction only because he’s the Emperor’s son. It is very subtle, but the scenes of Murasaki playing with dolls and not understanding his hints set a clear contrast between Murasaki as seen by Genji (a potential wife and surrogate for Fujitsubo) and Murasaki as she is (an innocent child who likes playing with dolls). 
Murasaki Shikibu also lets us see the girl’s unusual and vulnerable situation—Genji becomes her mother and father, she has nobody but him, and when he is banished, her biological father abandons her for fear of consequences. 
There are 2 scenes showing that their relationship (and marriage) isn’t as happy as it seems. The first time is in chapter 9, when Genji takes her virginity, unexpectedly. 
The second time is in chapter 14, when he tells her about his affair with the Akashi Novice’s daughter when he’s in exile, and his plan to bring the Akashi woman and their daughter to court. He talks like it’s only a fling and he has no choice. 
Both times, Murasaki is upset, angry, and hurt. Both times, she feels duped—betrayed. Both times, Genji fails to understand her feelings. 
In a subtle, natural way, Murasaki Shikibu conveys that a man’s plan to shape a girl from a young age into his ideal woman cannot work—he cannot see her for who she is, and does not understand her. 

6/ The Tale of Genji gives us a picture of the lives of women at the Heian court. 
Women have to share a husband (think of the Chinese film Raise the Red Lantern or the Vietnamese poem Cung oán ngâm khúc—Lament of a Royal Concubine), but they are not all equal. The Emperor’s Wife could be the Empress, or a Consort (Fujitsubo comes after the Kokiden Consort but is elevated to the rank of Empress), or lower (the second Emperor in the novel, Genji’s half-brother, doesn’t appoint Oborozukiyo as a Consort, which is a shame).  
A woman, in a way, has to compete to be recognised—to be one of the man’s women (Genji and the Rokujo Haven, for instance, aren’t official), and then has to compete to be a favourite, because the ones that aren’t favourites may be forgotten (such as the Reikeiden Consort). But even then, sometimes it’s not enough to be a favourite, because there are other factors—at the beginning of the novel, the Emperor’s favourite is the Kiritsubo Consort, Genji’s mother, but there is nothing he can do for her and Genji because she lacks power, whereas the Kokiden Consort is part of a powerful clan. 
In chapter 14, when the Emperor (Genji’s half-brother) abdicates and there is a second change in reign—replaced by Reizei, Fujitsubo’s son, at about the age of 11. We can see more clearly that different people, or different factions at court, try to introduce girls to the new Emperor.
In this context, the Akashi woman is an outsider. As her child’s wet nurse thinks, she is lucky.

The things left unsaid in The Age of Innocence

Writing about Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf ponders, if she had lived longer: 

“She would have devised a method, clear and composed as ever, but deeper and more suggestive, for conveying not only what people say, but what they leave unsaid; not only what they are, but (if we may be pardoned the vagueness of the expression) what life is.” (full essay)   

This is something I’ve noticed in The Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton writes a lot about things people leave unsaid.  
(From where we are, the 2 writers may not seem that far apart, at least to some of us, but more than 100 years passed between Jane Austen’s last novel, Persuasion, which was published in 1818, and The Age of Innocence, which was published in 1920, exactly 100 years ago). 
In The Age of Innocence, I think there are 3 main kinds of silence: 
1/ As Edith Wharton focuses on Newland Archer’s perspective (instead of switching between perspectives as she does in The Custom of the Country or The House of Mirth), such moments are about him—we know the things he thinks but doesn’t say. 
Newland has a gentleman’s restraint. For example, look at this exchange between him and his sister Janey: 

“"Not the half of one—if she thinks such old maid's rubbish."
"Mother is not an old maid," said his virgin sister with pinched lips.
He felt like shouting back: "Yes, she is, and so are the van der Luydens, and so we all are, when it comes to being so much as brushed by the wing-tip of Reality." But he saw her long gentle face puckering into tears, and felt ashamed of the useless pain he was inflicting.” (Ch.10)

 As he’s a gentleman, bound by conventions, there is lots of restraint in his conversations with Ellen Olenska. For example, this is when he and Ellen discuss her intention to file for divorce: 

“It was on his lips to exclaim: "My poor child—far more harm than anywhere else!" Instead, he answered, in a voice that sounded in his ears like Mr. Letterblair's: "New York society is a very small world compared with the one you've lived in. And it's ruled, in spite of appearances, by a few people with—well, rather old-fashioned ideas."” (Ch.12) 

Then: 

“"And you take their view?"
He stood up at this, wandered across the room, stared with void eyes at one of the pictures against the old red damask, and came back irresolutely to her side. How could he say: "Yes, if what your husband hints is true, or if you've no way of disproving it?"
"Sincerely—" she interjected, as he was about to speak.” (ibid.)   

He cannot bring himself to ask if she’s involved with her husband’s secretary, as her husband threatens to bring against her in the divorce. 

“Since she would not or could not say the one word that would have cleared the air, his wish was not to let her feel that he was trying to probe into her secret. Better keep on the surface, in the prudent old New York way, than risk uncovering a wound he could not heal.” (ibid.) 

As they both leave things unsaid, especially on Newland’s side, they keep the discussion on the surface and make assumptions about each other, and end up misunderstanding each other. In the end, Ellen chooses not to have a divorce, to protect him, May, and their families, and they cannot be together. 
There are many more such moments in The Age of Innocence. Newland may see all the conventions and restrictions in his society, but he too is part of society—he too has been brought up that way. He also chooses restraint and leaves thing unsaid, he also hints or avoids subjects instead of speaking frankly, he also keeps things on the surface, he also uses stock phrases like everyone else. He is exactly like the people he secretly condemns. 
However, this makes it so good when he confesses his feelings to Ellen. There is lots of passion, and a real sense of release.  
Later on, Newland, now married, still has restraint when seeing Ellen. Here is the scene in Boston: 

“The young man's blush deepened. She had pronounced the word as if it had no more significance than any other in her vocabulary. For a moment it was on the tip of his tongue to ask: "Did he send his secretary, then?" But the remembrance of Count Olenski's only letter to his wife was too present to him. He paused again, and then took another plunge.
"And the person?"— ” (Ch.23) 

A bit later: 

“They sat silent, not looking at each other, but straight ahead at the people passing along the path. Finally she turned her eyes again to his face and said: "You're not changed."
He felt like answering: "I was, till I saw you again;" but instead he stood up abruptly and glanced about him at the untidy sweltering park.” (ibid.) 

There he’s repressing his passion. It is no use. He’s now married. Anything with her is impossible. 

2/ The 2nd kind of silence is the silence of nearness and understanding, between Newland and Ellen—it is enough to be near each other, they do not speak. 

“As the paddle-wheels began to turn, and wharves and shipping to recede through the veil of heat, it seemed to Archer that everything in the old familiar world of habit was receding also. He longed to ask Madame Olenska if she did not have the same feeling: the feeling that they were starting on some long voyage from which they might never return. But he was afraid to say it, or anything else that might disturb the delicate balance of her trust in him. In reality he had no wish to betray that trust. There had been days and nights when the memory of their kiss had burned and burned on his lips; the day before even, on the drive to Portsmouth, the thought of her had run through him like fire; but now that she was beside him, and they were drifting forth into this unknown world, they seemed to have reached the kind of deeper nearness that a touch may sunder.” (ibid.) 

Later: 

“"And that's to be all—for either of us?"
"Well; it is all, isn't it?"
At that he sprang up, forgetting everything but the sweetness of her face. She rose too, not as if to meet him or to flee from him, but quietly, as though the worst of the task were done and she had only to wait; so quietly that, as he came close, her outstretched hands acted not as a check but as a guide to him. They fell into his, while her arms, extended but not rigid, kept him far enough off to let her surrendered face say the rest.
They may have stood in that way for a long time, or only for a few moments; but it was long enough for her silence to communicate all she had to say, and for him to feel that only one thing mattered. He must do nothing to make this meeting their last; he must leave their future in her care, asking only that she should keep fast hold of it.” (Ch.24) 

This is a magnificent scene. Newland and Ellen understand each other without speaking, they don’t need to say a word. They just stand there, in the moment. 

3/ The 3rd kind of silence, which I find particularly interesting, is May’s silence.  
Wharton does something interesting when she chooses to focus on Newland’s perspective, instead of switching between different points of view. We know what he thinks, we can guess what Ellen thinks, but what about May? How much does she know? 
Through Newland’s eyes, Wharton creates the impression that May is young, inexperienced, conventional, narrow, pure, and innocent—a nice girl, basically. But at the same time, we can see that May is not really what he thinks she is.  
Take this passage: 

“His wise May—how he had loved her for that letter! But he had not meant to act on it; he was too busy, to begin with, and he did not care, as an engaged man, to play too conspicuously the part of Madame Olenska's champion. He had an idea that she knew how to take care of herself a good deal better than the ingenuous May imagined. She had Beaufort at her feet, Mr. van der Luyden hovering above her like a protecting deity, and any number of candidates (Lawrence Lefferts among them) waiting their opportunity in the middle distance. Yet he never saw her, or exchanged a word with her, without feeling that, after all, May's ingenuousness almost amounted to a gift of divination. Ellen Olenska was lonely and she was unhappy.” (Ch.13) 

May has a sensitivity and perceptiveness that Newland doesn’t realise she has. She’s not naïve and ignorant either—he thinks nothing reaches her, but for a long time she knows about his previous affair with Mrs Rushworth, she just doesn’t ask about it.  
In this aspect, Newland is reminiscent of Ralph Marvell in The Custom of the Country—he looks down on his wife and underestimates her. 
To me, it’s obvious that May knows Newland’s involved with Ellen. When he speaks of going to Boston for business, it’s not stated in the novel but it should be easy for her to know that Ellen would also be there, as they’re cousins.  
The whole thing about the trip to Washington makes it even clearer, to the reader though not to Newland, that she knows. When he mentions the trip the 1st time, she tells him to remember to visit Ellen, I suppose, to see his reaction, and to let him know that she knows he lies. When their grandmother Mrs Manson Mingott has a stroke and wants Ellen back, the way May mentions Newland’s Washington business trip, in front of everybody, shows her cunning. They would cross paths. 
Later on, when the Wellands argue about who should pick up Ellen, and Newland volunteers, it seems obvious that May has been waiting to see what he says, then she acts like it’s all good, to keep up the happy couple image in front of her parents. But afterwards, she cross-examines Newland about why his employer (Mr Letterblair) goes to Washington but he doesn’t. 
I’ve written enough. May is no simpleton, and her silence is much more interesting as Wharton hints that she knows a lot more than she shows.

Another Emma

Whilst many people are reading Emma together (2015 marks the 200th anniversary of Emma; and 5 days ago was Jane Austen's 240th birthday), I've just read another Emma by Jane Austen. 
It's called The Watsons.
The question is: so many great books out there to read, why do we read unfinished novels? To satisfy our hunger for anything by a writer we love who wrote so little? To see a work in a progress and therefore gain insight into the author's process? To better understand the other, finished works?
All of those reasons, I guess. And another: to speculate why the writer abandoned it.
Here is the plot: the Watsons have 6 children- 2 sons Robert and Sam, 4 daughters Elizabeth, Emma, Penelope and Margaret (I'm not quite sure of the order). Emma has been singled out to live with and be brought up by her aunt and uncle, like Fanny Price, but at the beginning of the story she returns to her family, without a cent and adding to the burden, after her aunt remarries to an Irishman and loses everything because of the husband's will, which, by the way, sounds like Middlemarch. Robert Watson is a money-obsessed philistine, like the brother in Sense and Sensibility. Penelope and Margaret are husband hunters, or to put it more elegantly, they are very "bent on marriage" in order to escape poverty, which sounds like some supporting characters in Jane Austen's 1st 3 novels. Emma Watson has the sharp eye of Fanny Price and Anne Elliot and the sharp tongue and confidence of Elizabeth Bennet, who likely would have turned out to be a distinct character if Jane Austen had stayed with her, considering how different the 7 heroines are (I count Marianne Dashwood as well). And as usual, we have a good guy that looks boring, like Edward Ferras, Darcy, Edmund Bertram..., and a dashing and charming guy that is a scoundrel and hypocrite, like Willoughby, Wickham, Henry Crawford, William Elliot... The former is Mr Howard and the latter is Tom Musgrave, at this point I don't quite know how to categorise Lord Osborne.
Do I wish Jane Austen had completed it? In a way, yes. Look at what Virginia Woolf has to say:

"... To begin with, the stiffness and the bareness of the first chapters prove that she was one of those writers who lay their facts out rather baldly in the first version and then go back and back and back and cover them with flesh and atmosphere. How it would have been done we cannot say — by what suppressions and insertions and artful devices. But the miracle would have been accomplished; the dull history of fourteen years of family life would have been converted into another of those exquisite and apparently effortless introductions; and we should never have guessed what pages of preliminary drudgery Jane Austen forced her pen to go through..."

We don't know how it might have turned out- if curious, I'm curious because of my faith in Jane Austen.
To quote Woolf again:

"... But of what is it all composed? Of a ball in a country town; a few couples meeting and taking hands in an assembly room; a little eating and drinking; and for catastrophe, a boy being snubbed by one young lady and kindly treated by another. There is no tragedy and no heroism. Yet for some reason the little scene is moving out of all proportion to its surface solemnity. We have been made to see that if Emma acted so in the ball-room, how considerate, how tender, inspired by what sincerity of feeling she would have shown herself in those graver crises of life which, as we watch her, come inevitably before our eyes. Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet is composed of something that expands in the reader’s mind and endows with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial. Always the stress is laid upon character."

The scene, which Jane Austen reuses for Emma with Harriet Smith as "the boy" and George Knightley now "the kind young lady", makes me wonder and want to follow Emma Watson.
However, does this fragment have potential? I'm not so sure. Lady Susan, for all of its weaknesses of form and characterisation, gives me the feeling that if it had been rewritten so as to get rid of the epistolary form, and heavily revised, it might have become an interesting novel because of Susan Vernon alone. Jane Austen never comes that close to such a character- selfish, manipulative, scheming, cold-hearted and ruthless. Similar women can be found in the later works, but they are only in the background and seen from without whereas Susan is seen from within. Generally, the fault of The Watsons is similar to that of Lady Susan- in its early stage, the characters seem rather black and white. Worse, The Watsons appears quite simplistic, there is such a straight path- at the beginning of the story Elizabeth already tells Emma everything she needs to know about other family members and people in the neighbourhood and tells the truth, Emma already has good perception and correct impressions, the person she ignores she would eventually turn down, the person she dislikes in spite of his popularity is a jerk, the person she likes from the 1st she would eventually marry, in the fragment Emma Watson has perfect manners and kindness plus perceptiveness and doesn't seem to need any change or growth that many Jane Austen heroines experience. Of course one can argue that not all of them go through the same process, which would be repetitive, predictable and boring; Fanny Price and Anne Elliot don't, their stories are not of growth, but if we leave out Persuasion, which shows Jane Austen going in another direction at that point, the conflict of Mansfield Park is that the heroine is intellectually attracted to but morally repelled by and distrustful of a man. The conflict is enough for many readers to wonder whether she will choose Henry or Edmund eventually. It isn't a straight path, so to speak. If anything, it's Elizabeth Watson that has my interest- her declarations of indifference to Tom Musgrave, juxtaposed with all the little signs of interest and her incredulity at Emma's attitude, make clear that she's only denying.
No, I should stop there. It isn't fair to judge The Watsons, I don't know the whole plot, all I have is some opening chapters and a general idea about the ending. Who knows, Jane Austen might have done something magical if she had stayed with it. 
My thoughts now take another turn. If you put Jane Austen's novels in the same order as I do (NA=> S&S=> P&P=> MP=> E=> P), The Watsons is between Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, which somehow looks like a cross between the 2. Here is a young woman, independent, assured, fearlessly frank, artless and not at all superficial and mercenary like her sisters, and she goes to a ball, which is a marriage market, and meets some men. Doesn't that sound like Elizabeth Bennet? Instead of being prejudiced and mistaken, however, Emma Watson sees through everything and everyone and becomes the only person not to be infatuated with Tom Musgrave. But that's no fun. Jane Austen senses something wrong there, so what she does is bestow those attributes- sensitivity, perceptiveness and insight- on a character that seems like an opposite of Elizabeth Bennet- the quiet, timid, diffident Fanny Price. It is more interesting because, being more or less an outsider and being expected to be grateful, Fanny has no right to be obstinate and "irrational", and as she has been quiet all her life, the 1 time she refuses to comply, it becomes shocking, especially because others don't understand why she's not charmed with a man everyone else adores. In other words, The Watsons is not just a cross between the 2 works, it's a bridge.

The Portrait of a Lady: the characters and the author's sex

It is perhaps considered backward and narrow-minded, even sexist, to speak of the gender of a writer and of their creations, as though the differences between men and women are unbridgeable, as though writers are generally unable to portray convincingly characters of the opposite sex. I should look at the characters, the individuals, you may say. Why should gender be more significant than race or culture or class, you may ask. I don't think writing characters of the opposite sex is more difficult than writing the point of view of someone of another race or from another culture or another class, but there are still differences between men and women- I don't mean stereotypes like men are rational and women are emotional, or men like sports and women like fashion, or such bullshit, I mean, whether it's because of brains or genes or upbringing or the environment or personal experiences or everything, there are differences between men and women in thinking, observing people, perceiving the world, reacting to things, in concerns and interests, in habits, and so on. Charlotte Bronte doesn't see men, for example. Her male characters don't have the same vividness and vitality as her female characters (even though, as Virginia Woolf says, we don't read her for psychological insight, we can see Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe, Shirley Keeldar, Caroline Helstone), and when she attempts to write from a man's point of view (Louis Moore) in Shirley, it's a total failure. 
Now, on chapter 42, I'm thinking about the characters in The Portrait of a Lady and the author's sex. 
In his review of Middlemarch, Henry James complains that Will Ladislaw is a woman's man. I don't quite know what that means- how often do you find characters as excellently portrayed as George Eliot's Casaubon and Lydgate? But let's say the problem with Will is that he's a woman's man, I think the problem with Gilbert Osmond is that he's seen by a man. Perhaps that isn't it. All characters in The Portrait of a Lady seem vague, abstract, blurry, unclear. There is too much analysis; too much confusion. James, I'm afraid, doesn't quite capture the voices of his characters, when writing dialogue and when entering his characters' consciousness. There is lots of dialogue, but the dialogue doesn't seem real; one asks oneself if anyone speaks that way and thinks not; his characters' ways of speaking are strange. There is lots of- what? interior monologue? stream of consciousness?, but something is off, James doesn't get the "inner voice" of his beings; one looks at what he's doing and thinks he can't compare to Jane Austen and her mastery of the free indirect speech. All characters are vague. Yet I still feel that the problem with Osmond is that he's seen by a man. He is a villain, a bad boy of sorts; I compare him to the bad boys written by women- Jane Austen's Willoughby and especially Henry Crawford are utterly charming, Charlotte Bronte's Rochester, in spite of everything, can be fascinating, but it's hard to see how Osmond can charm Isabel Archer. An Osmond seen by a woman may let the readers see how a woman falls for him despite her earlier determination to be single, despite him having nothing whatsoever. Seen by a man, he is, as Walter Allen has put it, robbed "of a certain sexual magic". 
Am I being unfair to James? Perhaps I am. Because now I will venture to say, I'm afraid that the problem with Isabel may be that she's written by a man. Take the chapter I'm reading. Putting aside Caspar Goodwood, a woman who rejects a man for not feeling interested in marriage and for not knowing him well and then goes for someone only to find herself in an unhappy marriage is less likely to have the thought process as James describes Isabel as having, than to reconsider the man, see him differently and wonder what might have happened if she had chosen him. She doesn't have to love him or think highly of him, she doesn't even have to regret her decision, but the experience of marriage and the realisation that she has been mistaken in choosing her current husband would make her see that man in a different way, even if it's a slight difference, and would force her, at some point, to imagine a different path, a different scenario. We see that in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. Of course people are not the same, we think and act and react in different ways- I'm talking about what seems to me likely, and natural, though if you keep pushing I could be at a loss for words and end up saying it's personal. Maybe it is personal- all I can say is that Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, no matter how irrational and stupid and frustrating, never seem contrived and unnatural, and many other female characters by Tolstoy such as Natasha, Marya, Sonya, Hélène... are natural, vivid and full of life (except the bit about Natasha's changes in the epilogue), and Isabel is not only blurry and hard to describe but also a bit unnatural now and then, the the-author-doesn't-understand-women kind of unnatural. 
However, as written in an earlier post, the vagueness of Isabel is interesting and apparently deliberate, which invites us to be involved in the painting of her, in the solving of the puzzle named Isabel Archer. Others see her and try to read her and have their own theories about her and plans for her; others try to shape her the way they see fit; but she is never seen, even by the readers; she is larger than those perceptions and interpretations and discussions, larger than those theories and plans, larger than them all. Is that what James Wood say, in How Fiction Works? That she exists in spite of the abstractness, in spite of the lack of definition and depth, in spite of the inability to say exactly what she's like? Because she vibrates only because of James's anxious concern for her? 
The question is whether she is seen by James.

Henry James's "Daniel Deronda: A Conversation"

A critique of Daniel Deronda in the form of a short story, or rather, a play. 
There are 3 characters. 
Theodora adores George Eliot and says "A book like Daniel Deronda becomes part of one's life; one lives in it or alongside of it" and fervently defends Daniel Deronda. 
Pulcheria thinks George Eliot is no artist, appreciates Rosamond but doesn't believe in Dorothea, and harshly criticises Daniel Deronda, especially the Jewish plot and the characters in it "I don't see what you mean by saying you have been near those people, that is just what one is not. They produce no illusion. They are described and analyzed to death, but we don't see them or hear them or touch them. [...] They have no existence outside of the author's study". She complains "... what can be drearier than a novel in which the function of the hero- young, handsome, and brilliant- is to give didactic advice, in a proverbial form, to the young, beautiful, and brilliant heroine?". Even Gwendolen is problematic, she finds- "She was an odious young woman, and one can't care what becomes of her. When her marriage turned out ill she would have become still more hard and positive; to make her soft and appealing is very bad logic. The 2nd Gwendolen doesn't belong to the 1st". Pulcheria also says that Daniel Deronda doesn't have a current; it's not a river but a series of lakes. 
Constantius is in the middle, he admires George Eliot, especially her intellect, but also sees her deficiencies, and finds this book very much inferior to Middlemarch. 
I'm mostly on the side of Constantius and Pulcheria. 1 of the few things in which I disagree with Pulcheria is the depiction of Gwendolen. That's an excellent and well-drawn character. Indeed, it's a weakness that the narrator takes sides and doesn't give us Grandcourt's perspective, which makes him rather shadowy or at least hard to grasp as a character, but reading Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch helps see George Eliot's point about ethics- if there's a bit of conscience, there's a chance for improvement, and there can be improvement only if there's conscience, or to be more precise, the ability to find oneself wrong and feel bad about it. Gwendolen is very similar to Rosamond on the surface, but she isn't Rosamond, and her change is plausible. People are not static, sometimes tragedy brings about a great change in a person- Gwendolen learns through experience the way Dorothea does. That I've discussed before. 
However, in this story, Henry James does point out lots of problems I have with the novel. Or not only Daniel Deronda but also Middlemarch and Adam Bede, and I suppose other George Eliot novels I'll read in the future. George Eliot's mistake is that she's capable of creating wonderful characters, such as Edward Casaubon, Rosamond Vincy, Tertius Lydgate, Adam Bede, Mrs Poyser, Gwendolen Harleth... but likes to create characters that are ideal and perfect, characters that are embodiments of some ideas, characters that are there to support her didactic purpose. Look at Daniel Deronda, Mirah Lapidoth, Mordecai, Dinah Morris. Even Dorothea Brooke is frustrating in her saintliness, her childlike simplicity, her large heart. I don't demand fictional characters to always be realistic, like human beings- I don't stress on that as a criterion of literary merit, even if I like it. Many of my favourite characters are not realistic and might even be caricatures, like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, Mrs Norris in Mansfield Park, Mr Fairlie in The Woman in White, Joe in Great Expectations, the characters of Dead Souls, etc. It's just that I like characters to have a vivid existence within the world of the book, and to exist in their own right instead of embodying some ideas or teaching the readers something. You may say that it's not possible to say the characters in Daniel Deronda don't have a vivid existence, because they belong to the Jewish plot, and the Jewish plot is Idealism, as opposed to the Realism of the Gwendolen plot, and the 2 strands of Daniel Deronda are written in different styles, but in Middlemarch and Adam Bede we also find such characters, who are more like ideas than characters. 
As Virginia Woolf puts it: 

"Those who fall foul of George Eliot do so, we incline to think, on account of her heroines; and with good reason; for there is no doubt that they bring out the worst of her, lead her into difficult places, make her self-conscious, didactic, and occasionally vulgar." 

I don't know about her other books, but in all the 3 novels I have read, George Eliot likes to create a heroine that is an image of innocence, purity, nobility, benevolence, universal sympathy, forgiveness, saintliness... To use Jane Austen's words, pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked. It is dull to have a 1-dimensional character when that's an important character (minor/ supporting characters can be 1-dimensional). It is more frustrating when that character is just pure and noble and so good in every way. It spoils the book. 
Another issue, which Henry James doesn't mention, is the intrusive narrator. She takes control over everything, she is always present, she describes, addresses readers, comments on things, takes sides, takes care to make us like the right people, she never goes away. Readers have to adapt. 
Reading George Eliot takes efforts, appreciating her works requires readers to get accustomed to, and accept, the ever-present and moralistic narrator and the perfect, saintly heroes and heroines. Once one can get past the feeling of annoyance and accept these things as part of her art, one can recognise her formidable intellect and deep sensibilities and wisdom as well as her greatness as a writer. 

Sympathy and mockery; or Jane Austen's meanness

The line "What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?" in Middlemarch reminds me of the line "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?" from Pride and Prejudice. 

This is an interesting essay by Sarah Emsley about Jane Austen and the problem of charity: 

http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol26no1/emsley.htm

"Everybody's dear Jane" being uncharitable/ unfeeling/ mean/ cruel/ insensitive/ intolerant, etc. 
How can I defend her? I find her detached, and do notice some traces of meanness here and there in her works. I remember Nabokov's remark in his lecture that the deaths in Mansfield Park are functional deaths and no character dies in the arms of the author (which, if I'm not mistaken, is true for other novels too). I remember Woolf's comment that it seems like some characters are there only to give Jane Austen the pleasure of chopping their heads off. Whilst I remain firm in the opinion that she's superior to George Eliot as an artist, it's also true that George Eliot makes me aware of Jane Austen's smallness, in many senses of the word. The author of Middlemarch has a larger heart, deeper sensibilities. Some people find Flaubert cold and misanthropic but I can feel the deep sadness and hear Flaubert's sighs of resignation in Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education; some people criticise Nabokov for being icy and distant but Pnin is heartbreaking and Lolita made me want to cry for Dolores Haze; it is Jane Austen that is truly cold and detached and sometimes even harsh and unkind.
And yet her novels are about virtues, self-understanding, self-improvement. 
That woman is a bundle of contradictions. 

Get out of the way, will you?; or George Eliot vs some other writers

Page 193 of Middlemarch:

"These were actually Lydgate's first meditations as he walked away from Mr Vincy's, and on this ground I fear that many ladies will consider him hardly worthy of their attention..."

Page 195:

"Poor Lydgate! or shall I say, Poor Rosamond!"

Page 196:

"If you think it incredible that to imagine Lydgate as a man of family could cause thrills of satisfaction which had anything to do with the sense that she was in love with him, I will ask you to use your power of comparison a little more effectively, and consider whether red cloth and epaulets have never had an influence of that sort. Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite."

Then the narrative goes on, the author's presence is still felt on every page, but at least the "I" disappears or at least passes unnoticed. Then on page 224, chapter 20:

"Two hours later, Dorothea was seated in an inner room or boudoir of a handsome apartment in the Via Sistina.
I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly, with such abandonment to this relief of an oppressed heart as a woman habitually controlled by pride on her own account and thoughtfulness for others will sometimes allow herself when she feels securely alone. And Mr. Casaubon was certain to remain away for some time at the Vatican."

Page 225:

"To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world. But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot..."

The narrator doesn't say "I", but she's addressing (some of) the readers.
Page 226:

"... Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze..."

On the same page:

"Not that this inward amazement of Dorothea's was anything very exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among incongruities and left to "find their feet" among them, while their elders go about their business. Nor can I suppose that when Mrs. Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
However, Dorothea was crying, and if she had been required to state the cause, she could only have done so in some such general words as I have already used: to have been driven to be more particular would have been like trying to give a history of the lights and shadows, for that new real future which was replacing the imaginary drew its material from the endless minutiae by which her view of Mr. Casaubon and her wifely relation, now that she was married to him, was gradually changing with the secret motion of a watch-hand from what it had been in her maiden dream..."

She's still there. Yes, she's still there.
Page 228:

"... How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither? I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight—that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin."

Page 230:

"And by a sad contradiction Dorothea's ideas and resolves seemed like melting ice floating and lost in the warm flood of which they had been but another form. She was humiliated to find herself a mere victim of feeling, as if she could know nothing except through that medium: all her strength was scattered in fits of agitation, of struggle, of despondency, and then again in visions of more complete renunciation, transforming all hard conditions into duty. Poor Dorothea!..."

On page 232, George Eliot describes the 1st "argument" between Dorothea, now Mrs Casaubon, and her husband. He neglects her, noticing nothing. Dorothea feels useless, and betrays her feeling of anger. Here the intrusive narrator again speaks up:

"I fear there was a little temper in her reply."

I can't help thinking: Get out of the way, will you?
The problem is not so simple. It's not merely that the narrator constantly says "I" or addresses the readers or tries to evoke their sympathy by saying "we"/ "our"/ "us". It's not merely that the readers can see the author clearly on the page. Rather, it's the feeling that the whole book is a parable of sort, a story with a moral, told by George Eliot, an adult, to us children. Whilst telling the story, the adult comments on it, clarifies everything, keeps nothing subtle, lectures, moralises, directs our sympathy to the right people, explains for us who's good and who's bad and whom to like and whom to condemn, etc. George Eliot's description of what's going on in Mr Casaubon's mind doesn't create the impression (or illusion) of entering his mind; instead, it's still the voice of a person talking, talking to the readers.

"We are angered even by the full acceptance of our humiliating confessions—how much more by hearing in hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer, those confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and strive against as if they were the oncoming of numbness!"

His thoughts and feelings are not presented for their own sake. They are there for a purpose:

"She was as blind to his inward troubles as he to hers; she had not yet learned those hidden conflicts in her husband which claim our pity."

I will not compare George Eliot to Flaubert. I've done that before. Tom at Wuthering Expectations has also done it.
Instead, I'll refer to another female writer: Jane Austen. People can think more highly of Jane Austen or George Eliot, depending not on enjoyment and preference but on their aesthetics. According to mine, Jane Austen is the superior artist, who has what Virginia Woolf calls an androgynous and incandescent mind which "consumes all impediments", who writes "without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching", who presents things as they are, who is serious but never moralistic, who doesn't let personal feelings interfere with her art. She's also the more serious artist, seen in the way she works with the form, innovates, makes fun of conventions, parodies certain kinds of novels (the sentimental novel and the Gothic novel), in later works reacts against what she has done in previous works, etc. whereas George Eliot seems to use fiction as a means to another (higher?) end. Jane Austen frequently uses the free indirect speech, which she perfects in Emma, but it's Mansfield Park that best shows her superiority. As Caroline wrote a while ago, if George Eliot had written Mansfield Park, she would have taken care to make Henry and Mary less fascinating and more shallow, she would have made sure that readers side with Fanny. Or she would have made Henry change into a better man, for Fanny, but that's another story. 
George Eliot might be compared to Gogol and Tolstoy, who are not invisible. I'm thinking specifically of Dead Souls and War and Peace. The difference is that Gogol is only there in some of his digressions, and Tolstoy only appears in the essays on history and philosophy that he incorporates into his novel; neither let their private feelings and personal opinions distort their art, neither try to make the readers react and respond in a certain way, despite their didacticism. George Eliot does. That ruins her writing. 
However, hopefully in the end I may, like Virginia Woolf, see Middlemarch as a great work in spite of its imperfections, a much better novel than Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda. 

Which Austen heroine do you think Jane was most like?

https://rippleeffects.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/what-was-jane-austen-really-like-reading-cassandra-jane/
https://rippleeffects.wordpress.com/2008/10/17/what-was-jane-austen-really-like-reading-tomalin-and-shields/
https://rippleeffects.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/jane-austen-sense-or-sensibility/
https://rippleeffects.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/which-jane-austen-heroine-was-jane-most-like/

• Marianne Dashwood  5.2%  (14 votes)  
• Catherine Morland  1.86%  (5 votes)  
• Emma Woodhouse  6.32%  (17 votes) 
• Elizabeth Bennet  52.04%  (140 votes) 
• Fanny Price  4.83%  (13 votes)
• Anne Elliot  15.99%  (43 votes)
• Elinor Dashwood  13.75%  (37 votes)

Total Votes: 269

(Related: a discussion between Anna and Caroline on Jane Austen's MBTI:
http://thebriarfieldchronicles.tumblr.com/post/120734166397/its-funny-my-mbti-is-more-similar-to-jane-austens
http://annalynnaeus.tumblr.com/post/120735594995/thebriarfieldchronicles-its-funny-my-mbti-is
http://thebriarfieldchronicles.tumblr.com/post/120739891992/annalynnaeus-thebriarfieldchronicles-its
http://annalynnaeus.tumblr.com/post/120794221300/thebriarfieldchronicles-annalynnaeus)

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf remarks:

"Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare."

She writes more about her, as a writer and as a person, in the essay "Jane Austen":

"... Charming but perpendicular, loved at home but feared by strangers, biting of tongue but tender of heart — these contrasts are by no means incompatible, and when we turn to the novels we shall find ourselves stumbling there too over the same complexities in the writer."

"... One of those fairies who perch upon cradles must have taken her a flight through the world directly she was born. When she was laid in the cradle again she knew not only what the world looked like, but had already chosen her kingdom. She had agreed that if she might rule over that territory, she would covet no other. Thus at fifteen she had few illusions about other people and none about herself. Whatever she writes is finished and turned and set in its relation, not to the parsonage, but to the universe. She is impersonal; she is inscrutable. When the writer, Jane Austen, wrote down in the most remarkable sketch in the book a little of Lady Greville’s conversation, there is no trace of anger at the snub which the clergyman’s daughter, Jane Austen, once received..."

"But the gossip says of Jane Austen that she was perpendicular, precise, and taciturn — 'a poker of whom everybody is afraid'. Of this too there are traces; she could be merciless enough; she is one of the most consistent satirists in the whole of literature. [...] Sometimes it seems as if her creatures were born merely to give Jane Austen the supreme delight of slicing their heads off. She is satisfied; she is content; she would not alter a hair on anybody’s head, or move one brick or one blade of grass in a world which provides her with such exquisite delight."

Which of her 7 heroines was she most like? Catherine and Emma, in my opinion, can be right away scratched off from the list. The former is naive and innocent, with little experience and little insight; the latter is officious, snobbish, rude and mistaken about everything. Jane Austen understood and sympathised with them and forgave them their foibles and mistakes, because of their sincerity, good intentions, capability of self-reflection and wish for improvement, which distinguishes them from characters such as Mary Crawford, but she's unlike Catherine and Emma because with those sharp eyes, she noticed everything, saw through all pretensions, and had few illusions about herself and the world. Jane Austen's 6 novels, on the superficial level, are about love and money; on a deeper level, about virtues, balance and self-understanding.
It would do her injustice to think that 1 of her heroines was an image of herself as though we're not taking her seriously as a writer. Why should we suppose that Jane Austen was like 1 of her 7 heroines, considering how different, how diverse they are, and the fact that she sympathised with all of them? Each of these characters is an individual existing for her own sake and at the same time a study of 1 type of woman, which should be seen in relation to all the others. The Jane Austen I imagine in my head would be an introvert; wouldn't write to any man anything remotely like those letters Charlotte Bronte wrote to Constantin Héger or George Eliot wrote to Herbert Spencer when they were rejected; would be somehow terrifying before strangers due to her perceptiveness and irony; would be a combination of Elizabeth and Fanny, or more specifically, the wit and humour of the former and the level-headedness, clear-sightedness, strong principles and censoriousness of the latter. Impersonal, detached, lacking the sympathy of Tolstoy or George Eliot, Jane Austen may now and then sound harsh, unkind, if not even mean, unforgiving. Sometimes I can't help feeling that perhaps she was more like Fanny than people think, a Fanny without the timidity and the feeling of an outsider, and with humour. In my mind Jane Austen, like Fanny, was able to see through all pretensions and had no illusions about reforming bad guys such as Henry Crawford but who was nevertheless able to laugh at the folly of others. Elizabeth's well liked because of her wit, humour, free spirit and independent mind, but instead of coolly observing people as Fanny does (albeit critical of the Crawfords, Fanny empathises with those that are slighted or wronged, and thinks it not right to generalise about some groups of people, as Mary does), Elizabeth judges people hastily, lets prejudice colour her judgement and falls for Wickham. Jane Austen, who always wrote about delusion and misjudgement and depicted such a variety of hypocrites, was unlikely to be like that.
What do you think? 

On Great Expectations- a response to Caroline

This post is a response to Caroline's comment here:
http://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.no/2015/04/literature-reading-taste-critiques.html
I thought of writing a comment right there, and then realised that I had never written a post about Great Expectations before (except this comparison and these brief comments). So here goes:
1/ The word "real" appears 4 times in Caroline's comment.
Let me quote Nabokov: 

"The world the artist creates for this purpose may be entirely unreal—as for instance the world of Kafka, or that of Gogol— but there is one absolute demand we are entitled to make: this world in itself and as long as it lasts, must be plausible to the reader or to the spectator."

2/ "Biddy and Joe don't seem real enough."
There are different kinds of books, different kinds of writers. Some novelists create well-developed, realistic, complex characters that are like human beings, e.g. Tolstoy, Flaubert, Jane Austen, Turgenev, George Eliot, etc. Some novelists create some other kinds of characters, e.g. Kafka, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, etc. I'm fine with it. Personally speaking I like writers who create characters that are like human beings, full of life and full of contradictions, but that's not what I look for when reading a book, and I don't think it's fair to use the same standard for all novels and criticise some writers for not achieving what they don't set out to achieve.
Having said that, I think Joe is more than a caricature. In some scenes he can be ridiculous, like a big kid, such as when he meets Miss Havisham and insists on talking to Pip when she asks him questions. But some scenes give him a kind of humanity, such as when he sees the gap between Pip and himself and notices Pip's change in attitude, which makes him alter his way of speaking and keep a distance. Joe may act like a silly, childlike person throughout most of the book, but he feels nervous and embarrassed, can perceive Pip's shame, and also has his pride. His refusal to get anything from Jaggers and his cold attitude to Pip are signs of pride. These things give him complexity, make him human. In 1 scene, Pip says to Biddy that Joe is backward, and Biddy asks "And don't you think he knows that?" I think that's 1 of the saddest and greatest lines in Great Expectations.

3/ "I can appreciate the development of Pip's mind, the feeling of having risen and feeling ashamed of your humble origins".
And then feeling ashamed of having felt ashamed. Because what does Pip learn as he's educated to become a gentleman? Hardly anything worthwhile. Manners, some subjects that hardly equip him for a real job, bourgeois life, nothing at all about responsibility, kindness, nothing about how to be a decent human being. As Pip becomes a gentleman, he becomes a despicable person- has fun, gets into debt, feels ashamed of his origins, looks down on poor people, changes his attitude towards Joe, acts selfishly... It's only when everything collapses for him that he learns a lesson and becomes a better person.

4/ "Pip's feelings are the only thing that seems real to me in that novel."
If "real" means "realistic", Miss Havisham perhaps isn't real. I don't know any Miss Havisham in real life, and don't think I ever will. But that doesn't matter, she's real in that world created by Dickens. Deceived, disappointed and disillusioned, she cannot move on but chooses to be frozen in time- always in that house, always in that wedding dress, away from everyone, away from life. Her anger at 1 man extends to all men and she transfers that hatred to Estella, only to repent it later when she realises what she has done. We may not find such a person in life, but I have no doubt in her existence and the plausibility of her actions within the world of the book. I would even say that she's 1 of the greatest creations in literature. Without Miss Havisham, we wouldn't have the masterpiece Sunset Boulevard and the magnificent short story "A Rose for Emily" and perhaps some other great works of art I don't know of or can't remember at the moment.
Estella is also a good character. If Biddy lacks some complexity to seem real (though I don't find it a problem), Estella acts like a seductive, heartless, vain, cruel girl but behind it is her more sensitive and vulnerable side, her self-loathing, and Pip sees through it. She says she has no heart, but that doesn't mean she cannot feel, doesn't mean that she doesn't understand herself. 1 of the best scenes in Great Expectations is where she announces her engagement to the despicable Drummle to punish herself and Miss Havisham, saying that she is what Miss Havisham has made her.
"Great Expectations I think is considered his greatest because of Pip's feelings which seem very real to us."
More than that. As I've written above, Miss Havisham, Estella and Joe are all good characters. And then the plot, the story, the themes, the individual scenes, the language...

5/ "The big reveal about Magwitch seems anticlimactic compared to the opening chapters."
I didn't feel that way.

6/ "Miss Havisham's friends are bores".
They're meant to be.

7/ "though she seems scary".
Miss Havisham is a fascinating character not simply because she's scary. Keywords: grief, despair, revenge, repentance. How I love the 1st scene Pip meets her- all the clocks are stopped at the same time, the waxwork- skeleton woman picks something up only to put it down at exactly the same spot.

8/ "Dickens' other novels do not explore much psychological depth".
"Dickens was a master at atmosphere, caricature, Victorian world-building rather than psychological exploration".
"I think writing emotional complexity was a bit out of Dickens' depth".
Great Expectations is not without psychological depth (note: Pip), but a more important point is that psychological depth is not the only criterion of literary merit. 
Let me digress and ask: Do we read Charlotte Bronte for psychological depth? I'm going to choose the easy way- quoting Virginia Woolf: 

"... we read Charlotte Brontë not for exquisite observation of character — her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy — hers is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life — hers is that of a country parson’s daughter; but for her poetry. Probably that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering personality, so that, as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things which makes them desire to create instantly rather than to observe patiently. This very ardour, rejecting half shades and other minor impediments, wings its way past the daily conduct of ordinary people and allies itself with their more inarticulate passions..."

Readers who approach Charlotte Bronte with the expectation of finding "exquisite observation of character" or "psychological depth", as can be found in the works of Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Lermontov, Turgenev..., would be disappointed. Her heroines are strong, independent women like her who are once in a while her mouthpieces. Her heroes are her fantasies of dominating men. Charlotte Bronte's strengths are in other things- her poetry, her beautiful language, striking images, powerful emotions, her spirit and overpowering personality, her passion and refusal to stay within bounds... That's what matters. There are different kinds of books, different kinds of writers.

9/ "it is clumsily written". 
If this refers to the language, the style, I don't feel that way. 
If this refers to the plot, I don't feel that way either. If there's anything that slightly bothers me, it's the fact that the girl Pip loves, the adopted daughter of a woman he meets by chance, turns out to be the daughter of the man he previously ran into as a kid and the woman that works for his lawyer. The everyone-turns-out-to-be-connected-to-each-other-and-fits-perfectly-in-the-book thing. Contrived. But Jane Austen also does this, in Sense and Sensibility especially. George Eliot does this, in Daniel Deronda. Charlotte Bronte does this, in Jane Eyre and Shirley and most of all in Villette. Fiction has its conventions, so I'm OK with it, as long as it's not too outrageous, unacceptable. The reveal in Great Expectations doesn't seem so forced. 

Now I feel like grabbing a Dickens novel. 

The Madwoman in the Attic, George Eliot, female novelists, feminist criticism, Virginia Woolf

The other day, in The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, I read the introduction and several chapters on Snow White, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte. Now I've just read the chapters on George Eliot, and some passages on Virginia Woolf's reading of Paradise Lost. 
The same feeling of irritation, with some kind of distaste. 
The authors' reading is reductive and distorting and ideologically-driven. This is submission. That is renunciation. Those are patriarchal values. This is misogyny. That is self-hatred. This is upholding of conventional values. That is anti-feminism. This is feminine evil. That is male anxiety. This is female passivity. There the authoress is punishing her heroines. Etc. Etc. I'm too lazy and busy to dissect these long chapters, point out all the assertions and remarks I have problems with and comment on each of them. Gubar's analysis of Shirley is generally OK, as Shirley is a political novel (even without the themes of industrialisation and Ludditism) and there's no other way to look at it, but that's not the case with many other works. Gubar and Gilbert go too far in their feminist reading, creating the impression that when they examine a literary work, what they look at and look for is not its literary merits but its political significance, its portrayal of women, its feminism/ anti-feminism, its attitude towards the male-dominated society and tradition, its take on the conventional images in literature of women as the angel or the monster/ the madwoman, and so on and so forth. It is inartistic, simplistic and frustrating. 
It is, I think, not accurate to attribute my reaction to this book simply to my general dislike of feminist criticism (The Madwoman in the Attic is, by the way, considered a landmark, a ground-breaking work). Being female, I definitely notice and very often feel bothered by the sexism, bias and prejudice of some writers, and don't deny that feminist criticism can be useful. It should also be noted that Virginia Woolf is a favourite literary critic of mine (though I'm aware that her essays are more like commentaries or reviews), besides, say, Nabokov, and I have tremendous admiration and love (yes, love) for her A Room of One's Own and The Common Reader. However, while discussing the differences in circumstances between male and female writers, pointing out the obstacles and challenges against women and the effects these have on their works, she reads the novels by Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Jane Austen and George Eliot and other authors, as novels, as works of art, and it's from this point of view, as she prioritises art over politics, that she can see how Charlotte Bronte lets indignation distort her works and therefore gets less said despite having more genius in her than Jane Austen or how George Eliot becomes clumsy for trying to write a man's sentence or how Jane Austen's novels are not less important than those books about war and politics because what matters is that they're well-written, etc. She discusses literature and women authors but doesn't necessarily sees individual works through the lens of feminist criticism, doesn't impose ideas and ideologies on them and doesn't try to bend them to fit some theories. She definitely doesn't point at something and put some label on it like "submission" or "renunciation" or whatever as I've written above, which Gilbert and Gubar do. With her essays, Virginia Woolf has made me embrace my gender and think differently about literature and female novelists. That's where she differs from Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. 




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Below are some interesting quotes on George Eliot from The Madwoman in the Attic. So far I have only read Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda and don't want to say anything. When I consider myself more familiar with George Eliot, I will come back and comment on them. 

"Eliot's punishment of her heroines, her frequent bouts of illness, her often censorious avuncular tone, and her masculine pseudonyms all suggest the depth of her need to evade identification with her own sex."

"By perpetuating [the myth of feminine evil], Eliot demonstrates her internalization of patriarchal culture's definition of the woman as the 'other'. We can see the signs of that internalization throughout her career- in her continued guilt over societal disapproval, her avowed preference for male friends, her feminine anti-feminism, her self-deprecatory assumption that all other forms of injustice are more important subjects for her art than female subjugation, her extreme dependence on Lewes for encouragement and approbation, her inability to face the world as a writer and read even the most benevolent reviews of her work."

"Although until quite recently she has been viewed almost exclusively in terms of male literary history, Eliot shows in "The Lifted Veil" that she is part of a strong female tradition: her self-conscious relatedness to other women writers, her critique of male literary conventions, her interest in clairvoyance and telepathy, her imagery of confinement, her schizophrenic sense of fragmentation, her self-hatred, and what Emily Dickinson might have called her "Covered Vision" place Eliot in a tradition that still survives today."

"Insisting on the primacy of male spheres of activity, Eliot aspires to the 'masculine' scientific detachment of an essayist producing and analyzing 'slices of life'. And in this respect, as in so many others, Scenes of Clerical Life forecasts the camouflages of her later fiction. Adam Bede, with its masculine title, relies on the story of fallen and female Hetty Sorrel for its suspense, just as Felix Holt the Radical maps the mental and moral development of Esther Lyon, while both The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch announce themselves as sociological studies of provincial life, though they were originally conceived and still come across as portraits of female destiny. And at the end of her literary career Eliot wrote Daniel Deronda, a book that could as easily be entitled 'Gwendolen Harleth'."

What do you think about these assertions?