Middlemarch by George Eliot

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf

My Antonia by Willa Cather
Houghton Mifflin, 1988 (Originally published 1918)
Novel, 238 pages

Considered one of the outstanding American novels, My Antonia was first published in 1918, but retains a truth of rural life. Willa Cather tells her story through the eyes of a boy, Jimmy, who after the death of his parents leaves Virginia for his grandfather's farm in the midland plains of Nebraska. It is the story of a childhood spent in little towns of the prairies "buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes in climate." Antonia is a Bohemian girl, a new neighbor, who fascinates Jimmy, embodying "the country, the conditions, the whole adventure" of that childhood, as well as the indomitable immigrant spirit that so captivated Cather. L.H.

Excerpt

I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning. Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping.

Return to top of page

Middlemarch by George Eliot
Originally published serially, 1871-72
Novel, 823 pages

If you found you couldn't miss a single episode of Masterpiece Theater's recent six-part version of Middlemarch, you will want to read (or reread as I did) George Eliot's masterpiece of Victorian provincial life. Watching the television version brings memorable characters vividly to life, but missing is Eliot's wry narrative voice as she describes, for example, the beautiful and egotistical Rosamond: "Think no unfair evil of her, pray: she had no wicked plots, nothing sordid or mercenary; she never thought of money except as something necessary which other people would always provide."

Middlemarch sets the stage for exploration of the marriage drama-in particular the difficulties posed by matches that defy convention-against the mores of small town life. Except for the exquisite Victorian language they use, the characters seem contemporary, and certainly, their struggles are timeless. J.G.

Excerpt

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.

Return to top of page

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Viking, 1986 (Originally published 1939)
Novel, 581 pages

The Joad family, like thousands of uprooted families in the 1930's, leave the barren land of Oklahoma, just ahead of the gigantic tractors of Corporate America. "The bank- the monster has to have profits all the time. It can't wait. It'll die." The Joads head for California, land of promise for food, clothing, and the self-respect of making a living. "I'm just tryin' to get along without shovin' nobody around."

It is courage and a hope for something better that gets them to the New Land. But California uses them up, pitting man against man. The job-and the lowest wages-go to the most desperate. This is a story of survival and the affirmation of human dignity as events conspire to destroy and degrade. It's never too late to read this American classic. If you've already read it, it's well worth reading again. J.M.

Excerpt

And gradually the greatest terror of all came along. They ain't gonna be no kinda work for three months. In the barns, the people sat huddled together; and the terror came over them, and their faces were gray with terror. The children cried with hunger, and there was no food.

Return to top of page

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
First published in 1847
Novel, 452 pages

Jane Eyre is a powerful novel of a woman making her way alone. She is an orphan both literally and in the sense that women are orphans in the world of men. This classic is more than a Gothic romance. Read it for the first time -- or reread it as a novel in which what the character says and does can lift the spirit and nourish the souls of women everywhere. N.P.

Excerpt

I am not an angel and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself, Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me-for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not anticipate.

Return to top of page

Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938
Essay, 220 pages

"How in your opinion are we to prevent war?" With a sense of irony that an educated man should ask a woman-until recently not even considered equal to the task of voting-for her opinion on such a weighty matter, Virginia Woolf considers this question in her brilliant book-length essay, Three Guineas. Through astute and meticulously reasoned arguments, she demonstrates how war is systemically entwined with patriarchy and capitalism. A sense of righteous indignation and, at times moral outrage, pulse beneath the surface of her words; her emotions, though, never distract, having been harnessed in service to utterly civil discourse. Woolf's formula for solving the problem of war requires big social and economic changes, and many will dismiss it as impractical. In any serious effort to create lasting peace, however, her arguments simply cannot go unheeded. C.W.

Excerpt

For if you agree to these terms then you can join the professions and yet remain uncontaminated by them; you can rid them of their possessiveness, their jealousy, their pugnacity, their greed. You can use them to have a mind of your own and a will of your own. And you can use that mind and will to abolish the inhumanity, the beastliness, the horror, the folly of war. Take this guinea then and use it, not to burn the house down, but to make its windows blaze. And let the daughters of uneducated women dance round the new house, the poor house, the house that stands in a narrow street where omnibuses pass and the street hawkers cry their wares, and let them sing, "We have done with war! We have done with tyranny!" And their mothers will laugh from their graves, "It was for this that we suffered obloquy and contempt! Light up the windows of the new house, daughters! Let them blaze!"

Return to top of page