Tom Crewe: Ten Surprising Nineteenth-century Novels
By Vintage
Tom Crewe: Ten Surprising Nineteenth-century Novels
By Vintage
One of the things I wanted to achieve with my novel, The New Life, set in the 1890s, was to defamiliarise the Victorian age: to make people feel it as fresh, and modern, and edgily disorientating – as it was to the people who lived in it. We have so many lazy inherited prejudices and stereotypes about what the Victorians were like, most of which have to do with ideas of stuffiness and repression, or melodrama and sickly-sweet sentimentality. Some of these are reinforced by nineteenth-century fiction, more especially by TV and film adaptations. But many great novels of the era show us other things, and retain their capacity to surprise – if only by proving how foolish we are in our preconceptions.
It is also the case that we have lazy inherited prejudices and stereotypes about which nineteenth-century novels – and which nineteenth-century novelists – matter. There are many wonderful books that are woefully under-read. Reading beyond the familiar names, or even the familiar titles by a favourite author, will change your sense of the period.
I could have written a hundred different lists on this theme, but here is one:
Cousin Bette
Honore de Balzac
£10.99 £10.44Balzac is irresistible. Cousine Bette is a kind of sinister farce: Valerie Marneffe is at one point juggling relationships with at least four men, in a secret alliance with the eponymous Bette. These two women are compelling, charismatic villains, whom we can’t help but admire.
Dombey and Son
Charles Dickens
£9.99 £9.49I’m amazed by how few people seem to have read this great novel, even when they’re fans of Dickens. It has some of his best writing – Dickens surely had the most extraordinary prose style of any writer in his century – and a powerful treatment of an unhappy marriage.
The Small House at Allington: The Chronicles of Barsetshire
Anthony Trollope
£9.99 £9.49In the fourth of his Barsetshire series, Trollope is coolly brilliant in his depiction of the jilting of a good woman by a disappointing man. This narrative strand reaches an equally brilliant and mundane anti-climax in The Last Chronicle of Barsetshire.
The Eternal Husband
Fyodor Dostoevsky
£7.99 £7.59This is a terrifically weird and pressurised short novel, about Velchaninov, who is stalked by the man he cuckolded. Highly recommended.
Crime of Father Amaro
Eca De Queiros
£12.95An overwhelmingly intense and beautifully written work by Portugal’s great nineteenth-century novelist, about a young priest who begins a dangerous affair.
Miss Marjoribanks
Margaret Oliphant
£10.99 £10.44This is a delightful comic masterpiece that everyone should read, and the most interesting book about men written by a nineteenth-century woman. I wrote more about it here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n14/tom-crewe/on-the-shelf.
The Ladies Lindores.
Margaret Wilson Oliphant
£21.83I make no apology for having Mrs Oliphant on this list twice. It’s enraging that this wonderful British novelist is so little read or even known about, and that so much of her work has not been republished by the major publishing houses. The Ladies Lindores showcases her trademark qualities: a close attention to the experience of women, especially in marriage; a critical treatment of men but a sympathetic understanding of the demands of a constructed masculinity; a refusal to endorse easy or traditional assumptions; complex, self-scrutinising characters with shifting motivations; a wise and witty sensibility, just in view behind a fine prose style. The same things could be said of A Country Gentleman and his Family and Hester, to name just two more of her 98 novels.
New Grub Street
George Gissing
£10.99Gissing gives us London in the 1890s, with its cheapness and bleakness and squashed-down dreams. It is the Victorian novel with all illusions stripped away.
Esther Waters
George Moore
£9.99 £9.49Another 1890s book of massive power, built of beautiful scenes, about the misfortunes of Esther Waters, a housemaid who is seduced at work and battles to carry her son through to adulthood. She is simple and stolid, but at moments rises to profound insight and eloquence.
The Real Charlotte
Martin Ross and Edith Onone Somerville
£18.98This novel, also of the 1890s, was written in partnership by the Anglo-Irish cousins, Edith Somerville and Violet Martin (who used a male pen-name). It deserves to be much better known. Exquisite prose, and an outsized title character in the manipulative Charlotte Mullen, who boils beneath her cheery surface politeness.