Category: Classics Club

The Classics Club Spin #16

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The Classics ClubHow time flies because it’s time for another Classics Club spin!

I’ve been making very little progress with my Classics Club List of late because I keep getting tempted by new releases and blog tours. So this is a great opportunity to focus on it and at least get one book from the list read before the end of the year!

The rules (courtesy of The Classics Club) are simple:

  • Go to your blog
  • Pick twenty books that you’ve got left to read from your Classics Club List
  • Try to challenge yourself: list five you are dreading/hesitant to read, five you can’t WAIT to read, five you are neutral about, and five free choice (favourite author, re-reads, ancients – whatever you choose)
  • Post that list, numbered 1-20, on your blog before Friday, November 17th
  • That morning (17th November), we’ll announce a number from 1-20. Go to the list of twenty books you posted, and select the book that corresponds to the number we announce
  • The challenge is to read that book by December 31st, even if it’s an icky one you dread reading! (Not fair not listing any scary ones!)

So without further ado, here’s my spin list. My Classics Club List focused on women writers – with a few books by John Buchan thrown in for good measure. For my spin list, I’ve chosen mainly books I already own so there’s no excuse not to read whatever is selected!

  1. The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood
  2. The Power House by John Buchan
  3. The Watcher by the Threshold by John Buchan
  4. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
  5. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
  6. The Price of Salt (Carol) by Patricia Highsmith
  7. The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby
  8. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
  9. Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
  10. Invitation to the Waltz by Rosamond Lehmann
  11. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
  12. The Bell by Iris Murdoch
  13. Katherine by Anya Seton
  14. Memento Mori by Muriel Spark
  15. The Flowers of Adonis by Rosemary Sutcliff
  16. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor
  17. The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Armin
  18. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson
  19. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
  20. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

What would you be hoping for, or dreading, if you had my list? (Personally, I’m just hoping for a short one!)

 

Throwback Thursday: Lady Susan by Jane Austen

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ThrowbackThursday

Throwback Thursday is a weekly meme hosted by Renee at It’s Book Talk. It’s designed as an opportunity to share old favourites as well as books that we’ve finally got around to reading that were published over a year ago. If you decide to take part, please link back to It’s Book Talk.

This week, a proper throwback! I’m sharing my review of Lady Susan by Jane Austen, a short epistolary novel thought to have been written in 1794 (when Jane Austen would have been 19) but never submitted for publication by the author and only published in 1871, years after her death. It’s a book I read as part of the Classics Club Challenge and my From Page to Screen Challenge, based around books adapted into films.  You can read my comparison of the book and the film, Love and Friendship, here.

lady-susanAbout the Book

Lady Susan takes the form of letters between Lady Susan Vernon and her friend Mrs Johnson, between Lady Susan’s sister-law, Mrs Vernon, and her mother Lady de Courcy and Mrs Vernon’s brother, Reginald. Lady Susan is beautiful, flirtatious and recently widowed. The letters tell of her attempts to seek an advantageous second marriage for herself and persuade her daughter into a decidedly less attractive match.

My version was a free to download edition from Amazon.

Find Lady Susan on Goodreads

My Review

Although a juvenile work that ends rather abruptly (as if the author tired of writing it), Lady Susan has the trademark wit and ability to skewer social foibles one associates with later Jane Austen novels. Notably, the eponymous heroine is an older woman who is by turns scheming, selfish, unscrupulous and conducting an unsuitable relationship with a married man. Lady Susan has no compunction about freeloading from relatives, telling falsehoods or manipulating others. Not exactly the typical heroine of a romantic novel! However, Austen manages to make the reader admire Lady Susan, if not for her morals, for her independent spirit and sheer determination to live life to the full.

The one aspect of Lady Susan’s character that gives the reader pause for thought is her awful treatment of her daughter, Frederica, whom she describes as “a stupid girl” with “nothing to recommend her”. In fact, Frederica is a rather charming young girl but suffers in Lady Susan’s eyes because of her “artlessness” when it comes to capturing a man. When Frederica resists her mother’s plan for her to marry the brainless Sir James, Lady Susan congratulates herself on her maternal affection in not insisting on the marriage, remarking that she will merely make Frederica “thoroughly uncomfortable till she does accept him”.

Lady Susan has a fitting partner-in-crime in her friend, Mrs Johnson, who advises Lady Susan to pursue Reginald de Courcy on the grounds that his father is “very infirm, and not likely to stand in your way long”. Mrs Johnson herself has the misfortune to be married to a man “just old enough to be formal, ungovernable, and to have the gout; too old to be agreeable, too young to die.”   Only Mrs Vernon is able to see through Lady Susan’s duplicity: “Her address to me was so gentle, frank, and even affectionate, that, if I had not known how much she has always disliked me for marrying Mr Vernon, and that we had never met before, I should have imagined her an attached friend.”

Lady Susan succeeds in capturing a husband as does Frederica, although one suspects that Frederica will find more happiness in matrimony than her mother.

Although I enjoyed the book, it does end rather abruptly and the limitations of an epistolary novel mean the characters are never fully fleshed out. However, for fans of Jane Austen, it is of interest as an early indicator of her literary potential

In three words: Witty, engaging, sprightly

Try something similar: Emma by Jane Austen

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JaneAustenAbout the Author

Jane Austen is one of the most widely read and historically important novelists in English literature famed for her realism, wit and biting social commentary.