Sharing this wonderful post from Henry Oliver.
https://www.commonreader.co.uk/p/why-we-love-jane-austen-more-than
“Why is Jane Austen quite so popular?
The reason is simple….”
Reviews and Asides
Rereading Middlemarch in 2025
What I’m struck by this time around is something that’s easy to miss 150 years later: George Eliot was writing historical fiction. Published (in installments) in 1871 and 1872, the chief action of the book takes place over the end of the 1820s and start of the 1830s. It would today be like writing a novel about the mid-Reagan years, by someone born in the 1970s — old enough to remember those times. (Eliot was born in 1819 and died in 1880.)
I too am old enough to remember the 1980s. It is a real time for me, not something from history books, and I see the images of those days in color — not the sepia tones of the 19th century or the black-and-white of the early 20th century. Yet it was also a long time ago, and a lot has happened since. A person setting out now to write a novel of the 1980s would have to carefully think about the telling details. Corded landlines (though in those days known simply as “phones”). Cassette tapes. Guess jeans. Madonna. Morrissey. Those masses of rubber jelly bracelets people wore — why? “Falcon Crest” on the TV. Gorbachev. Last days of the Iron Curtain, though no one knew it yet. Such a novelist would need to think about how much the world had changed in the intervening 40 years, and how people in the 1980s had little idea what was coming, yet were obliged to go through their lives, making their moral and career and marriage choices with the best information available at the time.
It’s this kind of doubleness that 50-something Eliot would have had in her head sitting down to write Middlemarch, and that she could expect her readers to be aware of.
From the vantage point of 2025, both 1871 and 1830 seem equally long ago. For modern readers, she might as well have written this in 1835. But they are wrong. The 1830s had at least as much tumult and change as the 1980s, and perhaps more. It took the perspective of decades to take in what it all meant.
And once you see, you can’t unsee it. How Eliot makes a point of noting the absurdity of women’s bonnets, or observing that someone is wearing a pelisse, or talking about the Reform Bill or labor unrest, or surveying land for where the railroad will come through. Old-fashioned ideas about medical science. To me it seems all flavored with nostalgia for a lost world, the world of her own childhood, and with the awareness of how much change the years would bring.
It’s an even wider canvas, then, than we normally think of Middlemarch as being. Not just a whole town, and the country gentry who live outside the town. Not just a series of happy and unhappy marriages and struggles with money and careers, but the action of time itself.
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The Witch Elm by Tana French
Why I read it: I wanted an audiobook, and it was available at the library. I’ve enjoyed some of the other Tana French books I’ve read.
This thing was long! 22 hours! And audio means you can’t skim the boring parts (I know I could speed up the audio, but I am not that kind of person.) Nonetheless, I got through it in nine days. I could not seem to stop listening, at the expense of sleep.
I found the reading (listening) experience a strange combination of riveting and boring, exasperating and propulsive. Toby Hennessy, the first-person narrator, is another one of Tana French’s out-of-touch-with-himself male characters, reminding me a bit of the one from “In the Woods,” the first Tana French book I’d read (and nearly my last, so annoying did I find Rob Ryan).
What I liked: the actor reading the book was excellent at distinguishing the different speaking styles of the characters in a fairly dialogue-heavy book. Uncle Hugo was especially delightful. I found myself a bit in love with poor, dying Uncle Hugo just because of his way of speaking. French is great at creating atmosphere: you can almost clock her going through the various senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, as she puts you in a scene. The house where much of the action takes place is vividly depicted and almost a character in its own right. There is a heavy use of foreshadowing (which I think I noticed especially because the other book I was reading at the same time, “Birnam Wood,” has none at all) which creates an atmosphere of sinister disquiet. Whenever you think things are bad, Toby is ready to remind the reader the REALLY bad thing hasn’t happened yet.
The virtues of this book are also in some sense its weaknesses. All the atmosphere-building makes for a slow burn — sometimes a bit too slow. If I’d had a dollar for every time Toby says “For a long time….” I would quit my job and live off my savings. The conversations go on and on and on. Many childhood good times are recalled; the shrubbery of the garden is lovingly described.
Part of what makes it claustrophobic is that while Toby is an admiring observer of the sensory world around him, he’s not notably insightful about either other people or himself. He’s suffered a head injury early in the book, which affects his memory and his outlook, but still. We are stuck in his head, and it’s not the greatest place to be. I couldn’t help wishing Uncle Hugo were telling this story, or one of Toby’s cousins, though I recognize that would be an entirely different novel. I guessed who the real killer was well before Toby learned it, which made me proud of myself, until I realized that Toby isn’t that bright, and this was no doubt French’s intention all along — to make the reader feel smart.
French is acclaimed for writing entertaining murder mysteries that also have a literary flair and social commentary, and it’s possible I am less on board with this idea than I used to be. That is, I think the rigorous demands of murder mysteries can often prompt characters to do things because the plot needs them to, not because this is what the characters WOULD do (I remember thinking how “Broken Harbor” was extremely clever right up until the point when this happened), making the literary flair seem more like window dressing than intrinsic to the work.
“The Witch Elm” has a lot to say about privilege: Toby comes from a comfortable middle-class family, has always been handsome and popular, the sort of person who sailed through life taking his good luck for granted. Being attacked by burglars and suffering a head injury leaves him neurologically impaired in a way that might be permanent. For the first time, he’s that person others look at with pity, don’t take seriously. The events of the story force him to realize just how oblivious he’s been to the problems of people he thought he was close to: namely, his two cousins, who are his age and for all intents and purposes like his siblings.
The book also concerns itself with a related problem of identity, of nature vs. nurture, if you will. There’s a lot of: if this one particular thing had not happened, would this person have turned out the way they did? Or was the character baked into the person, just waiting to emerge all along?
It was interesting and yet it began to seem a little too much, again I think possibly because of the ponderousness of Toby as a narrator. But then, he has to be the way he is, to make the point the book is trying to make.
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Birnam Wood
I remember being impressed by the range and ambition and intricate structure of The Luminaries, the novel that made Eleanor Catton the youngest-ever winner of the Booker Prize, but not feeling particularly touched by it emotionally. So many characters made it hard to feel invested in any particular one. It was a book I read with more admiration than enthusiasm.
Birnam Wood, on the other hand, grabbed me from the start and wouldn’t let go. It ends as a thriller, but hardly starts out as one; on the contrary, it begins quietly, but immediately draws the reader into the complicated, contradictory emotional lives of the first three people we first meet: Shelley and Mira, two friends in their late 20s who are members of a guerilla gardening collective, and Tony, a former member who had a thing with Mira but has lost touch with her and has been abroad for several years, teaching English in Mexico.
Catton gives us a view inside each of these people by turn, and the difference between how they think about themselves and how the others view them is utterly fascinating. Shelley wants to leave the collective but doesn’t know how to tell Mira; Mira already suspects it’s coming. Mira presents as bold and resolute; inside, she’s something of a mess. Shelley is the opposite, running herself down, resenting her position as Mira’s sidekick yet feeling stuck in it, oblivious to her own strengths. And Tony! Wishing to make a difference in the world, clever in certain respects, utterly clueless in many others. The slight edge of satire is sharp but never overdone.
Mira, always on the hunt for new locations for her furtive gardening projects, goes on a fact-finding mission to a disused sheep farm she’s learned about, a place that was set to be subdivided until a landslide turned it into a cul-de-sac for an indeterminate period, as the one road through is blocked and the property is bounded by national parkland. While looking around, she runs into a mysterious man who does not believe her cover story about being a location scout for a movie, and seems to know an alarming amount about Mira.
The mystery man turns out to be Robert Lemoine, an American billionaire who made his fortune in surveillance drones. Officially, he is (secretly) buying the farm because he wants to build a luxury bunker there. In fact, he has an even more secret agenda. In the gardening collective, he senses opportunity….
That Lemoine is something of a cartoon villain in his blinding intellect, pure, amoral self-interest and prowess with surveillance technology, and yet does not seem any less improbable than some real-life versions of the same thing — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs come to mind — is a sad testament to the world we live in. He introduces a whole new level of crazy to this story, yet it all seems plausible enough. Actions have consequences, leading to other consequences; Catton has set up her dominoes and everything falls as it must.
Birnam Wood is the name of Mira’s stealth gardening organization, yet it also recalls the moveable forest that portended Macbeth’s doom. As the story goes on, this association becomes clearer. The novel does not try to do anything as clumsy as retell Macbeth, yet the way that incident follows incident, accelerating and increasingly high-stakes, careering toward inevitable disaster, is reminiscent of that play.
It’s more than 400 pages, and I read it in two days. Did not want to put it down. Emerging blinking into the world, going, what WAS that? And that, reader, is the mark of a good book.
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Educated by Tara Westover
It happened that I was looking for an audio book, so I scrolled down the availables at my public library resolved to choose the first thing that got my attention. “Educated” was a big deal when it came out several years ago, with both commercial and literary appeal. I even had a copy in the house that I had found on the street, but got rid of it in the Great Winnowing before my move to Seoul, and before I found the time to read it.
Tara Westover had an unusual childhood, to put it mildly, and has acquired the strength of mind and command of prose to relate the story of her growing up in a very interesting way. The story is much more about abuse and family dysfunction than I was expecting, and it made me a big believer in OSHA and child labor laws. Tara and various members of her family have numerous near-death experiences working for her father, a contractor and owner of a junkyard. She endures horrific psychological and physical abuse by an older brother, and is gaslighted about it, at the time and also later.
As she manages to escape, first by passing a test to get into Brigham Young University and (after many initial struggles to adapt to life outside her eccentric, wildly Mormon, government-avoidant family) later impressing her professors sufficiently to win a scholarship to Cambridge, where she eventually gets a Ph.D. in history. Over the course of the decade this takes, she comes to understand the toll that her family has taken on her own sense of reality, and becomes estranged from many of them, particularly her parents and some of her siblings.
Looking back a day after I finished it, my overwhelming impression is that though it was well-written and engaging, and though I am happy for Tara on her escape from a narrow and constricted life, I think I could have spent my time better than reading this book. Horrific memoirs of abuse always feel faintly voyeuristic to me, and I should have realized that this is what “Educated” would be.
Also, and it sounds mean to say this, but this is the sort of book taste-making coastal elites love because it confirms their prejudices about religious people in the heartland in an gratifying way — there’s abuse, but also a happy ending. Among many more ordinary readers there seems to be a strong love for memoirs of dysfunction and abuse — what else can explain the mysterious success of “Angela’s Ashes,” for example?
I think I need to read some more Barbara Pym. The world is too much with me.
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Review: John Eyre
I love 19th-century British literature, and lately I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the world and the works of the Brontes in particular. So I was honored to be invited to write about “John Eyre” as part of a virtual book tour for its author, Mimi Matthews.
As the title suggests, “John Eyre” is an homage to “Jane Eyre,” a novel that created a sensation as soon as it came out in 1847 and has kept readers enthralled ever since, with its mystery and danger, its hints of the supernatural, its romance and coming-of-age elements. It is a story narrated by a woman, in an age where women were not seen as fully human, and I think most of all it is that voice of the first-person narrator – at times outraged, passionate, snarky, wry, defensive, confessional – that elevates it from an entertaining story to something extraordinary.
Such a book is not easily forgotten, and we see that afterlife in novels it has inspired. Probably most famous is “Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys, which imagined how the first Mrs. Rochester might have seen things. There’s Daphne du Maurier’s spooky retelling, “Rebecca”; Sarah Shoemaker’s “Mr. Rochester,” offering us Edward’s version of events. “Re Jane” by Patricia Park imagines Jane as a modern orphan, half-Korean, whose journey of self-discovery starts in Flushing, Queens. But no author I’ve yet encountered had asked the deceptively simple question Mimi Matthews poses here in her latest novel: What if Jane were a dude?
Moreover, what if nearly everyone’s gender were flipped? In “John Eyre,” Mrs. Fairfax, the old housekeeper, has become Mr. Fairfax, the old butler. The strangely well-paid Mr. Poole fixes furniture when he’s not off somewhere in the upper reaches of the house laughing his sinister laugh. Mrs. Rochester, a mercurial yet mysteriously alluring widow, is John Eyre’s employer in his role as tutor to two little boys from parts unknown. And the dangerous lunatic imprisoned in the attic? Why, that would be Mr. Rochester.
It’s a fun thought experiment, and you feel that Matthews had fun writing it. She also – playfully, I think — takes names from the original novel and repurposes them. Helen Burns is the married lady whose love John Eyre cannot return, prompting her suicide before the action of the book opens. (Unlike in the original, we do not see his childhood.) Mrs. Rochester’s maiden name was Mason; first name, Bertha. Blanche Ingram, while still a member of the local gentry, is no longer a beautiful mean girl, but Bertha’s BFF.
Reading “John Eyre” has made me think about how central gender dynamics are to the plot of the original. It is hard to set a story in 19th-century England and make any man (any moderately educated white man, at least), however poor and orphaned, as powerless as Jane was. Even though John struggles with a laudanum problem and deep guilt over the Helen Burns thing, he’s still a man, with those fundamental advantages of manhood in the 19th century. This presents even a writer who’s just trying to have fun with a major problem. How does she solve it?
Reader, I’ll tell you, but spoilers lie ahead.
“John Eyre” does not try to recreate the narrative voice of Jane Eyre in the male lead. His sections are in close third person, written in short, choppy sentences that I think are meant to show his distance from his own feelings. But we have not lost the first-person view entirely. Entire stretches of the book are told from the perspective of Mrs. Rochester – narrating not the current action, but events of a few years earlier, poured out in letters to her dear friend back home, Blanche, as Bertha has a series of increasingly alarming experiences while living abroad.
So despite the title, this is as much Mrs. Rochester’s book as John Eyre’s. While he gets the obscure-orphan part of the source material, she gets the intimate first-personal confessional and the struggle to be an autonomous woman in a world set up for the convenience and pleasure of men.
But that’s not the only misdirection: The second thought experiment of “John Eyre” owes nothing to Charlotte Bronte and everything to Bram Stroker.
Perhaps how you feel about vampires, or at least the literature of vampires, will determine your reaction to this important aspect of “John Eyre.” What does it do to the thought experiment already underway?
“Jane Eyre,” for all its Gothic elements, is ultimately rooted in both rationality and faith. Ghosts, gytrash and other spooky things are not real, even if Jane and Rochester do communicate telepathically at one point. Jane fulminates against religious hypocrisies, yet her own conduct reflects her Christian morality. Not simply in the obvious way that she refuses to become Rochester’s mistress, but also in the radical notion that each person is of equal worth and value before God.
In the world of “Dracula,” spooky things are very much real, and can even kill you. A holy object, like a cross, might rout a vampire, who is essentially a satanic being,a sort of Antichrist , but this has more to with magic and superstition than with faith.
And John Eyre, in a sharp contrast to Jane, has no religious convictions — the trauma of Helen Burns’s death has ended such illusions for him.
Thus we start with one kind of story and find ourselves in another, in this playful yet gripping homage to both. I enjoyed how smoothly this work unfurled once underway, its creepy atmospherics, and how the unlikely pairing of elements harmonized together. Truly, reader, something to sink your teeth into.
The Jane Austen Project: A Novel 