Recent correspondence with a friend has prompted me to contemplate what books I would include in a semester-long course on the Modern British Novel.
My friend announced his intention to teach A Handful of Dust, which is my favourite of Evelyn Waugh’s early novels. Nonetheless, I couldn’t see myself teaching any novel by Waugh except his magnum opus, Brideshead Revisited. In my judgment, this is the greatest novel of the twentieth century and would have a sacrosanct place in any course that I were to teach on the Modern British Novel.
Intending to teach one text by Dickens (of course!), my friend said he was likely to select Great Expectations. This is a choice that would sorely tempt me also, though I might select A Tale of Two Cities instead, which would hardly be an adventurous choice, its being the bestselling of all Dickens’ works and probably the one which is taught most often. My rationale for choosing the obvious – apart from the obvious, i.e. that it’s a great novel – would be the desire that students receive Dickens’ insights on the nature of political revolution, the French Revolution in particular, but also the multifarious other secularist revolutions that have been made in the French Revolution’s image and have followed in its wake.
My friend intended to “take a stab at Joyce”, something which I have done also, though without much enjoyment. The only text by Joyce I’ve taught is Portrait of the Artist, which is the most accessible of his works and which establishes the creative template, rooted in hubris, that shapes his later works.
If we take “modern” as being anything from the Victorian period onwards, i.e. from 1837, other possibilities would be Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Jekyll & Hyde, Dorian Gray, The Man Who was Thursday and Nineteen Eighty-Four and/or Brave New World.
Come Rack! Come Rope! by R. H. Benson would be an excellent choice were the course to be taught at a Catholic college and would prove popular. It’s an historical novel, written just before World War One, which is set in Elizabethan England at a time of religious persecution.
Perhaps a little more controversially, I’d be tempted to avoid Graham Greene but would select something off the beaten track, such as The Quiet American, rather than The Power and the Glory, should I choose to include him. The former offers an intriguing contrast between Old World cynicism and New World naiveté which would be a good topic of conversation in the classroom.
I’d also teach one of the three novels in C. S. Lewis’ Ransom Trilogy. Any would serve but I’d be tempted to tackle That Hideous Strength. On the other hand, I probably wouldn’t (or couldn’t) include anything by Lewis’ great friend, J. R. R. Tolkien. This would not be due to Tolkien’s work not meriting a place on the syllabus in terms of its literary stature but simply that Tolkien’s works are not really novels and do not, therefore, qualify for a course on the Modern British Novel. The Lord of the Rings is really a prose epic and has more in common with the epics of Homer and Virgil, or Beowulf and the Norse Sagas. As for The Hobbit, it is a fairy story written for children, making it an awkward fit for the course we’re imagining.
Should we wish to broaden our panoramic horizons, we could extend the “modern” period back to 1815, the year of Waterloo, which would enable the inclusion of the works of the incomparable Miss Austen. In this case, my selection would probably be Sense and Sensibility, facilitating an engagement with the ideas of the Romantic movement and its reaction against the empiricism and rationalism of the Enlightenment. Austen’s nuanced approach to the tensions and differences between “sense” and “sensibility” would present the opportunity to discuss the philosophies of realism and relativism, a discussion that students in our confused and confusing times so sorely need.
The earlier date of 1815 would also permit the inclusion of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a work which raises many issues of perennial relevance, including the dangers of scientism, and the differences between the Christian romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge, on the one hand, and the secularist romanticism of Byron and Percy Shelley, on the other. Mary Shelley’s romantic novel would also prove to be an ideal foil for Jane Austen’s romance, each serving as a catalyst to reveal the animating ideas of the other.
Of the titles selected, Sense and Sensibility, Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and Dorian Gray have all been published in the Ignatius Critical Editions series. I’d assign these editions as the set texts, thereby avoiding those poisoned mainstream editions which pollute the minds of students with postmodern misreadings of the works in the accompanying essays and footnotes.
Having mused on what would be included in an imaginary college course on the Modern British Novel, I must thank my friend for prompting me to take this enjoyable flight of fancy and fictional fantasizing.
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.
Sadly you are ignoring D H Lawrence… FR Leavis considered him an author in The Great Tradition… Lawrence, for Leavis, had unfailing critical sense, a sureness of touch and was ‘radically free from egotism’
Perhaps…. just perhaps… we can revise the list of books we would include for Great British Novels… to include Lawrence…
What, no love for George Eliot? I’d consider Adam Bede, Middlemarch, or The Mill on the Floss. (I push Eliot because in my questionably valuable opinion Eliot is superior to Austen, though I admire both greatly.)
On a side note, I just finished the Ignatius Critical edition of Sense and Sensibility. I really like the presentation from Ignatius; they’re wonderfully accessible. I’ll be starting Jane Eyre soon.
Though it would perhaps not be considered one of the “Great British Novels”, I would like to take my own “flight of fancy” and mention George Moore’s most humane and unsentimental novel ESTHER WATERS. It is not a tragic story, though it appears to develop the common theme of misfortune as a result of the female protagonist’s victimhood and lack of agency. But the heroine struggles with a great deal of success to master her situation and overcome the disadvantages forced upon her by the ugly, preening, and sanctimonious attitudes of the more powerful around her. She receives help from unexpected persons but it is her own resourcefulness that is her best asset. It is not entirely a “happy” story but Esther does obtain a level of peace at the end. She certainly does not end up like TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES. I have read that Moore wrote his novel in part as a response to Hardy’s.
Hardy is so unremitting, though less so in FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD. This story carries the light that becomes so significant when the reader progresses to his later work in the same way as when one descends into a dark subway tunnel after taking in the magnificent view of the East River and lower Manhattan skyline crossing the Williamsburg Bridge on the M train out of Maspeth on one’s way to work on a June morning. Of course, one always comes out of the tunnel on the way home to Queens, later, in the afternoon.
How can one speak of great English novels without mentioning Jane Austen ?
I would also have nominated anther Dickens book: Bleak House.
This may sound silly, but I think Mr. Pearce has sadly underestimated Tolkien’s The Hobbit. If there’s a distinction between a novel and a long short story (maybe? unified by character rather than plot?) then The Hobbit has a spectacular unity, shown in the fact that the protagonist goes missing for every successive climax. Along those same lines, Grahame’s Wind in the Willows has so many amazing moments with Ratty and Mole.