My Very British Summer

Still need to get into tea

September 27, 2024

This summer I set out to read about 30 classic British novels in chronological order. I’m only about halfway through (up to 1925-ish), but given that summer has officially ended, I wanted to share some of my favorites so far.

Pride and prejudice and labor disputes

While I did get to read some early classics like Middlemarch (“One of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” according to Virginia Woolf) and Pride and Prejudice (fun!) for the first time, the first book on my list to really surprise me was North and South by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, who I hadn’t heard of before this project. Written and set in 1850s England, we get a firsthand look at the class dynamics of the late Industrial Revolution, with a tame love story mixed in.

I enjoyed watching old class labels become insufficient as the economy changed: What is this new man who runs factories? A “manufacturer”? An entrepreneur? What class should their spouse be from? How should they relate to their workers? There’s even a strike! It’s probably no coincidence that Marx’s pal Friedrich Engels spent his 20s in a similar environment in northern England. (For more mid-1800s strike drama, see: Germinal by Émile Zola, a favorite of mine).

A milkmaid so hot a man learns empathy

If you have trouble reading about bad things happening to lovable characters, the 600 pages of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy, might not be for you. But I was hit pretty hard by this passage where Angel Clare, the male protagonist (two brothers, no sisters), makes a realization about not just the lives of commoners in general, but about women.

Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king. Looking at it thus, he found that life was to be seen of the same magnitude here as elsewhere.

Despite his heterodoxy, faults, and weaknesses, Clare was a man with a conscience. Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss; but a woman living her precious life — a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest to himself. Upon her sensations the whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her fellow-creatures existed, to her. The universe itself only came into being for Tess on the particular day in the particular year in which she was born.

Wow! Feels pretty modernist for 1891. Twenty five years before Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Eliot’s Prufrock! As a man who grew up without sisters,… Taylor Swift… It took a while for me to… etc., etc.

British suffragettes fought cops and used hunger strikes

I didn’t want to go through this era of British history without learning about its suffragette movement. Luckily, I found a few contemporary novels from that period, written by women, from Persephone Books, a small publisher in Bath. Their books aren’t cheap, but they’re beautifully printed. I splurged for both No Surrender by Constance Maud and The Call by Edith Ayrton Zangwill.

I loved them both, but would recommend The Call as the more well-rounded novel, especially if you’re interested in how the scientific community treated women at that time, and/or how people are “radicalized” to political causes, and the tactics they might use to advance their cause (spoiler/trigger warning: hunger strikes). You can also check out the 2015 film Suffragette.

A still from Suffragette, starring Carey Mulligan and Helena Bonham Carter

A perfect thing, clear and simple

I noticed that Persephone Books publishes many works by one woman in particular: Dorothy Whipple. Taking that as a good sign, I tried High Wages, and phew, I was not disappointed. What a perfect gem of a novel. You’ve Got Mail/Nora Ephron vibes, if you’re into that sort of thing. I haven’t cared so much about a cast of characters in a while! (I might try Whipple’s Someone at a Distance at some point in the future, maybe when I’m feeling blue.)

What was the British Empire?

I also wanted to learn more about Britain’s passion for colonization and its accompanying violence. Thankfully, Left Book Club had recently sent me Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire by Kojo Koram. Koram makes some convincing arguments about why Britain’s era of colonizing most of the world still matters and how it still affects both the decolonized countries, as well as England itself (Neo-liberalism! Late-stage capitalism! Brexit!).

Still on the British shelf

This week’s summer equinox caught me re-reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which, fittingly, is set in mid-September and still slaps (I was sure to revisit Patricia Lockwood’s 2023 lovely, encouraging exploration first). I’d have to dedicate an entire missive to it, but I still find Mr. Ramsay the most interesting character...

Godrevy Lighthouse on Godrevy Island in St Ives Bay, Cornwall, said to be Woolf’s inspiration

I’m giving myself some grace time to finish a few more from my list including: Lady Chatterley's Lover, Woolf’s The Waves, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (what a title), Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Zadie Smith’s NW, and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. I’ll also try to get to some spooky books before Halloween.