post your unpopular literature opinions?

Jane Austen wrote about the world she and her readers knew where gentlewomen had to make a good marriage. She did have Harriet married to the industrious farmer Robert Martin who was very much not a 'gentleman' but was a decent man.

But was anyone writing about the experiences of the working class women then? Would anyone have published such books even if they were written? And who would have read them? In the early 19th most women were illiterate. Jane Austen was writing more realistic novels than those who preceded her so critising her for writing books that you now perceive as fantasies is unfair. TBH, having grown up in a rural middle class family in the mid 20th century, there is much about her world that is very recognisable to me (my parents definitely talked about who would make suitable spouses for myself and my siblings) even if I had more options to escape the marriage market through education.

@MissLucyEyelesbarrow I don't disagree that she writes about women trying to secure financial security alongside emotional security. My point is that the women always end up with a man who is both wealthy and 'good.' This was pure fantasy for the vast majority of women at the time (and often still is when there's significant wealth involved ).

I didn't like The Bell Jar. Loved Evelyn Waugh's novels. Not read Joyce, LOTR or Atonement. I tried to read something by Ian McEwan and gave up.

gosh I LOVE that book, and have never met anyone outside my family who has even heard of it!
edit - failed quote... was aimed at @TitusMoan re the Rats of NIMH 😅

@SerafinasGoose - Joyce has a bit of a reputation for turgid prose like Henry James or Dostoyevsky.

Never found him too bad though.

Always thought if it's an author you really enjoy you can read a book of any length by them - off the top of my head my list in that category would include Fielding, Dickens, Eliot, Tolstoy, Mailer, Vidal, Monaldo e Sorti, Eco and even Neal Stephenson, Stephen King and Robert Ludlum

He messed up there then because Beowulf is short! The others aren't but they are all to be heard rather than read. I wonder if LOTR is better heard than read?

I read them all, cover to cover. Loved them, but yes it's a dark forest out there.

I have to put in a defensive word for James Joyce here. Ulysses would probably top my list of my favourite books in the world. It's multi-faceted. It's full of tensions and contradictions. It's gratuitous. It's hilarious: laugh out loud funny in places. It's tragic. It's lowbrow (advertising, pop culture and music hall songs permeate it). It's highbrow (Homer, obvs; Artistotle, contemporary pragmatist philosophies and a good smattering of idealism as well). It's a palimpsest. It's sexual (scrub that, it's unmitigated pornography in places). It's inhibited. It's lyrical and poetic yet rooted in the ordinary, it's idiosynchratic, it's a window into working-class Irish tongues, attitudes, occupations and interests of the day. As far as literature is concerned, it's unique.

It's pretentious, for sure, and there's a tension between working-class Dublin and literary elitism. But Joyce a 'bad' writer? Not on this planet!

+1 for Atonement, which IMO is 'neo-modernist' the same as the likes of Sarah Waters and John Fowles are neo-Victorian. The many literary allusions he uses in that text (Woolf and Richardson's Clarissa being two that spring to mind) find their parallels in the novel. Which is 'Briony's' novel: who we know is an unreliable narrator who has founded her life on lies.

Brideshead Revisited I haven't read - never really fancied it much but have a few credits to use up on audible - but of Evelyn Waugh's efforts Vile Bodies is simply brilliant (Stephen Fry did a film of it called Bright Young Things, its original intended title) and Scoop isn't bad either. It's a mockery of modernism and the superficial media class of the day. Vile Bodies also has a direct pisstake of Ulysses. Miss Runcible, the racing car driver, is my absolute favourite character: she rocks!

I don’t hate The Bell Jar and in fact I found it funny and insightful but there’s no denying some of the issues are hard to read about.

Another upopular one. I am always envious of people who hated The Bell Jar and found it unbelievable and self-indulgent.

This is one I agree with whole-heartedly. I hated the "twist", which was an almost offensively unrealistic portrayal of mental illness. Oh, I've been imagining my mean mother all along and now I've remembered she's dead, I'm magically cured.

I tried being charatible and thinking of it as being a metaphor for carrying around trauma or something, but then it's still offensive because it makes it seem like getting over trauma isn't hard work over a long period of time and it's just having some sudden realisation.

The men Austen's heroines marry aren't troubled, they spend a lot of time avoiding those sorts. They marry the decent men. She write about how women have to balance financial security with emotional security.

Anne Elliot doesn't marry the very wealthy Mr Elliot, she marries the not so wealthy Captain Wentworth because he's a better man. Elizabeth refuses her father's heir because she thinks he's a fool and the wealthy Darcy and until he saves her sister and her family from disgrace. Charlotte realises Mr Collins is harmless and marries him knowing he can provide for her and willtreat her well. Elinor marries the rather dull but decent Edward and Marianne is saved from disgrace (after how she behaved over Willoughby) by marrying the decent Colonel Brandon.

@MissLucyEyelesbarrow and yet in every single book the plucky heroine tames the troubled but wealthy man using nothing but her good character. You don't need to have read much history to realise what a fantasy this is - it's basically Cinderella with a few moral lessons thrown in for the middle classes

I have to love or hate (as in love to hate) characters, but if I am indifferent I give up reading

All Fitzgerald's novels (and there's only 5 ) are about moral corruption and decadence

The Great Gatsby suffers from the fact that people who read it without paying attention think it’s supposed to represent something glamorous and desirable, as the films also present it.

F Scott Fitzgerald was an unpleasant alcoholic who seemed to thrive on creating horrible characters. The Beautiful and the Damned is the prime example

I was reading about Gitzgerald’s life after posting here, very sad life, alcoholic who died in mid 40s, had love affair with “Daisy” whose family wouldn’t let her marry him as he wasn’t rich enough for their socialite daughter. He enlisted in WW2 army hoping to get killed as he was so upset at being ditched by “Daisy”. His wife was a schizophrenic who died young too.

Basically yes!

Atonement is a really imaginatively crafted book.

I'm so late to this thread.
I like a lot of YA that MNers sneer at, I'm really not too fussy. That said,
Saturday by Ian McEwan is ludicrous tripe.
Always astonishes me when I hear any praise about McEwan.

I spent way too much time studying that book for A-level English and had completely forgotten he gets killed.

Which probably says it all about the book tbh.

I’ve tried several times to read Middlemarch and never made it past Chapter 3.

I hate being given books as presents. They're usually something worthy that I have no inclination to read.

Thanks. He got killed!