Author Archives
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Analysis of Margaret Forster’s Georgy Girl
A story that captures the changing sexual mores of the 1960s, Georgy Girl contrasts the choices two roommates make as birth control expands the range of options women have in their personal lives. Georgina Parkin is the daughter of Ted… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ian Fleming From Russia, with Love
The fifth installment in the ongoing saga of adventures featuring the consummate spy James Bond, this novel helped make the series an international phenomenon when, in 1961, President John F. Kennedy named it as one of his favorite books. As… Read More ›
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Freudian Criticism
Sigmund Freud’s theories of the personality and the unconscious mind received international attention in his lifetime as psychoanalysis became an accepted method of treating emotional disorders. Freud’s ideas rather quickly became the basis of an approach to literary criticism that… Read More ›
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Analysis of Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair
A mystery, a thriller, and a low-keyed romance, this novel takes the form of a puzzle. Life follows its uneventful course at The Franchise, a somewhat decayed estate inherited by a mother and daughter, Mrs. Sharpe and Miss Marion Sharpe,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City
Volume five in the Children of Violence series, this novel follows Landlocked (1965) and concludes the adventures of Martha Quest in an apocalyptic vision of a future in which human beings overcome the limitations of communication and mutual understanding through… Read More ›
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Analysis of William Trevor’s Fools of Fortune
Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in the year it was published, this short novel examines Irish-English relations on the intimate scale of family life. Two “great houses,” Woodcombe Park in Dorset, England, and Kilneagh in County… Read More ›
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Analysis of Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot
A novel that sometimes disguises itself as a scholarly treatise, Flaubert’s Parrot was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1984. The novel’s structure showcases the stylized self-awareness that is characteristic of postmodernism. The author dispenses with much of the traditional… Read More ›
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Analysis of Joyce Cary’s First Trilogy
The three novels in this sequence include Herself Surprised (1941), To Be a Pilgrim (1942), and The Horse’s Mouth (1944); Cary’s heirs collected the three titles into one volume in 1957 and christened it First Trilogy. Joyce Cary had been… Read More ›
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Analysis of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
A legendarily difficult novel, Finnegans Wake is the culmination of James Joyce’s life and work as an artist. It is a playground, a wrecking yard, a battlefield of literary experimentation and mythic allegory, placing demands on its readers that can… Read More ›
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Analysis of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance
Set in India in 1975 and 1976 under an impending political crisis, A Fine Balance follows the lives of four characters in a coastal city in India (Mumbai, formerly Bombay) and the many other figures to whom they are connected…. Read More ›
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Analysis of William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey
A suspenseful thriller that alternates between the story of a potential victim and that of her potential predator, Felicia’s Journey follows the title character from her bleak young life in Ireland to an unknown future in England. She is pursuing… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road
Winner of the Booker Prize (known then as the Booker-McConnell Prize) in 1991, this novel of magic realism is set in the African nation of Nigeria and serves as an allegory of Nigeria’s transformation from a British colony to an… Read More ›
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Analysis of Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water
Drawing on her own experience with mental illness and the institutions that manage those afflicted by it, Janet Frame creates a novel that is itself a part of her psychiatric therapy: writing used as a path to greater wholeness and… Read More ›
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Analysis of Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm
An epic novel that was published the same year Patrick White won the Nobel Prize, The Eye of the Storm is set in Australia, White’s native country, and covers the period of the first 70 years of the 20th century…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Elizabeth Bowen’s Eva Trout
As this last novel by Elizabeth Bowen opens, Eva Trout is deceiving people into believing that she has been engaged and has tragically lost her beloved. In fact, Eva is emotionally stunted: her mother had abandoned her infant daughter upon… Read More ›
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Analysis of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient
Toward the end of World War II, in the Villa San Girolamo in Italy, four shattered survivors cope with the physical and emotional suffering the war has brought about. They come from different parts of Europe and the dissolving British… Read More ›
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Analysis of Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers
Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 2000 and a selection on the short list for the Booker Prize, English Passengers uses multiple narrators and textual devices to tell the 19th-century story of a voyage to Tasmania…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Julian Barnes’s England, England
In this comic novel, Julian Barnes satirizes a publicity campaign to increase tourism in England by reinventing the nation as a commercial brand of entertainment. The novel begins and ends in England—that is to say, in “Old England,” the island… Read More ›
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Analysis of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair
A novel that examines love, faith, fidelity, and saintliness, The End of the Affair is one of Greene’s Catholic novels, along with Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and A Burnt-Out… Read More ›
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Analysis of Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April
When four women rent a villa in Italy for a month, they find their lives changed for the better as a result—especially their love lives—in this example of romance fiction. Elizabeth Von Arnim narrates this story through the third-person omniscient… Read More ›
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