Rebecca Novel Quotes

I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels

In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met. The usual I we are given has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specializes in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment, the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgettings and misrememberings, the portions of a life lived through others’ stories, the incoherence and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machina and the companionability of ghosts. There are other ways of telling.

I love shopping. There is a little bit of magic found in buying something new. It is instant gratification, a quick fix.

...all I knew were novels. It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.

I think I am going to have to supercharge my optimism to arm myself for the battle ahead. Trust me, it is going to be a battle.

I was where my heart held out hope that someday I would be again. It was the reason I never forgot him. My heart had held onto him. And as he clung to me, as he soothed me, held me, I felt everything begin to relax.

Advice to friends. Advice to fellow mothers in the same boat. "How do you do it all?" Crack a joke. Make it seem easy. Make everything seem easy. Make life seem easy and parenthood and marriage and freelancing for pennies, writing a novel and smiling after a rejection, keeping the faith after two, reminding oneself that four years of work counted for a lot, counted for everything. Make the bed. Make it nice. Make the people laugh when you sit down to write and if you can't make them laugh make them cry. Make them want to hug you or hold you or punch you in the face. Make them want to kill you or fuck you or be your friend. Make them change. Make them happy. Make the baby smile. Make him laugh. Make him dinner. Make him proud. Hold the phone, someone is on the other line. She says its important. People are dying. Children. Friends. Press mute because there is nothing you can say. Press off because you're running out of minutes. Running out of time. Soon he'll be grown up and you'll regret the time you spent pushing him away for one more paragraph in the manuscript no one will ever read. Put down the book, the computer, the ideas. Remember who you are now. Wait. Remember who you were. Wait. Remember what's important. Make a list. Ten things, no twenty. Twenty thousand things you want to do before you die but what if tomorrow never comes? No one will remember. No one will know. No one will laugh or cry or make the bed. No one will have a clue which songs to sing to the baby. No one will be there for the children. No one will finish the first draft of the novel. No one will publish the one that's been finished for months. No one will remember the thought you had last night, that great idea you forgot to write down.

Fearful that they would be caught, the young lovers cast themselves into the sea with their stone, saying these words, "May we ever be united in love and hidden as long as this stone hides in deep waters.

The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle. In her novel “Regeneration,” Pat Barker writes of a doctor who “knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cat of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.” But the butterfly is so fit an emblem of the human soul that its name in Greek is “psyche,” the word for soul. We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Nor of the violence of the metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a flower blooming.

We each carry our own designated end within us, our very own death ripening at its own rate inside of us. There are insignificant people who are harboring unawares the grandeur of large deaths. We carry it in us like a darkening fruit. It opens and spills out. That is death.

Jonah was cute and all before I left, but in Paris he became a God. It was a rather simple equation: loneliness + silly crush - reality check = full-blown obsession.

The opposite of a plain truth, Neils Bohr liked to repeat, is a plain falsehood. But the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth.

Sweetheart, I have no intention of denying you a thing.

In 1942 the Germans sent a spy called Eppler into Cairo before the battle of El Alamein. He used a copy of Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca as a code book to send messages back to Rommel on troop movements. Listen, the book became bedside reading with British Intelligence. Even I read it.

I've got access to your mysterious body but not your mysterious soul. Souls seem to me the loneliest possibility of all.

It’s Levi. Levi, who carried Pru to safety from the boathouse. Levi, who loves classic novels as much as I do. Levi, who sees me for who I am and excepts the good along with the bad. Who’s never known me as anything less than complicated and broken. And who’s loved me anyway.

A garden path,' write the landscape architects Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull, 'can become the thread of a plot, connecting moments and incidents into a narrative. The narrative structure might be a simple chain of events with a beginning, middle, and end. It might be embellished with diversions, digressions, and picaresque twists, be accompanied by parallel ways (subplots), or deceptively fork into blind alleys like the alternative scenerios explored in a detective novel.

Well what I was going to say was that it reminds me of us because a cactus can grow and thrive without a lot of water and attention. Even if it gets neglected on a shelf, it can blossom and still develop into something beautiful.

I just can't convince myself that everything is okay again. Rationally, nothing has really happened to me. My days are spent as they always have been, but when I am lying alone at night in my big bed I'm lying on a bed of pins. I can't sleep anymore.

Words sometimes tumble out before I can self-edit.

The bravest thing a person can do is survive when it would seem to most that little is left. You have survived to help someone,

We are strong—our enemies have kept us that way. They are the secret of our strength. We would not have to be strong if they were not always rising up from every direction,

It didn’t matter that she didn’t live here, that a relationship was out of the question. It was probably because a relationship wouldn’t happen that he could let himself get this close. He wrapped his arms tighter around her as though this were all that existed in the world. Just the two of them, the mountain, the clean winter air. The taste of her tongue on his lips.

In my old age (smirk), I seem to have become a creature of habit. I have order, schedules, quirky little activities I dig that fill up my days. Even though I hang alone, I hang alone well.

It baffled me how people could resist math's gorgeousness, but people did, and people do. The fine of its purity drives them away, the purity of the fine, unmixed with the heaviness of unnecessitated being.

She couldn’t stop kissing him. Literally could not. There could be an earthquake, a fire, an explosion—who would notice? The whole world could come crashing down and it wouldn’t be enough for her to pull away.

Without them we would not know that we can rise up again after any attack, no matter how brutal. But I fear we have met an enemy too big to defeat with strength alone. We will need wisdom and cunning to survive.

Even earthquakes are the consequence of tensions built up over long spans of time, imperceptibly, incrementally. You don't notice the buildup, just the release. You see a sick person, an old person, a dying person, the sight sinks in, and somewhere down the road you change your life. In movies and novels, people change suddenly and permanently, which is convenient and dramatic but not much like life, where you gain distance on something, relapse, resolve, try again, and move along in stops, starts, and stutters. Change is mostly slow. In my life, there had been transformative events, and I'd had a few sudden illuminations and crises, crossed a rubicon or two, but mostly I'd had the incremental.

RE: Kindle, iPad, et cetera: For a researcher, these new ways of accessing information are just extraordinary. I thing it introduces the possibility of a new standard of cognitive exactness and precision. ~ Rebecca Goldstein, author of Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics.

Horror is a woman’s genre, and it has been all the way back to the oldest horror novel still widely read today: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, daughter of pioneering feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft. Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novels (The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian) made her the highest-paid writer of the late eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Charlotte Riddell were book-writing machines, turning out sensation novels and ghost stories by the pound. Edith Wharton wrote ghost stories before becoming a novelist of manners, and Vernon Lee (real name Violet Paget) wrote elegant tales of the uncanny that rival anything by Henry James. Three of Daphne du Maurier’s stories became Hitchcock films (Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, The Birds), and Shirley Jackson’s singular horror novel The Haunting of Hill House made her one of the highest-regarded American writers of the twentieth century.

I remembered Daemon's feather soft kisses on my cheek, and I remembered the clouds parting and the sun shining on a cold February day in Ireland. And as my baby girl was laid on my chest and my husband held my hand, I saw my best friend Kat walk into the sun kissed part in the clouds, hand in hand, along with the last regrets of my past.

To me the most interesting question of our human existence is: “How much is in our control, and how much is going to happen regardless of what we do?” I knew that Dannie would live that hour and it would be exactly the same as the hour she lives at the beginning of the book, meaning all of the same things would happen. But I also knew it would mean something entirely different than what she’d been anticipating. That, to me, is really the thesis of the novel: we can think we know what is coming, but we can never know what it will mean.

I mean, what makes her think I don't know about dry-humping? I could dry-hump my way through Cuba if I felt like it. She can't even spell 'pregnant'.

Has it been hard for you being with me all this time? It goes against your whole need to leave and change. No more Molly in perpetual motion.

about how Taylor Swift is kind of like Amazing

I’m not sure I’ll ever have a heart to give. Seems safer to read about love in novels than it is to honestly experience it.

I wasn’t one of those people who believed in jolts of electricity at first touch like all the romance novels, but here I was, jolted to my core.

I knew life wasn’t like a romance novel, but I still held out hope it could be. Why shouldn’t I strive for more?

I had to remember my life wasn't a romance novel, no matter how much I wanted it to be.

love a reunion,” Rebecca reflected. “It’s neither a beginning nor an ending, but a touchstone between the past and the future.

Sometimes, it’s easier to withdraw from the reality around you and enjoy the fantasy reality in a fictional novel.

The great thing about ten-year-olds is they don't balk at non sequiturs.

Don’t scream.” He took another step away and pressed his shoulders back. As he did, a set of white wings sprouted from his back.

You stupid, irresponsible human,” Lorelei spit the words out like a curse. Kary had never heard the word “human” sound so bad. 

Alarice,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to see you.” “Can’t say the sentiment’s returned.

If she died today, she died making her brother proud. But she didn’t want to die.

You could have me hanged,” Alarice offered. “If there are no witnesses, it never happened.

It was funny to feel so at peace - enough to ponder such trivial things - when she was about to send hundreds of men to their demise, and while she too was facing death.

It’s your imagination,” she told herself, “you’re not turning into a demonic cat.

She fell into their booth, right on the lap of a fallen angel. 

Now he had come to know that Kary was utterly irresponsible. What else could explain her coming back relentlessly to the place that had almost led to her assassination?

Kary burst out laughing out of the sheer annoyance. It was the better alternative between that and punching him in the face.

More than any other city, [Paris] has entered the paintings and the novels of those under its sway, so that representation and reality reflect each other like a pair of facing mirrors, and walking Paris is often described as reading, as though the city itself were a huge anthology of tales. It exerts a magnetic attraction over its citizens and its visitors, for it has always been the capital of refugees and exiles as well as of France.

Serena whirled, turning toward Lorelei, her eyes wild as she considered the second choice she had just been offered. Lorelei gave her a small nod.  She shifted to Kary, silently begging her younger sister to have mercy.  

A quick and dirty whatever-it-was in the stolen minutes in the middle of the day was one thing. The quiet crackle of the fire, smell of warm bread, the home she knew was so important to him—this was something else altogether.

All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo Big Nate series by Lincoln Peirce The Black Cauldron (The Chronicles of Prydain) by Lloyd Alexander The Book Thief  by Markus Zusak Brian’s Hunt by Gary Paulsen Brian’s Winter by Gary Paulsen Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis The Call of the Wild by Jack London The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White The Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury The Giver by Lois Lowry Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling Hatchet by Gary Paulsen The High King (The Chronicles of Prydain) by Lloyd Alexander The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien Holes by Louis Sachar The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins I Am LeBron James by Grace Norwich I Am Stephen Curry by Jon Fishman Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell Johnny Tremain by Esther Hoskins Forbes Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson LeBron’s Dream Team: How Five Friends Made History by LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger The Lightning Thief  (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) by Rick Riordan A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle Number the Stars by Lois Lowry The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton The River by Gary Paulsen The Sailor Dog by Margaret Wise Brown Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury Star Wars Expanded Universe novels (written by many authors) Star Wars series (written by many authors) The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann D. Wyss Tales from a Not-So-Graceful Ice Princess (Dork Diaries) by Rachel Renée Russell Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt Under the Blood-Red Sun by Graham Salisbury The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Second hand books had so much life in them. They'd lived, sometimes in many homes, or maybe just one. They'd been on airplanes, traveled to sunny beaches, or crowded into a backpack and taken high up a mountain where the air thinned. "Some had been held aloft tepid rose-scented baths, and thickened and warped with moisture. Others had child-like scrawls on the acknowledgement page, little fingers looking for a blank space to leave their mark. Then there were the pristine novels, ones that had been read carefully, bookmarks used, almost like their owner barely pried the pages open so loathe were they to damage their treasure. I loved them all. And I found it hard to part with them. Though years of book selling had steeled me. I had to let them go, and each time made a fervent wish they'd be read well, and often. Missy, my best friend, said I was completely cuckoo, and that I spent too much time alone in my shadowy shop, because I believed my books communicated with me. A soft sigh here, as they stretched their bindings when dawn broke, or a hum, as they anticipated a customer hovering close who might run a hand along their cover, tempting them to flutter their pages hello. Books were fussy when it came to their owners, and gave off a type of sound, an almost imperceptible whirr, when the right person was near. Most people weren't aware that books chose us, at the time when we needed them.

Sometime later, I stood watching the cold rain fall, when suddenly I felt Daemon's arms around me and his lips on my neck. He loved my pregnant body and his hands roamed over it under the warm terrycloth of my bathrobe. I was lost in the moment, content to stay here forever...lost in the cold rain and welcoming warmth of Dublin, and lost in the arms of my husband. Since we arrived early this morning we were in our room, making love and sleeping, lost in a fairy tale moment, savoring every caress.

She would be like that character in a novel she read once about the woman who rid herself of everything she owned, item by item. She kept paring down, paring down until all she had left could fit in her handbag. Then she walked out the door and left the house behind, too.

Kary smiled despite herself. “Does that line work with all the girls?” “Would you believe I’ve never tried it before?” “I would say that’s another line,” she said with a raised eyebrow. “You could just start a normal conversation, you know?” “And talk about the weather?

Wings like Ryan's, but these were black as well as white. Swords clashing with ear-splitting shrieks. Fires raging, consuming everything in their path. The clack-clack of heels on marble floors. The flashes of gowns and spinning to music. Two pairs of the same-colored eyes.

You know those times when an opportunity comes up and you hear yourself in some voice you hardly recognize saying yes? Like some imposter had invaded your throat, thumped on your vocal chords, and made a decision for you before you even have had a chance to think it through?

Treat the study as if we’re in a Daphne du Maurier novel, as if this house is an alternate-universe version of Manderley, and I am keeping either the murdered and mummified corpse of Rebecca or Mrs. Danvers—or both!—behind that locked door, to spare myself from a long prison sentence.

What if everything about me is totally made up? What if I’m actually…I don’t know. A wanted fugitive in the States.” “Julia.” He reached across the table and grabbed her hand. “Nobody makes up being a high school math teacher.” “That’s why it’s the perfect disguise!” He shook his head. “Nobody.

In my old age (smirk), I seem to have become a creature of habit. I have order, schedules, quirky little activities I dig that fill up my days. Even though I hang alone, I hang alone well. In the two years since I got back from my seven-month postcollegiate sojourn in gay paris, I have gotten used to spending most of my time alone, playing inside my head. All those solo walks along the Seine, nights spent reading in my apartment, and weekend lurking gin dark cafés conditioned me to like my own company. Sure, I was lonely not having anyone to gab with or laugh with, but somehow I found serenity in solitude. Now, even with friends around, I like being able to tune everything and everyone out. I have become selfish with my freedom, filling it with things I deem fit. This is how I deal with loneliness in my life: I learn to love it, and the it isn't loneliness, it's just lovely. 

What person does not have both the sage and the sucker lurking within? However, mine exist at the same time, all the time, and most of the time, they initiate conversation or argument with each other no matter the circumstance. I talk to myself into things, out of things, around things, and through things.

Right. Well, I wouldn’t know.” Sophia dismissed it with a wave of her hand. “It’s not like you speak anything other than English with me.” “You only know five words in Spanish and they’re all insults.” “They’re the most necessary of the words.” Sophia shrugged and gave the green-eyed girl a playful glare.

Eliot was scornful of idle women readers who imagined themselves the heroines of French novels, and of self-regarding folk who saw themselves in the most admirable character in a novel, and she hoped for more nuanced engagement from her own readers. Even so, all readers make books over in their own image, and according to their own experience.

….unable to find a title for her last published novel, she wrote six lines which included her eventual title The Birds Fall Down. These lines were attributed to Conway Power (the name she generally appended to her poetry, even in her private notebooks), from a non-existent poem called ‘Guide to a Disturbed Planet.’ When the novel was published she had fun deflecting the enquiries of readers who wanted to know how to find the works of Conway Power. One was told a long story: Conway Power was a landowner in a remote area who had written thousands of poems and destroyed most of them. He had left some of them with her, given his property to a nephew, and gone abroad. ‘If I can trace the book (if there is a book) I’ll let you know.

As a reader, I’m a lot more interested in what’s going to happen than what already did. Yes, there are brilliant novels that run counter to this preference (or maybe it’s a prejudice)—Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, for one; A Dark-Adapted Eye, by Barbara Vine, for another—but I like to start at square one, dead even with the writer. I’m an A-to-Z man; serve me the appetizer first and give me dessert if I eat my veggies.

The unnamed narrator of Rebecca begins her story with a dream, with a first sentence that has become famous: Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again. Almost all the brief first chapter is devoted to that dream, describing her progress up the long winding drive, by moonlight, to Manderley itself. The imagery, of entwined trees and encroaching undergrowth that have “mated,” is sexual; the style is slightly scented and overwritten, that of a schoolgirl, trying to speak poetically, and struggling to impress. Moving forward, with a sense of anticipation and revulsion, the dream narrator first sees Manderley as intact; then, coming closer, she realizes her mistake: she is looking at a ruin, at the shell of a once-great house. With this realization—one of key importance to the novel—the dreamer wakes. She confirms that Manderley has indeed been destroyed, and that the dream was a true one. (“Dreaming true” was a term invented by du Maurier’s grandfather, George du Maurier, author of Trilby; it was a concept that fascinated her all her life. Daphne was aware of Freud and Jung: George was not.)

Some very eminent critics writing in the decades immediately after the novel's publication felt that Eliot failed to maintain sufficient critical distance in her depiction of Ladislaw--that she fell in love with her own creation in a way that shows a lack of artistic control and is even unseemly, like a hoary movie director whose lens lingers too long on the young flesh of a favored actress. Lord David Cecil calls Ladislaw 'a schoolgirl's dream, and a vulgar one at that,' while Leslie Stephen complained 'Ladislaw is almost obtrusively a favorite with his creator,' and depreciated him as 'an amiable Bohemian.

A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another. The child I once was read constantly and hardly spoke, because she was ambivalent about the merits of communication, about the risks of being mocked or punished or exposed. The idea of being understood and encouraged, of recognizing herself in another, of affirmation, had hardly occurred to her and neither had the idea that she had something to give others. So she read, taking in words in huge quantities, a children’s and then an adult’s novel a day for many years, seven books a week or so, gorging on books, fasting on speech, carrying piles of books home from the library.

Adrienne Rich once wrote that Virginia Woolf’s style — that detachment and banked rage, that light, calculated charm — revealed a woman who never forgot she was being overheard, and evaluated, by men. Reading the flood of public writing about #MeToo in recent years — the op-eds and testimonies — I’d occasionally experience a prickly feeling of recognition. Here again, I’d think, was writing that stemmed from outrage, and often shame, but remained impeccably well-mannered and sure of itself, almost legalistic in structure and presentation. Necessarily, perhaps — women must constantly perform credibility. “The whole long arc of justice now crashing down that we call #MeToo has been about whether women may be in possession of facts, and whether anyone will bother to hear out those facts or believe them or, having believed them, allow those facts to have consequences,” Rebecca Solnit has written. These pieces often felt preoccupied with their imagined reception — straining to appease, convince, console — conscious of being overheard, in Rich’s phrase, but this time by women as well as men. Not these novels. They occupy the backwaters where the writer need not pander or persuade, and can instead seek to understand, or merely complicate, something for herself. They are stories about inconsistencies and incoherence, stories that thicken the mysteries of memory and volition.

hour. You all need a break from talking. And I need a break from trying to get you to stop talking.” Everyone laughed. For a second, they thought they had been in trouble. And it was actually a relief, to open their books and let their mouths rest for a little while. Though the buzzing feeling didn’t really go away. Evan had been reading How to Write a Mystery Novel for ten minutes when he realized that Mr. O’Neal was looking over his shoulder. “Interesting. Are you planning to write a book this summer?” Evan tried to decide if Mr. O’Neal was teasing him, and decided (correctly) that he was not. “No. But I am—” Evan realized he was about to say but I am kind of trying to solve a mystery. Mr. O’Neal looked at him. “But I am thinking about some stuff,” Evan said instead.

But as musically evocative as Fitzgerald’s diction is, it’s his luxurious syntax that choreographs the scene. Like the liquid movement of the partygoers, his sentences “swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath.” Fitzgerald’s long, languid rhythms rise and fall seamlessly, then “with triumph glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.” His language is as opulent as the women’s costumes and as free-flowing as the champagne, continuing breathlessly to the end of the passage. As readers, we may eventually forget Fitzgerald’s colorful and musical descriptions, but we probably won’t forget the atmosphere of his fictional dream. Long after the last guest has departed and we’ve closed the covers on the novel, something— a fragrance, a snatch of song, a feeling—will remain in the summer air. ATTITUDE

What did you think of Rebecca on tv? I don’t think it had dated too badly, but some things hit me – and it was silly, the way they made Rebecca hit her head on a block, instead of being shot by Maxim. And they muffed the fancy-dress ball, and the wreck: it was all too hurried, one did not know what was happening. In the book she had to go through the whole Ball without speaking to Maxim, who was on a hard chair beside her, and then it was in early dawn the wreck came. I suppose you thought to yourself, now Peg would have been much better than Olivier, and it would have worked out rather well, imagining Peg thinking of his first wife, and being plunged in deep thoughts ...! Of course it was old-fashioned in 1938 when it was written – I remember critics saying it was a queer throwback to the 19th-century Gothic novel. But I shall never know quite why it seized upon everyone’s imagination, not just teenagers and shop girls, like people try to say now, but every age, and both sexes.

INTRODUCTION TO GENDER AND SOCIETY The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir A classic analysis of the Western conception of the woman. Feminism Is for Everybody by bell hooks A primer about the power and potential of feminist action. We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Feminism redefined for the twenty-first century. QUEER THEORY AND INTERSECTIONAL FEMINISM Gender Trouble by Judith Butler A classic, and groundbreaking, text about gender and the boundaries of identity. Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein A 1990s-era memoir of transition and nonbinary identity. This Bridge Called My Back ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa A collection of essays about the intersections between gender, class, sexuality, and race. Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde A landmark collection of essays and speeches by a lauded black lesbian feminist. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston A memoir of growing up as a Chinese American woman. MODERN HISTORY How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor A history of the Combahee River Collective, a group of radical black feminists operating in the 1960s and 1970s. And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts Investigative reportage about the beginning of the AIDS crisis. A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski An LGBT history of the United States, from 1492 to the present. CONTEMPORARY QUESTIONS Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus by Vanessa Grigoriadis An exploration of the effects of the sexual revolution in American colleges. The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin A book about the shifting power dynamics between men and women. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay Essays about the author’s experiences as a woman and our cultural understanding of womanhood. All the Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister An investigation into the lives of twenty-first-century unmarried women. GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN FICTION Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown A groundbreaking lesbian coming-of-age novel, originally published in 1973. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin A classic of morality and desire, set in 1950s Paris, about an American man and his relationship with an Italian bartender. Angels in America by Tony Kushner A Pulitzer Prize–winning play about the Reagan-era AIDS epidemic. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson A coming-of-age and coming-out novel about a woman growing up in an evangelical household.

That’s a trilby,” I said, referring to Mr. Mitchell’s hat and trying to show off at least some expertise. “Named from du Maurier’s novel, later made into a play,” said Oscar. “It was a style worn on stage.” “You mean Rebecca?” “No, Rosemary. George du Maurier’s Trilby. Not Daphne. That was his granddaughter. Now, Trilby also introduced into common usage the name Svengali. You see, it’s a story about power, about control . . .

Even so, all readers make books over in their own image, and according to their own experience. My Middlemarch is not the same as anyone else’s Middlemarch; it is not even the same as my Middlemarch of twenty-five years ago. Sometimes, we find that a book we love has moved another person in the same ways as it has moved ourselves, and one definition of compatibility might be when two people have highlighted the same passages in their editions of a favorite novel. But we each have our own internal version of the book, with lines remembered and resonances felt.

about the conditions as they have been. Meanwhile, angry art of the new era—from Naomi Alderman’s best-selling novel The Power; to Dietland, a television show about a women’s magazine . . . and a feminist terrorist group that throws men out of planes; to Hannah Gadsby’s cult stage show Nanette and the exhibition of Adrian Piper’s art at MoMA and the feminist street art of Tatyana Fazlalizadeh—captures the furious female energy of contemporary America.

The lingering assumption—born of the same expectations that I had chafed at as a kid, reading novels—was that the natural state of adult womanhood involved being legally bound to a man.

It was intolerable what lay hidden within another, intolerable tat you could not divide one person into another with no remainder.

Since physics is poetry, then poetry is physics, he propounded.

Photographs and essays and novels and the rest can change your life; they are dangerous.

the recent novel by his wife Rebecca Goldstein, entitled 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, subtitled A Work of Fiction). The

Cash was really handsome; his olive skin and piercing eyes reminded me of the romance novels I used to sneak sometimes when I’d finished work. Eventually, I’d stopped reading them. I wasn’t going to have that kind of love. Why break my heart over and over with fiction?

I could understand the impulse to make the novel more accessible. I want as many people as possible to read The Mill on the Floss too. But like paperback editions of classic novels issued with updated covers resembling those of Twilight, it seemed a pandering and misbegotten effort, as if no young reader today might possibly pick up a novel written one hundred and fifty years ago unless the book were in sexy neo-Gothic drag.

That, to me, is really the thesis of the novel: we can think we know what is coming, but we can never know what it will mean.

That kind of talk belonged only in romance novels, where people were liberated to say all the silly, raw, beautiful things they felt.

So I went out alone into a soft day, with the dispelled winter lurking above in high dark clouds under which there ran quick fresh currents of air, and broken shafts of insistent sunshine that spread a grey clarity of light in which every colour showed sharp and strong.:

Secondhand books had so much life in them. They’d lived, sometimes in many homes, or maybe just one. They’d been on airplanes, traveled to sunny beaches, or crowded into a backpack and taken high up a mountain where the air thinned. Some had been held aloft tepid rose-scented baths, and thickened and warped with moisture. Others had childlike scrawls on the acknowledgment page, little fingers looking for a blank space to leave their mark. Then there were the pristine novels, ones that had been read carefully, bookmarks used, almost like their owner barely pried the pages open so loath were they to damage their treasure. I loved them all.

Seems safer to read about love in novels than it is to honestly experience it.

Mrs. Biddle might remind me uncomfortably of Mrs. Danvers from Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca, but on the positive side, she made an excellent brew.

thinking about Rebecca, the romance novel, again. In her column,

What if there is no pot of gold, Anna?” Her mother’s voice joined the breeze. “You need to find your own treasure in moments because life is short and passing as we speak. Don’t waste it.

if I can get up on my soapbox here, saying that romance novels are unrealistic is horseshit,” he cleared, and I ducked my head, fighting a laugh. “I think unrealistic is believing it’s okay to be in a relationship where you aren’t respected or loved.

When she at last pressed her mouth to his, it felt like coming home. He tasted of fire and smoke and earth, and fresh bread and soap and something so clean, so pure, it was like spring water to her lips.

Reading is a bridge from misery to hope.