Author Henry James constantly moved between two worlds: from the 19th century to the 20th, realism to modernism, and America to Europe. Like many expatriate American writers who followed him in the 20th century, he developed a double consciousness, taking on the ways of his adopted English society but retaining an ability to analyze it as an outsider. He drew on this double life to write novels revered as much for their notoriously difficult prose as for their presentation of contrasts between the Old World and the New.

Early Life in New England

The James family was famously brilliant. Henry James Sr. was a utopian theologian immersed in the intellectual life of mid-19th-century Massachusetts, rubbing shoulders with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

When his children were born, he was living in Washington Square, New York City, the eponymous location of an early novel by his son. Henry James Jr. would describe the neighborhood as having “a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city.” Here, one might “come into a world which appeared to offer a variety of sources of interest” (James 2001, p. 13). He would never completely lose this interest in the genteel world of high-society New York, but he would cast his sights further afield before long.

Henry James Jr. was born in 1843, a year after his brother William, who would go on to become an eminent and innovative psychologist. William James’s experimental, empiricist psychology was founded on his early training in physiology and medicine, as well as an interest in philosophy, in which he took after his father.

William and Henry James were close to their sister Alice, whose bouts of mental illness seem to have influenced both brothers’ work. Alice was also a writer, keeping a diary for the last three years of her life, which has become a source of scholarly interest for its revelations about the James family and in its own right, as a study of illness.

A Cosmopolitan Youth

A cosmopolitan, in the 19th century, was someone whose worldview was untrammeled by national borders; someone who had spent time absorbing the culture of multiple countries. In America, particularly, someone who had traveled extensively in Europe. The James family was as cosmopolitan as they come.

Henry was not yet one when his father sold the house in Washington Square, and the family upped sticks to Europe. They returned intermittently to New York, but between the ages of 12 and 17, Henry spent more time abroad than at home. His father’s work took him to intellectual centers such as Paris, Geneva, and London.

According to 19th-century tradition, a young American returning from such travels could now consider himself sufficiently worldly and cultured to become a writer, which James did after quickly abandoning his studies at Harvard Law School. From the very start, James was interested in what he would later term ‘the art of fiction,’ publishing criticism as well as stories, and making friends with important figures in the literary circles of New York, Boston, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In his late twenties, he felt a pull to return to Europe. There, he mixed with even more eminent Victorians, many of them cosmopolitans like himself. From the world of English literature, he met George Eliot (who was working on her own novels set partly in Europe, 1871’s Middlemarch and 1876’s Daniel Deronda), Charles Dickens, and the critics Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin.

Rome and Paris offered long-term prospects for James as a foreign correspondent for American publications. In 1875, he spent a year living in Paris’s famed Latin Quarter, again managing to make the acquaintance of authors whose names would go down in history: Émile Zola, the master of literary naturalism; Guy de Maupassant, practitioner of the short story; Ivan Turgenev, advocate of Russian literature in the West.

The stage was set for James to start penning classics of his own. His early novels dealt, perhaps predictably enough, with wealthy heiresses in New York society, struggling artists in Rome, and the contrasting values and ways of life in the New World of America versus the Old World of Europe. See his revealingly titled novels The American (1877) and The Europeans (1878).

Settling in England

It was not until he settled in London that James hit his stride, drawing together the influences of his affluent, learned New England upbringing with his cosmopolitan education and passion for the literary traditions of France and England.

Moving among the upper echelons of British society, James developed an interest in (and a keen ability to analyze) both the people within this society and the effects of this society on outsiders such as himself. Americans, with their innocent optimism and zeal for taking life by the horns, might easily find themselves at odds with world-weary Europeans, whose cynicism comes from having seen and done everything that the Old World, stuffed with so many artistic treasures that beauty becomes passé, has to offer.

Many of James’s friends and readers were well-off women. Unsurprisingly, his first successful novels featured protagonists plucked from this demographic: Daisy Miller (1878) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Both novels examine the problems of courtship for young, wealthy, and brilliant women whose privileged, cosmopolitan experiences set them at odds with the norms of behavior for married women.

James has been both praised and criticized for how he portrays women. He claimed to have been inspired by George Eliot’s ordinary yet remarkable heroines, such as Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. “Place the centre of the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness,” he wrote, “and you get as interesting and as beautiful a difficulty as you could wish” (James 1908, Preface).

This is partially an explanation of James’s approach in Portrait of a Lady, which is considered his first masterpiece for the way it interrogates the interiority of its heroine, Isabel Archer, as she contemplates marriage and throughout her marriage to the egotistical Gilbert Osmond. It is also more broadly a defense of his highly interiorized technique. James admired Eliot’s ability to prove how much her female characters “insist[ed] on mattering” by placing them front and center in her novels, making their consciousnesses adequate subjects for serious, intellectual fiction, and he aimed to do the same.

The 1890s: James’s Crisis Point

By the late 1880s and early 1890s, James was living in London, often visiting Paris and re-immersing himself in French literature. His 1890 novel The Tragic Muse, with its actress protagonist, revealed his strong interest in the theater, and was followed by an attempt to conquer the West End.

Guy Domville, which premiered in January 1895, ran for just one month and was greeted with booing. Audiences did not quite share James’s interest in the conflict between worldly and religious lives, played out in the 18th-century protagonist’s flirtations with entering a monastery versus continuing the family line. Famously, when the protagonist spoke the line, “I’m the last, my lord, of the Domvilles,” an audience member shouted out: “It’s a bloody good thing you are!”

The conflict in Guy Domville was pertinent to James: not because he had designs upon a religious life but because celibacy and all-male companionship were on his mind. Guy Domville was staged by the manager of the St. James’s Theater, George Alexander, already known for promoting Oscar Wilde’s comedy Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892). Alexander would become notorious later in 1895 as the producer of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, which was running at St. James’s when the playwright was arrested and convicted for homosexuality.

Perhaps in the spirit of rivalry, James had called Wilde’s play An Ideal Husband “crude,” “feeble,” and “vulgar.” But in a letter reacting to Wilde’s arrest, he stressed the “sickening horribility” of having one’s private life exposed and made into a “spectacle” (Matheson 726).

Objecting to the indignity of being made conspicuous for one’s sexuality, James here fuels the theory of several critics who have speculated that he was closeted. Like his friend Robert Louis Stevenson in the classic Gothic novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, James seemed interested in the possibilities afforded by modern, urban life for hiding in plain sight.

The 1890s brought James a series of personal and professional crises, which, as the themes of Guy Domville suggest, must have made him conscious of his public perception. He was brought down by the deaths of his sister Alice in 1892, then Stevenson in 1894, and then his close friend Constance Fenimore Woolson.

An erudite, cosmopolitan writer like James, Woolson had kept up an intense, 14-year friendship with him, founded on rivalry and mutual obfuscation. Both felt they had something to hide. It remains open to debate what, exactly, they felt for each other: words flowed freely between them when discussing each other’s work, but when it came to their feelings, a wall of silence sprang up. Undoubtedly, James was affected by her probable suicide in Venice in 1894. From here on, his work grew yet more contemplative, yet more complex.

Henry James’s Masterpieces

After the hardships of the 1890s, James reached his apex as a writer, although he now stuck firmly to novels, short stories, and criticism. In works from the late 1890s and 1900s, he integrated his previous ‘international theme’ with an interest in drama, psychological depth, and awakening consciousness of sexuality.

He published The Turn of the Screw in 1898: a Gothic horror novella which turns on the unreliable narration of a governess who believes her young wards to be possessed by the spirits of former staff at the mansion. Part of the governess’s outrage (although it is not quite overtly spelled out) comes from the possibility that these children have, through these evil spirits, been exposed to sexual knowledge.

The Awkward Age, the following year, was less Gothic in style but similarly explored a young girl’s awareness of sexuality among the adults around her, as did What Maisie Knew (1897). James’s increasingly oblique style matched this subject. The novels are full of euphemism and circumlocution, mimicking the way people talk around their feelings (and juxtaposing it with the straight-talking of children).

Other masterpieces from this period were The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). James’s themes of cosmopolitan experience and the problem of marriage, especially for women, remain intact. With these novels, though, James mastered the prose for which he is known: both wandering and precise, fixated on pursuing every facet of a character’s inner workings and thought processes.

Final Years and Impact

Henry James wrote most of his masterpieces after settling in the English seaside town of Rye in 1898, in a Georgian villa called Lamb House. He lived here for the next 18 years, only returning to America for short visits. He never married, but devoted himself to filling Lamb House with art, developing its gardens, and inviting numerous literary friends, including H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad.

In the early 1900s, James undertook the huge task of editing and compiling his novels for a collection known as the New York edition, revising some and writing prefaces explaining his intentions. By this time, he was dictating his words to a secretary rather than writing or typing them himself, which has been proposed as a reason for his labyrinthine sentences.

Yet each word is scrupulously chosen, and it can often take more than one reading to comprehend a Henry James sentence. Take this example, from his 1908 preface to Portrait of a Lady:

“These are the fascinations of the fabulist’s art, these lurking forces of expansion, these necessities of upspringing in the seed, these beautiful determinations, on the part of the idea entertained, to grow as tall as possible, to push into the light and the air and thickly flower there; and, quite as much, these fine possibilities of recovering, from some good standpoint on the ground gained, the intimate history of the business – of retracing and reconstructing its steps and stages.” (James 1908, Preface)

By the time the First World War broke out, James had good reason to consider himself more English than American. Like many in Britain’s artistic circles, he was horrified by the prospect of war in Europe, a place he saw as a cradle of culture and freedom. As an American, James was doubly horrified at his home nation’s initial lack of intervention. In 1915, in an act of protest, he gave up his American citizenship and became a naturalized British citizen.

His fiction remains difficult to categorize because of this straddling of worlds. In terms of style, he matured to a prolix, dense prose that, especially in its psychological complexity, anticipated modernist writers who would come to maturity just after his death in 1916, such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

He can be grouped with British writers of the period, sharing the cosmopolitan vision of predecessors such as George Eliot and John Ruskin; but his reflections on American sensibility set him apart. Ultimately, this double vision from a long, transnational life makes Henry James unlike any other author. It’s no wonder readers call him The Master.

Sources

• James, Henry (1908). The Portrait of a Lady, New York edition.
• James, Henry (2001). Washington Square. Project Gutenberg edition.
• Matheson, Neill (1999). ‘Talking Horrors: James, Euphemism, and the Specter of Wilde’, American Literature Vol. 71, No. 4.

One of the key figures of German Romanticism, ETA Hoffmann was not just a composer and music critic, but also an author and important innovator of tales of the fantastic, supernatural, and uncanny. Drawing on folkloric elements, childhood imaginings, and the deep workings of the subconscious, Hoffmann’s stories have profoundly shaped literary history since they first appeared in the early 19th century. Beyond that, they have provided inspiration for operas, ballets, films, and television shows. Here are five of his most compelling works.

1. The Nutcracker and the Mouse King

Every Christmas, a ballet company somewhere is bound to be performing The Nutcracker. First performed in 1892, the ballet was a collaboration between Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and choreographer Marius Petipa. Tchaikovsky’s sugary score, Petipa’s delicate and dazzling set pieces, and the enchanting scenery (The Nutcracker was intended as a “ballet-féerie,” a subgenre of ballet that relies on spectacular visual effects) are all elements that capture the magic of ETA Hoffmann’s original short story, first published in 1816.

There are minor differences between Hoffmann’s story and Tchaikovsky’s ballet: the heroine is named Marie in the story and Clara in the ballet, while the ballet does not include a subplot from the story that details how the young prince was turned into a nutcracker. Tchaikovsky’s and Petipa’s libretto was not based directly on Hoffmann’s story but on an 1844 adaptation by the French author Alexandre Dumas père. 

By and large, though, the ballet retains the essential components of Hoffmann’s story. On Christmas Eve, young Marie is given a nutcracker in the traditional shape of a soldier figurine by her imposing and mysterious godfather, Herr Drosselmeyer. More interested in his own toy soldiers, Marie’s brother Fritz accidentally breaks the nutcracker, but Drosselmeyer (who turns out to be a skillful toymaker) manages to do some remedial repairs, and Marie sets down the nutcracker to rest.

Overnight, she goes to check on the invalid and finds the house under attack by the terrifying, seven-headed Mouse King and his army of mice. The nutcracker, now grown to human size, defends Marie, backed by an army of gingerbread men and the children’s other toys, and Marie clinches the battle at the last moment by throwing her shoe at the Mouse King.

Tchaikovsky was drawn to The Nutcracker and the Mouse King because, characteristically for Hoffmann, it blurs the lines between reality and fantasy through the lens of childhood. In its young female heroine, Marie, the story celebrates childhood as a time of access to imaginative dreamscapes that, as adults, we long to recover.

The story emphasizes Marie’s ability to find magic in ordinary household objects such as the grandfather clock and the toy cabinet, and the adults’ insistence that she is only imagining things. Although the story employs a classic trope by consigning its most exhilarating moments to dreams, there is no moment when the author pulls away the curtain and definitively says: “It was only a dream.” There is no clear division, in Hoffmann’s writing, between the dream world and reality.

2. The Sandman

One of Hoffmann’s other best-known stories similarly fascinates readers because of its exploration of dreams and the unconscious. The Sandman is a truly terrifying story whose complexities, both psychological and literary, give it its power to surprise and entrance readers even today.

Beginning with a series of letters between the protagonist, Nathanael, his fiancée Clara, and Clara’s brother Lothair, the narrative soon unravels as the narrator (a friend of Lothair) interjects and confesses that he has contrived to open the story in a way “calculated to arrest your attention.” Henceforth, he promises, the story of Nathanael’s “ominous life” will get only more bizarre—but, he insists, it is all true, for “nothing is more wonderful, nothing more fantastic than real life.”

The opening letters establish that all through his childhood, Nathanael lived in fear of the Sandman, a character from folklore who is said to scatter sand onto our eyes as we fall asleep to help us sleep soundly and peacefully. Nathanael, though, associates the Sandman with having to leave his parents at night, and his fears are worsened by old wives’ tales about this evil visitor throwing sand into children’s eyes so that they will pop out and he can steal them. Worse still, he imagines that a lawyer friend of his father’s, Coppelius, is the Sandman in disguise—a grotesque figure whom Nathanael sees, one day, conducting a mysterious alchemical experiment. Surrounded by apparitions of eyeless faces, Coppelius pulls embers out of a furnace and hammers them into shape: “Eyes here! Eyes here!,” he cries, advancing on a terrified Nathanael before his vision (was it real or a hallucination?) ends.

Later in the story, an older Nathanael has moved away but is still so haunted by Coppelius that he becomes suspicious of a glasses merchant he meets called Coppola, who hawks his wares by shouting about “fine eyes.” Nathanael has also fallen in love with the daughter of Coppola’s friend Spallanzani, Olympia, a beautiful, accomplished pianist and singer, but responds stiffly and mechanically to his advances. As it turns out, Olympia is an automata created by Spallanzani with the help of Coppola. Finding the two men tussling over her, Nathanael discovers not only that Olympia is a doll but that Coppola is really Coppelius. As the fight ends with Olympia’s glass eyes falling out, Nathanael is dragged back into the psychic trauma of his childhood.

Hoffmann’s story has had an afterlife as vivid as the tale itself. Its exploration of women’s objectification through automata was especially suggestive for works of opera and ballet, which place women front and center whilst obliging them to perform mechanically. Jacques Offenbach’s opera Les contes d’Hoffmann (1851) used the plot of The Sandman for its first act, while the ballet Coppélia (1870), with music by Léo Delibes and libretto by Charles-Louis-Étienne Nuitter, borrowed names and the central conceit from Hoffmann’s tale.

The Sandman also caught the attention of Sigmund Freud, who offered a psychoanalytic reading in his 1919 essay The Uncanny. Though not the first to theorize about the uncanny (an unsettling sensation of simultaneous familiarity and unfamiliarity), Freud took up the suggestion of his predecessor, psychiatrist Ernst Jensch, that Hoffmann’s stories were a perfect literary case study of the phenomenon. Discussing the story’s eyes motif, which he understands as indicative of the Oedipus myth or castration complex, Freud calls Hoffmann “the unrivaled master of the uncanny in literature.”

3. Ritter Gluck

Hoffmann’s first published story was another uncanny tale and an early example of the doppelgänger in literature. While The Nutcracker and the Mouse King and The Sandman bear some imprints of Hoffmann’s musical pursuits, and indeed most of his stories involve music in some way, Ritter Gluck (1809) actually features a composer—or does it?

The narrator of Ritter Gluck meets a mysterious stranger in Berlin’s Tiergarten as the two listen to one of the orchestral performances that typically took place in such parks in the 19th century. They find they have a shared admiration for the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (whose middle name Hoffmann adopted as a sign of his own admiration) and Christoph Willibald Gluck.

The stranger gets the orchestra to perform the overture to one of Gluck’s operas, and the narrator suspects he must therefore be a Kapellmeister—a music-master employed to write and perform for a German church or court. But the stranger is given to sudden disappearances and is gone before the narrator can work out who he is and where he has come from.

They meet again, and the stranger laments the sorry state of the music scene in Berlin, where the orchestras neglect Mozart and, worse, ruin Gluck. He disappears again, and the narrator eventually finds him outside a theater where Gluck’s opera Armide is being performed. Promising to give the narrator a better rendition of the work, the stranger takes him to a curious house, where everything is furnished in an outdated style. The stranger performs a masterful and true-to-the-original version of Gluck’s overture and finally reveals—or claims—that he is Gluck.

Hoffmann’s story is set in 1809 when the real, historical Gluck had been dead for over twenty years. This might account for the outdated furnishings of the stranger’s house: perhaps he is Gluck’s ghost, lingering in his strangely unchanged surroundings. Or perhaps the stranger is just a Gluck aficionado, who convinces himself, because he can play his music so brilliantly, that he really is the composer—it is for the reader to decide.

4. The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr

One of Hoffmann’s most unusual works, the novel The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr was left unfinished on the author’s death in 1822. Its title pays homage to a similarly experimental novel, Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759). However, while Sterne’s work was a freewheeling take on the conventions of the Bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel, in which the protagonist narrates the story of their life from beginning to end (Tristram Shandy does not get to his birth until Volume Three), Hoffmann’s satire goes a step further: the protagonist proudly telling his life story is not a human, but a highly literate cat.

For much of Tomcat Murr, we are reading, as the title suggests, the life and opinions (he has many) of a cat named Murr, who has secretly learned to write by raiding the library of his owner, the magician Master Abraham. But, as the novel’s full title suggests, Murr has not used totally blank paper for his memoirs: we are reading The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr together with a fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper.

Murr’s memoirs are frequently interrupted—sometimes mid-sentence—by passages from Johannes Kreisler’s biography. Like the ghostly Gluck in Hoffmann’s earlier story, Kreisler is a Kapellmeister employed by a court to write music. The grouchy, eternally unfulfilled Kreisler’s sections of the novel tell of his unrequited yearning for a beloved muse, Julia, and the mistreatment he receives as a jobbing composer from society.

If this complex narrative structure and the inclusion of a proto-magical-realist literate cat were not innovative enough, Hoffmann’s novel contains another postmodern flourish. Johannes Kreisler was not just a character in Tomcat Murr, but featured in a series of earlier, semi-fictional writings about music that Hoffmann published under the title Kreisleriana (1813). Using Kreisler as a mouthpiece allowed Hoffmann to distinguish between his music criticism and more satirical, often scathing, pieces of writing about the contemporary music world.

Like the blurring of reality and fantasy in Hoffmann’s other works, the invention of Kreisler has both helped and hindered later critics and historians in understanding Hoffmann’s own life and opinions, since it is hard to draw a line between the author and his alter ego. Kreisler may have been fictional, but he seemed to many to embody the values of Romanticism so completely that his importance in literary and musical history is equal to that of his creator. The composer Robert Schumann was so inspired by Kreisleriana that he wrote a set of piano pieces under the same title, while a young Johannes Brahms styled himself as Johannes Kreisler (Schafer 1975, 119).

5. The Golden Pot

First published in 1814, the novella The Golden Pot is another work that displays Hoffmann’s remarkable capacity to include a host of stereotypical Romantic fairytale elements and, simultaneously, to work outside the parameters of form, style, and genre. Like The Sandman and Tomcat Murr, The Golden Pot employs an unusual structure, told as a series of twelve “vigils,” and features a metanarrative device: towards the end of the novella, the narrator becomes a character in the tale.

Magical touches abound in The Golden Pot, although unlike the other stories mentioned here, these are less suggestive of childhood fantasies or childhood trauma and more connected to traditions from folklore, mythology, and even alchemy and theology. There is a lovelorn student protagonist, Anselmus; an old apple-monger who turns out to be a witch; a mysterious archivist, Lindhorst, who turns out to be a salamander; and his daughter, Serpentina, with whom Anselmus falls in love. Set to work by Lindhorst transcribing ancient Arabic and Coptic texts, Anselmus is also tasked with not spilling a drop of ink on the originals, a task he succeeds in with the help of Serpentina.

As a fire snake, Lindhorst has been sent out from the mythical land of Atlantis. He can only return when he has succeeded in marrying off his three snake daughters to humans, bestowing at the same time their dowry: a golden pot. But when the apple-monger bewitches Anselmus with a magic mirror, he comes to believe that the salamander and Serpentina are not real and mistakenly splashes one of the ancient texts with ink. Lindhorst (or the salamander) takes revenge by imprisoning him in a tiny crystal bottle. Eventually, after a battle between the witch and salamander, all is well, with Anselmus and Serpentina finally ending up in Atlantis.

Just as The Sandman lent itself to operatic and balletic retellings, The Golden Pot is steeped in the theatrical culture of its time. Hoffmann was working as a music director in Dresden while he wrote the novella. During this time, he conducted Mozart’s The Magic Flute, which has similar themes of the protagonist undergoing trials to win the love of a magician’s ward. Hoffmann was also working on his own opera, Undine (premiered in 1816), which is similarly about an anthropomorphic woman-creature who gains immortality through the love of a human man. These touches, along with the apple monger with a magic mirror who recalls the witch in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (first published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812), make The Golden Pot a quintessential fairytale. Its idiosyncratic manner of telling, however, is pure Hoffmann.

Reference List:

Schafer, R. Murray (1975). E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Jane Austen’s novels promote the idea of virtuous living within a complex social setting, delivering stories that contain moral education. Austen drew on a classical tradition that had enumerated the virtues necessary for a good life and the ideas of Christian virtue that permeated her own life. In the novels, moral improvement involves, as writer and critic C.S. Lewis observed, the experience of a profound self-awareness. Austen carefully choreographs her characters’ actions, using what Lewis calls a “grammar of conduct,” leading them on a journey of success or failure in achieving moral improvement.

Austen’s Use of Classical Virtues

The Greek philosopher Aristotle defined virtue as that which “will be the state of character which makes a man good and which makes him do his own work well.” Jane Austen’s novels flesh out the complexity of that process. For Austen, a virtue is not the capacity to obey rules and meet obligations. She focuses on character virtues developed through life experience that define the choices her characters will make.

Many critics have speculated about the sources of Austen’s approach to virtue, with some pointing to similarities she shares with Aristotle, who, in his work The Nicomachean Ethics, outlined a detailed scheme of what was necessary to achieve happiness. For Aristotle, the pursuit of happiness was both practical, rooted in action and choices, and philosophical, leading to wisdom.

Aristotle produced what philosopher Gilbert Ryle described as “copious and elastic discriminations,” focusing on excesses and deficiencies that strayed from what Aristotle defined as the mean, or the ideal middle way. For Aristotle, the way to happiness was to find the middle way in conduct.

Thus, in Austen’s novels, characters are drawn away from this middle ground by complex family and social relationships as they strive for happiness. For some, like Darcy and Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, this results in joy; for others, like Lydia and Mr. Wickham, the refusal to follow the path of moderation ends in hardship.

Some critics detect a Christian aspect of Austen’s view of the virtues. Her father, a clergyman, had a scholarly background and may well have influenced Jane’s interest in the virtues. As a result, although not explicitly depicted in the novels, Christian virtues such as faith, hope, and charity were added to the classical virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude.

The Challenges of the Virtuous Life

In Jane Austen’s novels, the virtuous life is not easy. Happiness comes at a cost and is won by struggle and sacrifice. The choice to pursue a course of virtuous action can follow careful deliberation, as with Elinor in Sense and Sensibility. It can also emerge from a natural inclination learned through habit, as Fanny Price demonstrates in Mansfield Park. In both cases, the decision to pursue virtue and seek personal happiness creates obstacles that disrupt the lives of the protagonists and those in their immediate social circle.

In Sense and Sensibility, unlike her sister Marianne, who allows emotion to overwhelm her, Elinor keeps her head, preserving the vital virtue of prudence. By contrasting the two sisters, Austen highlights the importance of maintaining self-control in society. For Elinor, the virtues of temperance and prudence are essential. For Marianne, their lack becomes problematic.

Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, is placed in a domestic situation with the Bertram family, which requires her to draw on her hard-won internal resources. She becomes what Lewis calls the “spectator of deceptions.” While the characters who inhabit or pass through the grand Bertram family house act out their virtues and vices, Fanny remains constant in her refusal to be affected or changed by them. Fanny resists the advances of Henry Crawford and the attempts by his sister Mary to tempt her into making ill-judged choices. Fanny emerges resolute and, by the novel’s end, is ready to marry Edmund.

The Complexity of a Life of Virtue

Aristotle described the path of the virtuous life as one of moderation. In Jane Austen’s novels, we also witness the complexity and variety of virtues. There are no simple choices between good and evil in Austen’s work. Her characters are not cardboard characters inhabiting a simplistic moral universe. This enables subtle comparisons of temperament, desire, and capacity. Fine details of excess or deficiency in virtue are examined for narrative effect.

In Sense and Sensibility, the difference between Lucy Steele and the Dashwood sisters lies in the contrast between false emotion and the capacity for careful deliberation in moral matters. With Elinor and Marianne, we see the inner complexity of their lives as they struggle for coherence in their ethical judgments.

Darcy, in Pride and Prejudice, is portrayed as a snob who is disdainful of those he considers inferior. But Elizabeth senses depth to Darcy’s character and explores these throughout the novel, challenging him whenever necessary. Darcy eventually succumbs to Elizabeth’s pressure. But Austen does not stop there. In prompting the transformation of Darcy, Elizabeth comes to important self-knowledge. “I never knew myself,” Elizabeth admits after encountering Darcy in all his complexity.

Austen displays skill at delineating subtleties of character, even with someone as imperturbable as the hero of her most famous novel. Austen does not confine this approach to her hero and heroine. Each of the Bennet sisters exemplifies an aspect of pride gone wrong. Jane’s lack of pride becomes indifference to consequences, while Lydia’s presumption leads to an ill-judged marriage.

Doing the Right Thing in Austen’s World

For Aristotle, what was correct in personal conduct was whatever was done “at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way, is what is both intermediate and best, and this is characteristic of virtue.”

In Jane Austen’s novels, this principle dominates the narrative. It is the principle of the moderate middle way, and few characters escape its controlling effect. At the foundation of this principle is the necessity of deliberation. In Austen’s novels, characters who cannot deliberate bring disorder into their lives. Even with a character as prudent in her judgments as Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, it may take the course of the entire narrative for the right balance to be achieved.

Emma Woodhouse in Emma takes it upon herself to become a matchmaker. She fails to deliberate sufficiently about the consequences of this choice, and it falls to Mr. Knightley to act as the correcting force. He stands back, viewing the results of Emma’s interference. Throughout the novel, George Knightley openly critiques Emma, ultimately guiding her to moral improvement. In his eyes, Emma has failed to do what was right for the right person at the right time. Her scheming has been born of a deficiency in practical reasoning, which leads to an insensitivity toward others. Emma has strayed from the middle way of careful reasoning.

In Emma, the heroine illustrates the negative impact upon others of a lack of empathy. Acceptance of the judgment of others and personal humility are the only ways this vice can be corrected. Mr. Knightley becomes the source of that correction.

The Rewards of Virtue

For Aristotle, each person seeks a goal, or what Aristotle called a “telos.” In Jane Austen’s novels, this end is dramatized as the final reward of virtuous acts, often in the form of marriage. While the novels have been described as domestic comedies, and marriage ultimately plays a central part in their conclusions, the happiness achieved by Austen’s characters is not confined to marital bliss. Happiness is achieved in a life lived well, meeting the demands of virtue, and in accordance with the principle of moderation. It is also illustrated by the establishment of a renewed social order.

Throughout the course of the narratives, each of Austen’s characters is challenged. They must show the extent to which they possess the virtues. Some meet the challenge, achieving personal union with another. Elizabeth and Darcy marry; Emma and Mr Knightley are wed at the end of the novel. By contrast, Henry Crawford and Maria in Mansfield Park reap the rewards from their transgressive choices, outcasts of the Bertram family society. Mr. Elliott and Mrs. Clay in Persuasion also suffer social banishment after straying from the path of moderation.

The virtues gained by Austen’s characters strengthen society. In this sense, she adds a Christian dimension to her narratives. Charity, the central virtue of Austen’s Christian faith, becomes the means whereby the disorder of polite society is banished, to be replaced by an order essential for the future lives of her characters.

Jane Austen’s novels promoted virtuous living through stories that dramatized the challenges of being virtuous, its complex nature, and the dangers of straying from the middle way into excess and deficiency in conduct. Her large array of characters allowed Austen to use narrative to overcome the limitations of moral instruction delivered in philosophical and religious tracts.

Though Thomas Hardy began writing poetry from a young age, he gained notoriety with his novels. As a Victorian realist, Hardy did not shy away from criticizing Victorian society and was sympathetic toward the declining rural populations in the United Kingdom. Many of his novels are set in a fictional region of rural Wessex in southwest England. Hardy’s novels are often dark, suspenseful, and even controversial, as he illustrated the darker side of human nature within his texts.

Here are ten of his most prominent novels. Most were inspired by Hardy’s own life, the people in it, and the rugged countryside surrounding him.

Who Was Thomas Hardy?

Born on June 2, 1840, in Dorset, England, Thomas Hardy grew up with a father who was a stonemason and a mother who devoted her time to educating her son before he began school at age eight. Hardy demonstrated academic potential. However, his formal education ended at age 16, as his parents could not afford to send him to university. He instead became apprenticed to a local architect and, skilled at the trade, moved to London in 1862 to work in the field. He enrolled in King’s College, London, in that same year.

Hardy never grew accustomed to life in London. He felt inferior to others in the city and was infuriated by the class divisions in its society. He became interested in social reform initiatives and began reading the works of English philosopher John Stuart Mill and English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold.

After a few years, Hardy returned to Dorset and settled in Weymouth, where in 1871 he began his writing career. In September 1874, Hardy married English writer and suffragist Emma Gifford. Her death in 1912 profoundly affected Hardy, who fell into a deep depression. He married again in 1914 to an English teacher and children’s writer named Florence Emily Dugdale.

In 1910, Hardy was appointed a Member of the Order of Merit and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. By 1927, he had received 25 nominations and was a finalist for the prize in 1923.

In his later years, Hardy adopted a Wire Fox Terrier, Wessex, who remained by Hardy’s side as he continued to write. On January 11, 1928, at the age of 87, Hardy dictated his final poem to his wife before passing away.

Hardy’s reflections on such themes as morality, social judgment, class, fate, and remorse were controversial in his own time and remain vital subjects of discussion in the 21st century. Hardy’s ashes can be visited in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey in London.

1. Desperate Remedies (c. 1871)

Hardy’s first published novel and one of his lesser-known works, Desperate Remedies, follows Cytherea Graye, who, after her father’s death, seeks employment and becomes a lady’s maid to the mysterious Miss Aldclyffe.

Cytherea falls for the architect Edward Springrove, but complications arise when she discovers he is already engaged. Meanwhile, the sinister Aeneas Manston pursues her, hiding a dark secret involving his supposedly dead wife.

Hardy interweaves gothic suspense into his sensation novel as arson, blackmail, and mistaken identities threaten Cytherea’s safety. Ultimately, Aeneas’s crimes are exposed, Edward’s prior ties dissolve, and Cytherea achieves both freedom and a hard-won future with Edward. The novel was released anonymously by the publisher Tinsley Brothers.

2. A Pair of Blue Eyes (c. 1873)

Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes follows Elfride Swancourt, a young, impressionable woman drawn into a love triangle with her first suitor, the earnest architect Stephen Smith, and later the older, intellectual critic Henry Knight. When Elfride’s past with Stephen is revealed, social prejudice and pride undermine both men’s claims to her affection.

Henry’s dramatic rescue binds him to her emotionally, but his moral rigidity soon drives them apart. Seeking security, Elfride impulsively marries another man, then dies tragically. Stephen and Henry confront their failures as they travel together to Elfride toward the end of the novel, both unaware that she had married another man and subsequently died. A Pair of Blue Eyes was Hardy’s first novel not to be published anonymously.

3. Far From the Madding Crowd (c. 1874)

Perhaps Hardy’s most celebrated novel, Far from the Madding Crowd follows Bathsheba Everdene, an independent young woman who inherits a farm and attracts three very different suitors: steadfast shepherd Gabriel Oak, wealthy but lonely farmer William Boldwood, and reckless soldier Sergeant Troy.

Bathsheba’s impulsive marriage to Sergeant Troy leads to heartbreak, financial strain, and tragedy, especially after Sergeant Troy’s neglect. William’s obsessive love culminates in violence when Sergeant Troy briefly reappears. After Sergeant Troy is killed and William is imprisoned, Bathsheba learns the value of loyalty and quietly builds a future with Gabriel, whose devotion endures.

Far from the Madding Crowd explores the conflict between independence and emotional responsibility through Bathsheba’s romantic relationships. By contrasting Gabriel’s stability with William’s obsession and Troy’s recklessness, Hardy critiques impulsive desire and romantic idealism. The novel highlights how chance and social conventions shape people’s lives, with Hardy ultimately arguing that stability, patience, and quiet endurance should be valued over passion.

4. The Hand of Ethelberta (c. 1876)

Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta depicts Ethelberta Petherwin, a clever, ambitious young woman who rises socially after marrying a wealthy, elderly man, only to have him die soon after their marriage.

Determined to support her large working-class family, Ethelberta becomes a celebrated poet and storyteller while carefully concealing her origins. Pursued by multiple suitors, including the loyal architect Christopher Julian, the aristocratic Lord Mountclere, and others drawn to her beauty and talent, Ethelberta navigates social ambition, romantic pressure, and family duty. Ultimately, she marries Lord Mountclere for security rather than love, only to find the union stifling.

The novel critiques class mobility, performance, and pragmatic marriage. Hardy employs the hallmarks of Victorian realism, a 19th-century literary movement that focused on social issues and the day-to-day lives of people, to depict life in the Victorian era, particularly the experience of ordinary people in rural communities in the southwest of England.

5. The Return of the Native (c. 1878)

The Return of the Native begins with Clym Yeobright’s return from Paris, in hopes of uplifting his community, but he is met instead by his mother, who disapproves of his marriage to the beautiful, restless Eustacia Vye.

Eustacia dreams of escaping her new home and grows disillusioned as Clym’s ambitions falter. Misunderstandings involving Clym’s cousin Thomasin and her unreliable husband, Damon Wildeve, intensify the tensions within the family.

A tragic chain of events leads to the drowning deaths of Eustacia and Damon. Clym, grief-stricken, becomes a wandering preacher, while Thomasin eventually finds stability with Diggory Venn.

The novel is set on Egdon Heath, a fictional moor of Hardy’s Wessex. Although the area is depicted as rural and largely uninhabited, residents earn their living by cutting the furze that grows there.

6. The Trumpet-Major (c. 1880)

Set during the Napoleonic Wars, Hardy’s The Trumpet-Major follows Anne Garland, who is pursued by the steady, honorable trumpet-major John Loveday, his impulsive sailor brother, Bob, and Festus Derriman, the cowardly nephew of a local squire.

Anne’s household is unsettled by military encampments, wartime anxieties, and the vain attentions of the boastful Festus Derriman. While John’s quiet devotion offers stability, Anne is drawn to Bob’s charm, despite his unreliability.

After romantic misunderstandings, departures, and returns, Bob ultimately reforms and wins Anne’s hand. John, heartbroken but dutiful, withdraws. The novel blends romance with the tensions of wartime England. The Trumpet-Major was Hardy’s only historical novel.

7. The Mayor of Casterbridge (c. 1886)

Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge follows Michael Henchard, a hot-tempered laborer who drunkenly sells his wife and infant daughter at a fair.

Years later, now a prosperous grain merchant and mayor of Casterbridge, Michael is shaken when his wife and daughter return. His attempt at restitution is undermined by pride, secrecy, and rivalry with the capable Donald Farfrae, who gradually surpasses him in business and public favor.

Michael’s past deceptions erode his remaining relationships. Bankrupted and isolated, he dies alone, leaving a note asking to be forgotten, embodying the novel’s themes of fate and remorse.

8. The Woodlanders (c. 1887)

The Woodlanders depicts Grace Melbury, raised above her humble origins by her ambitious father, and Giles Winterborne, the loyal woodsman who has long loved her.

When Grace marries the sophisticated but morally weak Dr. Edred Fitzpiers, jealousy, betrayal, and class tensions unravel their union. Edred’s affairs leave Grace isolated, while Giles’s unwavering devotion leads him to sacrifice his health and ultimately his life to protect her reputation. After Edred seeks reconciliation, Grace realizes too late the worth of Giles’s steadfast love.

The novel explores loyalty, desire, and the painful cost of social aspiration.

9. Tess of the d’Urbervilles (c. 1891)

One of Hardy’s most controversial novels, Tess of the d’Urbervilles follows Tess Durbeyfield, a poor but dignified young woman whose family’s claim of a noble ancestry sets her on a tragic path.

Sent to seek favor from the wealthy d’Urberville branch, she is exploited by Alec, an experience that shadows her life. Tess later finds love with the idealistic Angel Clare, but when she confesses her past, he rejects her. Poverty and desperation drive her back to Alec until Angel returns, repentant. Tess kills Alec in anguish and briefly escapes with Angel before her capture and execution.

The novel condemns social hypocrisy and rigid moral judgment and reflects on class, gender, and sexual norms in Victorian society. It exposes the double standards that punish Tess for her victimization while excusing male wrongdoing. Hardy presents Tess as morally pure yet socially condemned, emphasizing the role that rigid social structures have in shaping her tragic life. Through Tess’s suffering, the novel challenges notions of justice and purity, and portrays a society that destroys innocence through hypocrisy rather than compassion.

10. Jude The Obscure (c. 1895)

Hardy’s last major work of fiction, Jude the Obscure, portrays Jude Fawley, a bright, ambitious stonemason longing to study at Christminster, a fictional city modeled on Oxford. Trapped by a loveless marriage to Arabella Donn, he later falls deeply in love with his cousin, Sue Bridehead, whose intellectual independence challenges social norms.

Their attempt to live together outside marriage sparks public condemnation, poverty, and instability. The burden worsens when Sue’s children die in a horrific murder-suicide by Jude’s neglected son, “Little Father Time.” Crushed by guilt and societal pressure, Sue returns to her estranged husband, while Jude dies alone and defeated.

The novel critiques social rigidity, marriage laws, and thwarted aspiration.

The 14th century was a time of major economic and societal changes in the Italian peninsula. As commercial activity increased and generated considerable wealth, a new social structure began to form, with new actors and a new sensibility, more focused on earthly matters than spiritual concerns. Florence, where Giovanni Boccaccio spent much of his life, was at the heart of this upheaval, which found its way into his work. Indeed, his Decameron, a collection of 100 novellas written in Italian vernacular, laid the foundations for the humanist attitude of the Renaissance, breaking with medieval sensibilities.

Who Was Boccaccio?

Born in 1313 in Florence or in nearby Certaldo, Boccaccio was the son of Boccaccio di Chiellino, nicknamed “Boccaccino,” and an unknown woman. A wealthy Florentine merchant, Boccaccio officially recognized his illegitimate son. Thus, young Giovanni spent his childhood years in the San Pier Maggiore neighborhood among the Florentine gente nova (new people), the rising merchant class. In 1320, “Boccaccino” had another son with his wife, the noblewoman Margherita de’ Mardoli, whose family claimed a connection with Beatrice, Dante’s muse.

In 1327, at the age of 13, Boccaccio went to Naples with his father, who had received the influential position of agent of the Bardi Bank, one of the leading Florentine financial institutions. As Boccaccio’s father wanted his eldest son to follow in his footsteps, Giovanni began working at the changing desk of the Bardi Bank’s Neapolitan office.

At the time, Naples was a major economic and political center in the Mediterranean region. His “apprenticeship” at the bank gave young Boccaccio the opportunity to interact with people from all walks of life, honing the observational skills that would inform his future literary works.

Boccaccio, as the scion of a partner of the wealthy Bardi Bank, was admitted into the Angevine court, where he mingled with the local aristocracy and experienced the courtly chivalry of an elite yearning for an old world of refined customs and traditions. In Naples, Boccaccio also pursued his literary interests, coming into contact with the city’s learned circles, where he read, alongside the Classical Latin authors, Petrarch’s poetry.

In 1340, however, following the bankruptcy of the Bardi Bank, Boccaccio was forced to return to Florence, bringing his first literary works with him: Il filocolo (The Love Afflicted, ca. 1336), Il filostrato (The Love Struck, ca. 1338), and the epic Teseida (1340-41). Combining the courtly themes of chivalry and love with Boccaccio’s acute observation of real life, these early works had an important impact on the literary circles outside Italy, serving as inspiration for Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales.

In Florence, Boccaccio experienced financial difficulties, especially after his father’s death during the 1348 Black Death. In the same year, the deadly plague and its impact on Florence’s society inspired him to start penning his major work: the Decameron.

Italy in the 14th Century: Society, Religion, Literature

The bubonic plague was a catalyst for crucial changes in the social fabric of Europe, shaking the foundations of the feudal system. By the time the pandemic spread in the Italian peninsula, likely carried by Genoese ships traveling between Asia and Europe, 14th-century Italy was already experiencing a period of social and political reconfiguration.

Indeed, around this time, the considerable wealth generated by the flourishing commercial activities introduced a new key player in the urban landscape: the merchant class. The increased social standing of these gente nova challenged the status quo of the Italian city-states, where the ruling aristocracy saw their power base and worldview threatened. The tensions between these two classes caused a series of social, political, and religious conflicts.

The financial and social success of the rising merchant class also marked a change in values. While the Catholic Church continued to condemn money lending, branded as usury, and commerce, the attitude toward dealing with money and amassing wealth through trade began to shift.

Meanwhile, the general dissatisfaction with the tight control of the Church over religious matters, exacerbated by the weakening of the papacy’s power during the Avignon period (1309-1377), generated friction between the religious authority and lay institutions. The result was the emergence of a new “materialistic” sensibility, which promoted, especially among the merchant classes, a renewed concern for the earthly world and the interplay between its various actors and forces.

An acute observer of the world around him, Boccaccio infused the emerging worldview taking shape in Italy at the time into his Decameron, laying the groundwork for a new, secular literature.

The Decameron: Storytelling in the Time of Plague

Like Dante’s The Divine Comedy, the Decameron begins with a crisis that causes chaos and social upheaval. While Dante embarks on a supernatural journey from Hell to Paradise to seek redemption, Boccaccio finds a remedy to adversities in humankind’s resilience and ingenuity.

Indeed, in the proem introducing the Decameron, ten young people (seven women and three men) flee from Florence, where the Black Plague is causing death, anguish, and the breakdown of all social and moral norms. They find refuge in the countryside in nearby Fiesole, where they spend a fortnight holding banquets, dancing, playing, and inventing stories.

Every day, the brigata (brigade) elects a queen or king who directs their leisure activities and, more importantly, sets the rules for their storytelling. So, over the course of ten days (hence the title of the work, Decameron, meaning “Ten Days’ Work”), each member of the group tells a story (for a total of 100 tales). At the end of each day, the storytellers sing a ballad. In the prologues to the days and in some individual tales, Boccaccio adopts a classical style and vocabulary. However, the Decameron mostly features a vivid, swift, and tense prose.

On the first day, Pampinea allows her friends to “discourse of such matters as most commend themselves to each in turn.” The second day, under the rule of Filomena, the young men and women take turns in telling tales “of the fortunes of such as after divers misadventures have at last attained a goal of unexpected felicity.” On the third day, Neifile instructs the brigade to come up with stories where human will triumphs over fortune.

The fourth day, under the rule of Filostrato, is dedicated to tragic love stories. The following day, Fiammetta asks her companions to tell love stories where “good fortune [befalls] lovers after divers direful or disastrous adventures.” On days five, six, seven, and eight, Elissa, Dioneo, and Lauretta instruct the others to invent (often bawdy) tales focused on wit, trickery, and deceit.

After a ninth day, where, under the rule of Emilia, each member is free to choose a theme, the Decameron ends with Panfilo asking his friends to tell tales “of such as in matters of love, or otherwise, have done something with liberality or magnificence.” The final tale of the collection is The Patient Griselda, in which Boccaccio recounts the story of a popular character of medieval romance.

Key Themes: Fortuna & Amore

In the hundred tales narrated by the ten young Florentines, two fundamental forces are at play, causing various mishaps and vicissitudes: Fortuna (fortune) and Amore (love).

The idea of fortune as a force that distributed its gifts unevenly caught the imagination of many medieval writers. In their worldview, despite its apparent randomness, fortune was part of a preordained, divine plan. In Inferno VII, for example, Dante asks his guide, Virgil, about the nature of fortune. The Roman poet describes it as an agent of divine providence, giving away its gifts according to God’s inscrutable will.

With the rise of mercantile society, however, the concept of fortune undergoes a fundamental change. From an agent of divine design, it becomes a “natural,” if not yet entirely “materialistic,” force that presents a constant challenge to human enterprise. The son of a wealthy merchant, Boccaccio was well aware of how an unforeseen event can make or break a carefully devised plan.

In the Decameron, however, humankind is not helpless against the irrational turning of the “wheel of fortune.” Indeed, for one of the first times in the Middle Ages, Boccaccio praises those who use their industria (ingenuity) to struggle against adverse fortune, seizing every available opportunity to overcome it.

In the Decameron’s more “modern” world, the concept of love is also the subject of a radical transformation. In the last lines of Paradise (33, 145), Dante refers to God as “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Conversely, Boccaccio shows love as a natural force that should not be repressed.

The numerous sexual references of the Decameron and the bawdy tone of a number of tales have led to much debate over the work’s moral values. Some believe Boccaccio showed a blatant disregard for the morality of his time. On the other hand, others argue that it is no longer possible to consider his work obscene, emphasizing that he simply approached the concept of love from a “naturalistic” perspective.

The Decameron’s Legacy: A Step Out of the Middle Ages

In his influential analysis of Italian literature, 19th-century literary critic Francesco De Sanctis referred to the Decameron as a “Human Comedy” that introduces a new worldview and moral order after Dante’s Divine Comedy.

De Sanctis’s view may imply an overly rigid divide between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. However, the Decameron’s spirit, alongside its open celebration of ingenuity as a human virtue, is undeniably new, spearheading Humanism and the Renaissance. Indeed, Boccaccio’s collection of tales is both a celebration of all human experience, tragic and comic alike, and an attempt to raise vernacular literature to the status of the Classics.

In his later years, Boccaccio devoted much of his time to the study of Latin texts, and his Florentine house became a meeting spot for the circle of early Italian humanists. At the same time, he remained interested in Italian vernacular poetry. His Trattatello in laude di Dante (Little Tractate in Praise of Dante), written between 1351 and 1365, is a testament both to his passion for vernacular literature and admiration for Dante.

By the time of his death in 1375, a year after his friend and fellow poet, Petrarch, died, Boccaccio had already laid the foundations for the development of the Italian Renaissance.

After his trek through Hell (Inferno), guided by Virgil, Dante comments, relieved: “we emerged, to see—once more—the stars.” The poet, however, will need to journey through Purgatory, where sins are cleansed, before reaching Paradise. Here, guided by his beloved Beatrice, Dante will tackle a series of increasingly complex theological issues, from the coexistence of unity and multitude to the mystery of incarnation. The ineffability of his last supernatural journey repeatedly challenges Dante’s poetic skills, making the Paradiso the Divine Comedy’s most difficult canto. Here is a brief guide to help readers make sense of Dante’s mystical experience.

Dante’s Guide in Paradiso: Who Is Beatrice?

At the beginning of the Divine Comedy, when Dante, having lost the diretta via (the path that does not stray), finds himself in a selva oscura (shadowed forest), a special guide appears to help him: Virgil. The Roman poet explains that he will lead Dante through the nine circles of Hell up to the mountain of Purgatory.

However, as a follower of the pagan religion and unbaptized, Virgil won’t be able to accompany Dante in the final leg of his supernatural journey, where the Florentine poet will reach the beate genti (blessed people) residing in Heaven. “If you would then ascend as high as these,” says Virgil, “a soul more worthy than I am will guide you; I’ll leave you in her care when I depart.”

The new guide appears when Dante climbs to the top of Mount Purgatory, the location of Earthly Paradise. There, Virgil is replaced by Beatrice, the Italian poet’s dead beloved. After rebuking him for straying from the rightful path, thus betraying her memory, Beatrice exhorts Dante to drink from the rivers Lethe and Eunoè to confront and atone for his sins. Then, as the poet is “remade, as new trees are renewed when they bring forth new boughs,” he and Beatrice can finally “climb unto the stars.”

Dante introduced Beatrice in his La vita nuova (The New Life), a 1239 work in which he chronicles his love for and relationship with Beatrice, from the first sight of his beloved at nine years old to his deep mourning after her death. In the last chapter, Dante vows to write in the future about who came to be his ideal woman “that which has never been written of any woman.”

The poet fulfils his promise about 40 years later with his Divine Comedy, where Beatrice serves as both his guide and teacher, helping him address some of the most complex theological issues in Christianity. In the Paradiso, Beatrice, usually identified as Beatrice Portinari, retains her individuality while also being presented as an allegory of divine love and theology.

Indeed, the Divine Comedy, like most works of medieval literature, features different levels of interpretation. As a result, each historical figure with whom Dante interacts is both a “real,” earthly person and an allegory of something else. Moreover, in Dante’s worldview, where everything unfolds according to a divine plan, history and historical figures serve to anticipate future events. In this case, the Beatrice Dante meets in the afterlife is the fulfillment of her earthly qualities: spiritualized love.

Dante’s Cosmology: The Nine Heavens

The first canto of Paradiso begins when Dante is still physically at the top of Mountain Purgatory. Aware that he is about to write about topics that usually elude human understanding, the poet asks Apollo and the godly force for help to “show the shadow of the blessed realm inscribed within my mind.”

Moreover, Dante himself needs trasumanar (pass beyond the human) to enter the divine realm, an experience that “cannot be worded.” In the Divine Comedy, God’s realm is composed of nine heavens and the Empyrean, the immaterial region where God resides. Following the Ptolemaic understanding of the universe, Dante places the earth at the center of his cosmos.

Surrounded by spheres of air and fire, the planet is part of the so-called “sublunar world,” subject to change. The nine concentric celestial spheres, on the other hand, are immune to corruption. The first sphere, the Heaven of the Moon, is home to the souls of those who failed to fulfill their vows. From there, Dante travels to the Heaven of Mercury, where he encounters those who lived with too much ambition. In the third celestial sphere, the Heaven of Venus, reside those who loved with too much ardor.

The fourth heaven, the Heaven of the Sun, is past the earth’s shadow. As a result, its souls are described in positive terms. There, Dante meets the wise. In the fifth sphere, the Heaven of Mars, reside the warriors of faith. The Heaven of Jupiter, the sixth celestial circle, is home to the just rulers. The souls of contemplative thinkers reside in the Heaven of Saturn. In the eighth sphere, the Heaven of the Fixed Stars, Dante witnesses the triumph of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

From there, Dante and Beatrice move to the Primum Mobile, home of the angels, where the poet learns a new kind of world geography (more on that later). Beyond the ninth heaven is the Empyrean, the final leg of Dante’s supernatural journey.

A Divine Order

In Dante’s (medieval) worldview, every element of the universe (including Paradise) is part of a divine order, created according to God’s plan. “All things, among themselves, possess an order; and this order is the form that makes the universe like God,” explains Beatrice in the first canto of Paradiso.

The relationship of one part of the universe to another, as well as the relation of all things to their divine creator, is the great theme underlying the last cantica of the Comedy. As its 33 cantos offer an exploration of the harmonic structure of creation—and the truth about reality and humanity—the Paradiso has often been referred to as Dante’s most “mystical” work.

Influenced by Scholasticism, the leading philosophical system of the Middle Ages and, especially, by St. Thomas of Aquinas, Dante aims to encompass reality as a whole in his poem. More importantly, believing that the world can be (rationally) explained through a harmonic conceptual system, the Florentine poet sees the Comedy as a means to restore the right order (diritta via), lost amid the political (and spiritual) turmoil of his time.

Endowed with intelligence and free will, human beings are the only creatures able to stray from the right track. On the other hand, their yearning for knowledge makes them the only created being capable of discerning the divine truth, the ultimate meaning of the universe.

“The Great Sea of Being”: The One and the Many

Dante presents the idea of the universe as a harmonic creation of God in the opening verses of the Paradiso, where he states: “the glory of the One who moves all things permeates the universe.” However, the celebration of the “oneness” of all things with their creator is immediately followed by a paradox: God’s glory “glows in one part more and in another less.”

The coexistence of unity and diversity is one of the central themes of the Paradiso. While everything that exists is created and sustained by God (the existence itself), some parts of the universe receive a lesser amount of divine light.

To explain the paradox of “the One and the Many,” the same paradox captured by the Christian concept of the Trinity, Dante resorts to an ontological metaphor: lo gran mar de l’essere (the great sea of being). While all things derive and tend to the same end (God), “every nature has its bent, according to a different station, nearer or less near to its origin. Therefore, these natures move to different ports across the mighty sea of being, each given the impulse that will bear it on.”

In the third canto of the Paradiso, Dante returns to the relationship between oneness and multiplicity, asking Piccarda Donati (more on her later) whether the souls of the outer heavens envy those nearer to God. In her answer, Piccarda explains how Paradise is the place where souls are at one with God and all desires are always satisfied. Going back to the sea metaphor, Piccarda tells Dante: “And in His will there is our peace: that sea to which all beings move—the beings He creates or nature makes—such is His will.”

In The Undivine Comedy, Teodolinda Barolini notes that Dante “does not so much attempt to resolve as hold up for scrutiny” the paradox of unity and diversity, adding that “our poet seems more to revel in it than to want to cover it over.”

Key Encounters in the Paradiso

During his encounter with Piccarda, Dante not only reflects on the ontological challenges within the “sea of being,” but he also addresses Florence’s history of political violence. Indeed, the Divine Comedy, which the poet started during his exile, is both an allegory of humankind’s hope for redemption and a commentary (and solution) on Italy’s 14th-century political crisis.

The sister of Forense Donati, whom Dante met in Purgatory, Donata was kidnapped from the cloister on the order of her other brother, Corso Donati. Corso was the leader of the Guelfi Neri (Black Guelphs), the faction opposing Dante’s political group, the White Guelphs. It was the Black faction that condemned Dante to death in absentia in 1302.

History and politics are also at the center of the sixth canto. (The sixth canto of each section deals with politics as seen from an increasingly broader perspective, from Florence to the empire.) There, in the Heaven of Mercury, Dante speaks with the Byzantine Emperor Justinian. A complex narrative, the meeting with Justinian frames the Roman Empire (seen as a preparation for the coming of Jesus) within Christian providential history. At the same time, the canto condemns the weakness of the contemporary empire, a pawn in the bloody rivalry between Guelphs and Ghibellines.

In the Heaven of Mars, Dante then delves into his family history during his conversation with Cacciaguida, his great-great-grandfather. In addition to explaining to the poet the origins of his family name, Cacciaguida bemoans the decay and corruption of Dante’s Florence, recalling the idyllic old times, when the city, “sober and chaste, lived in tranquility.” In a show of medieval rhetoric, Dante puts Cacciaguida, a knight killed in the Second Crusade, among the warriors of faith.

The conversation becomes theological once again when Dante meets St. Thomas of Aquinas (Heaven of the Sun) and the first human, Adam. Justinian had already explained how the crucifixion of Jesus was the just punishment for humankind’s original sin. Now, Dante gets to know the true cause of this offense: the trespassing of the boundary placed by God on humankind.

The End of the Journey & the Vision of God

As Dante journeys through the heavenly spheres, he turns his attention to increasingly complex theological issues. In the Primum Mobile, he is even confronted with an alternative perspective of the universe. As in 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 was amazed by the sight of the Earth rising above the lunar horizon, so Dante is granted a unique vision: the image of the universe with God as a luminous point at its center.

After witnessing the angelic hierarchies circling around the center of the universe, Dante and Beatrice enter the Empyrean, the “heaven that is pure light.” In a series of “phantasmagoric visions,” the poet recalls his tour of the inner heavenly realm: a river of light turns into a circle, which then acquires the shape of a hillside and a rose. Finally, the rose turns into a city, the celestial Jerusalem, with an empty throne at the center. The imperial seat awaits Henry VII, the emperor who, in Dante’s political vision, “shall show Italy the righteous way-but when she is unready.”

At the end of the tour of the Rose of the Blessed, Beatrice is replaced by the medieval mystic St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Dante’s guide for the last leg of his journey. St. Bernard urges the poet to pray to the Virgin Mary before directing his gaze to the primo amore (Primal Love), the divine principle holding the universe together.

Lamenting the difficulty to recount his visions, Dante, nevertheless, tries to verbalize his experience: “I saw—ingathered and bound by love into one single volume—what, in the universe, seems separate, scattered: substances, accidents, and dispositions as if conjoined.”

While gazing at the center of the divine light, the poet experiences the true nature of the Trinity: a series of three circles of three different colors, with the third appearing as “fire breathed equally by those two circles.” Then, Dante witnesses a human image appearing within the second circle (the Son), representing the mystery of the incarnation.

Finally, in the final verses of the Paradiso, Dante reaches his goal, the vision of God: “Here force failed my high fantasy; but my desire and will were moved already—like a wheel revolving uniformly—by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

What we think of as Irish literature is a multifaceted phenomenon, shaped to some extent by the ever-changing relationship between the island and its near neighbor, Britain. All of the following writers wrote primarily in English (though some also knew Irish). Some came from Anglo-Irish backgrounds, growing up in England and spending only a brief time in their homeland. Others lived and breathed Ireland, and their writing is saturated with local characters, beliefs, traditions, and turns of phrase. You may already know that Irish literature boasts the playwright Oscar Wilde, poet W.B. Yeats, and novelist James Joyce—but who else does it count among its leading lights?

1. Oscar Wilde

Irish literature is known all around the world thanks to the country’s longstanding devotion to nurturing literary talent, a tradition that survives today. It’s also known, in part, thanks to certain great names: Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce.

The flames of Wilde’s fame were undoubtedly fanned by circumstances beyond his writing, namely his arrest and imprisonment for “gross indecency” (or homosexual acts) in 1895. Yet the Dublin-born writer, who spent most of his adult life in England, was always destined to go down in literary history. He cultivated a penchant for the epigram, a short, witty saying which often revolves around reversing expectations or a pair of qualities: “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing,” as a character states in his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1895).

Wilde was also one of the most popular playwrights in 1890s London. He took up the genre of the drawing room play and infused it with his epigrammatic wit in plays such as Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). These have gone down as archetypes of Victorian Englishness, despite Wilde’s Irish background (his mother, Speranza, was a poet with a strong interest in Irish nationalism and folklore).

2. W.B. Yeats

Two years after Wilde’s biggest theatrical success and great fall from grace, his compatriot, Yeats, pledged to open an Irish Literary Theatre, which ran from 1899 to 1901. Though short-lived, it laid the groundwork for the more successful (and still running) Abbey Theatre in Dublin, a home of the groundswell in Irish literary activity in the 20th century.

Yeats was also the foremost poetic chronicler of the Celtic Twilight (another name for the revival of interest in Celtic, Gaelic, and Irish culture in the late 19th century). His own poetry brought together Irish folk tales with classical allusions and an interest in spiritualism.

3. James Joyce

If Yeats’s language looked towards modernism, with its frequent recourse to imagery and symbolism, James Joyce’s works brought Irish literature and modernism together definitively. Like Yeats, he was interested in traditional Irish stories as well as classical mythology, depicting ordinary urban life in the short stories that made up Dubliners (1914), before retelling Homer‘s Odyssey in a stream of consciousness style in Ulysses (1922).

Finnegans Wake (1939) is perhaps his most formidable work, moving towards the invention of a new language, resembling English but in a highly idiosyncratic distortion. Like several of the following writers, Joyce wrote most of his works outside Ireland, living in various European cities, including Paris and Zurich.

4. Jonathan Swift

A master of satire, Jonathan Swift is also known as Dean Swift, in reference to his day job as Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin during the early 18th century. From this prominent position, Swift—son of English parents who had moved to Ireland following their support of the royalist cause during the English Civil War—was able to get involved in politics, both locally and further afield in London.

His politics varied, oscillating widely as did the terms ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ themselves in this period. However, from his writing, we can safely say that Swift supported the cause of Ireland, a nation ruled from afar by the British monarchy.

Works such as A Modest Proposal (1729) weaponized a highly ironic style to urge readers to recognize the harsh conditions foisted upon Irish people under British rule.

A Modest Proposal is an essay that begins fairly ordinarily, lamenting the starvation of poor people across the country. Eventually, Swift makes his ‘modest’ proposal: children can be “most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled,” so why should poor people not eat them? It was an extreme way of drawing attention to poor people’s plight and the dehumanizing solutions put forward by politicians.

Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726) satirizes the popular subgenre of travel literature, although it is now celebrated as much for its sprawling imagined geography—including the land of the Houyhnhnms, where talking horses reign over the human-like Yahoos—as for its underlying political commentary.

5. Maria Edgeworth

Like Swift, Maria Edgeworth came from an Anglo-Irish background. Her father was a politician and landowner (as well as inventor and father to 22 children), whose estate was named after the family: Edgeworthstown, in County Longford.

Maria Edgeworth grew up with a wealth of firsthand experience of Anglo-Irish landlordism, overseeing the day-to-day life of servants, tenants, and ordinary working Irish people. Both Edgeworth and her father were relatively progressive, supporting Catholic Emancipation and women’s education.

Edgeworth’s novels are reflections of this perspective on Irish country life, as well as important examples of Enlightenment and early Romantic ideals in an Irish literary context. For Castle Rackrent (1800), Edgeworth drew on her own family’s history of mismanaging its estate, telling the tale of the castle’s fluctuating fortunes over four generations.

Not only did the novel inspire Sir Walter Scott to write his Waverley series of novels (sometimes considered among the earliest examples of historical fiction), but it also inaugurated a subgenre which would be integral to Irish literature in English for over a century to come: the Big House novel. These novels centered on a large estate, the Anglo-Irish family that owns it, and their relations with the Irish people and places around them. (It is possibly merely coincidental, but telling as to the Irish perspective on these houses, that ‘big house’ has also long been a slang term for ‘prison’.)

6. Lord Dunsany

When we think of Irish writers born in the 19th century, several names might spring to mind: Oscar Wilde, beloved for his wit and wisdom; W.B. Yeats, poetic chronicler of the Celtic Twilight (another name for the revival of interest in Celtic, Gaelic, and Irish culture in the late 19th century); and James Joyce, innovative author of enduring literary mind-bogglers such as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).

Possibly more prolific than these three put together is the lesser-known Lord Dunsany. Born Edward Plunkett in London, he was heir to the peerage of Dunsany, and after inheriting the title aged 22, lived for most of his life in Dunsany Castle, in County Meath.

This was Dunsany’s base for his participation in the thriving Irish literary culture of the early 20th century, when he worked with Yeats and Lady Gregory, co-founders of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, a breeding ground for many of Ireland’s most significant playwrights.

Plays did feature among the 90 or so works Dunsany wrote, but his greatest influence was as a writer of short stories and novels in the fantasy genre. He has been cited or detected as a precursor in writing by J.R.R. Tolkien, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. Le Guin, H.P. Lovecraft, Jorge Luis Borges, and Guillermo del Toro.

7. J.M. Synge

Like Dunsany, Synge was a playwright closely involved with Yeats, Gregory, and Edward Martyn’s Abbey Theatre. It had been open for just three years when it courted a major scandal with the opening of Synge’s play The Playboy of the Western World in 1907.

Synge had been interested in his native language and culture for some time before writing this play. He had extended his university studies in Hebrew and Irish by undertaking further research into Irish folklore and tradition on the Aran Islands, off the coast of Galway. He did not limit himself to patriotic studies: like many literary figures around the turn of the 20th century, Synge was a cosmopolitan, traveling and studying in Germany, Italy, and France.

After meeting Yeats, Gregory, and Martyn, Synge became even more devoted to writing about Irish life and people, and started producing plays which attracted the attention—and often critique—of figures among the prominent Irish nationalist movement of the early 1900s. Many of these figures had strong ideas about how the representation of Irish people, especially their attitudes to religion, sex and gender, and work, could impact support for the nationalist movement.

The Playboy of the Western World, set in County Mayo, tells the story of a young man who boasts that he has killed his father and becomes celebrated by local women as a hero, only for it to transpire that his father has not died, so he attacks him again. Nationalists attending the premiere decried the play’s immorality, outraged at Synge’s representation of the Irish working class and of Irish women, and riots broke out across Dublin.

After the outbreak of violence at the premiere, the remainder of The Playboy of the Western World had to be mimed. This meant that audiences missed out on hearing Synge’s greatest achievement: his lyrical language, meticulously representing the dialect of English spoken by Irish people. Synge is now praised for this linguistic mastery as well as his realism.

8. Elizabeth Bowen

Somewhere between Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Nancy Mitford, Elizabeth Bowen’s writing is acutely conscious of place, and that place is often Ireland, where she spent her early childhood and intermittent periods of her adulthood.

The Last September (1929) is a Big House novel like Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, and similarly draws on the author’s autobiography. Bowen inherited the family home, Bowen’s Court in County Cork, in 1930. In The Last September, she combines her idyllic memories of a charmed countryside childhood with the sociopolitical backdrop of Ireland’s struggle for independence.

Bowen was fascinated by Ireland, feeling “an extraordinary ambivalent attitude towards it” as someone with, as she felt, only a partial claim to a heritage which was gradually eroding, the old families and houses disappearing  “like patterns fading out of a textile.”

Elsewhere, she reflected on the “slight inflection” implied in the term Big House, its hint of “hostility, irony” (Lee 1999, p. 26). Nonetheless, each of these houses “seems to live under its own spell” (Lee 1999, p. 25). The same could be said about the finely wrought houses in many of her other books, set outside Ireland, such as The Heat of the Day (1949) and The House in Paris (1936).

9. Flann O’Brien

Two hundred years after Jonathan Swift mixed politics and literature, there came Flann O’Brien—one of the many pen-names of the civil servant Brian O’Nolan. Throughout his career, O’Brien wrote fiction and journalism under a variety of pseudonyms to hide the fact that these send-ups of political processes were coming from the heart of politics itself.

Much of O’Brien’s journalism was published during a 20-year period during which he is sometimes said to have withdrawn from writing fiction. His first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), was a roaring success with critics, lionized by such literary giants as Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, and James Joyce. After his next novel, The Third Policeman, was rejected, O’Brien started a rumor that he had lost the manuscript on a countryside drive. (It was, in fact, hidden in his sideboard—and the novel was published posthumously in 1967.)

Yet O’Brien did not retire from writing fiction, only fiction in English. His next novel was published in 1941 and was titled An Béal Bocht. Written in Irish, it is the imagined autobiography of a poor Irishman who faces various misfortunes, and was published under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen, which O’Brien was using for his Irish-language newspaper columns.

This interplay between Irish and English sets O’Brien apart from a writer with whom he is often paired (and who was something of a bête noire for him), James Joyce. Both were master absurdists, practitioners of ludic metafictional nonsense. However, where Joyce was immersed in cosmopolitanism thanks to his time on the Continent (he spent the majority of his life away from his homeland), O’Brien never left Ireland. Like his somewhat unlikely predecessor, Swift, he wove Dublin, with its culture, its language, its people, and their quirks, into his playful and satirical works.

10. Samuel Beckett

Many of Irish literature’s finest practitioners wrote their best work outside Ireland: Wilde and George Bernard Shaw in London, Joyce in Paris and Switzerland. Samuel Beckett was another, spending most of his life in Paris, but like his friend Joyce, and like Flann O’Brien, Beckett was undeniably influenced by his early years in the literary atmosphere of Dublin.

Beckett was a key figure in literary modernism. In his early years, as a critic, he made important connections between contemporary Irish poetry and modernist writing coming from London and Paris.

Coming into his own as a playwright in the 1950s, he extended that connection, composing most of his plays in French before translating them into English himself. The same goes for his best-known novels, including the trilogy beginning with Molloy in 1951.

Claiming that it was easier to write “without style” in French than English, Beckett innovated a prose that was entirely his own, borne out of his Irish upbringing, his thorough knowledge of literature in English, and his immersion in Parisian culture in the cafés of Paris’s Left Bank.

En attendant Godot (premiered in 1953), Beckett’s best-known play, is typical of his interest in stripped-back theater, with few characters and very little plot, allowing for rumination and philosophical speculation which often borders on the absurd.

11. Iris Murdoch

Although born in Dublin to Irish parents, Iris Murdoch lived for most of her life in England. As an adult, she expressed conflicting views on her heritage. She wrote to her fellow philosopher Philippa Foot that “I feel unsentimental about Ireland to the point of hatred,” but this musing did come about while she was on her way to a conference on Irish literature.

Murdoch, along with Foot, was one of several notable young women who became renowned as philosophers during and after World War II. Like her contemporary across the Channel, Simone de Beauvoir, Murdoch channeled her philosophy into fiction too.

Oxford, where Murdoch studied from 1938 to 1942 and returned to live for most of her adult life, was a hotbed for philosophical thought in this period, playing host to academics who found themselves refugees, including Ernst Cassirer, Eduard Fraenkel, and Isaiah Berlin. Murdoch was part of a movement that sought to restore metaphysics to philosophy, and her fiction blended this interest with her inclination towards moral philosophy.

Her first novel, Under the Net (1954), explored the quandary of useless philosophizing in a comic mode. Later novels, such as The Sea, The Sea (1978), which won the Booker Prize in 1978, interrogate the motivations and interior lives of characters who are placed in morally complex situations.

Murdoch may have been ambivalent about her Irish heritage, but the themes and style of her fiction are reminiscent of an Irish predecessor she admired and with whom she was friends: Elizabeth Bowen.

12. Roddy Doyle

Another Booker Prize-winner born in Dublin is Roddy Doyle, although unlike his predecessor Iris Murdoch, Doyle has remained in his home city for his entire life, suffusing his work with the rich life of the city, especially its working-class neighborhoods.

Doyle’s Booker-winning novel, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993), takes us into the world of a 10-year-old Dubliner in 1968 (when Doyle himself was 10). Living in the Barrytown neighborhood, Paddy narrates his youth: a mixture of carefree hijinks and dim awareness of the adult world around him.

Barrytown was also the setting for a trilogy of novels starting with The Commitments in 1987, all of which were made into films. The Commitments charts a young man’s quest to band together a group of soul musicians and make it big, while The Snapper deals with pregnancy outside marriage—still a source of controversy in traditional, working-class Irish families.

Doyle has become one of Ireland’s most popular novelists today, celebrated for his dialogue-heavy style, which brings characters to life through a vivid use of voice and dialect.

13. Colm Tóibín

In what has become something of a tradition for Ireland’s great writers, Colm Tóibín blends the rich literary tradition of his homeland with a cosmopolitan perspective gained through spending time away from Ireland. He lived for a few years in Barcelona in his youth, and now lives in America, where he has been a visiting professor at several major universities.

Born in County Wexford, Tóibín often sets his novels in Ireland, sometimes dealing with characters who leave their homeland and have to navigate a sense of split identity—as in Brooklyn (2009), which was adapted as a film in 2015.

Elsewhere, Tóibín’s fiction delves into its protagonists’ deep-seated senses of self: introspective novels which use language to weave an intricate, if sometimes tortuous, impression of identity. These reflections combine with Tóibín’s interest in masculinity and homosexuality in novels such as The Master (2004) and The Magician (2021), fictionalized versions of the lives of Henry James and Thomas Mann, respectively.

Further Reading

• Lee, Hermione (1999). The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen. London: Vintage.

In some ways, it is remarkable that Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein is only 200 years old. With its core mythology of a man who cheats death by creating life out of human remains, it could be as old as humanity itself. At the same time, Frankenstein is a product of its era, with rapid advances in science and industrialization reshaping how people imagined the limitations of human life. Fusing modern anxieties with a timeless myth, Shelley created a tale whose resonance only increases with the centuries.

The Story of Frankenstein

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus in 1816, when she was just 18 years old. Commentators and critics, ever since the novel’s 1818 publication, have marveled at the electrifying imagination, acuity, and depth on display in this work by such a young author.

Frankenstein lurched into being on an auspicious night. While still a teenager, Mary Godwin—as she then was—had left England with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. By 1816, they were visiting fellow poet Lord Byron at his villa on the shores of Lake Geneva.

It has gone down in English literary history as a meeting of great minds, all deeply engaged with the literary culture of their day and a vast range of other subjects, from utopianism to vegetarianism, free love, and galvanism. Such surroundings, coupled with the strange microclimate of the ‘Year Without a Summer’ in 1816, furnished Shelley with the perfect ingredients to create Frankenstein. When the group of Romantics decided to hold a ghost story competition, she was ready.

In the novel, the protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, tells how he followed his ambition to its dizzying heights. Gathering and assembling body parts from corpses, he discovers how to infuse the creature with an electric life force.

Instantly, however, Frankenstein rejects his creature, finding him horrifying to look at. The creature spends the remainder of the novel pursuing his maker, leaving a trail of devastation in his wake. The novel has often been read as an allegory, open to many interpretations. What can Frankenstein teach us in the 21st century?

Is It About Artificial Intelligence?

In the 200 years since its publication, Frankenstein has spawned hundreds of adaptations on the page, stage, and screen. Its influence has stretched beyond mere replications of its plot and characters. Ideas from the novel surface in such diverse places as episodes of Doctor Who and Scooby Doo, Stephen King’s 1986 novel It, and the 1975 film and stage musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show. 

While these retellings play freely with aspects of the original novel’s plot and characters, one aspect that tends to remain intact is the science fiction. In some versions, Victor Frankenstein is transformed into an evil scientist intent on imperialist domination, a would-be creator of an entire new race; in others, he is grief-stricken and seeks to reanimate a lost loved one. In a 1992 film version, Frankenstein’s so-called monster is a clone of Frankenstein himself, not stitched together from corpses.

In Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 novelistic reimagining, Frankisstein, the creature forms part of scientific exploration into the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Winterson, who has taken an open stance on AI and its future role in the arts and beyond, turned to Shelley’s novel as an originary myth about humanity’s capacity to harness science and technology and, potentially, imbue non-living things with consciousness and sentience.

We can look to Frankenstein when thinking about how the rapidly developing world of artificial intelligence might reshape our experience of life and understanding of human nature. We are increasingly able, for instance, to recreate the likeness of human beings in videos—right down to their facial expressions, mannerisms, and speaking voices—and thereby to cheat death, not unlike Frankenstein with his reanimation of body parts.

In the novel, Frankenstein is enchanted by the ambitious scientists who have gone before him, who “penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding-places” (chapter 3). He insists that humanity could be “upon the brink” of all sorts of discoveries, if only “cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries” (chapter 4).

Yet the novel invites us to wonder whether it might not be better to allow nature its “recesses” and “hiding-places.” In cheating death and playing God, Frankenstein takes on a role too powerful to sustain. At the core of the mystery he penetrates—the conception of life—he finds death, not his own, but a ripple effect of deaths among those he loves.

Is It About Parenthood?

The creature’s devastation of Victor Frankenstein’s family might be read as payback for the scientist’s attempt to usurp the family by inventing a human being who is made, not born. Readers, since the advent of Freudian theory, have picked up on the importance of Victor’s aversion to making a female companion for his creature, resulting in the creature murdering Victor’s wife, Elizabeth, on their wedding night.

Although Shelley was only 18 when she started writing Frankenstein, she had already known the joys and hardships of parenthood. A year earlier, she and Percy had had a daughter, born two months prematurely. Her grief over this child’s loss, and subsequent happiness on giving birth to a son just a few months before the fateful trip to Lake Geneva, may have found their way into her novel’s representation of parenthood.

On top of this, Shelley had never known her mother, the radical philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died shortly after giving birth to her. Her father, William Godwin, was a brilliant thinker, well-versed in the kinds of works that enthrall Victor Frankenstein, such as natural philosophy. Godwin was also a keen interpreter of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, which features in Frankenstein as one of the books that helps the creature learn to read, and as a source for the idea that the outcast (Satan in Paradise Lost, the creature in Frankenstein) might deserve our sympathy, rejected as he is by his maker.

Frankenstein is a haunting meditation not only on the precious ability to give life to another human being (and the dangers of doing so artificially), but also on the responsibilities that follow that giving of life. It’s possible to read all of the creature’s actions as the hurt lashings out of a rejected child, stemming from Frankenstein’s response when he first animates the creature.

Before completing his experiment, Frankenstein is full of the optimism of the expectant father: “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs” (chapter 4).

Yet as soon as the creature comes to life, he feels “breathless horror and disgust […] Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room” (chapter 5). Many adaptations—including the 2025 film written and directed by Guillermo del Toro—highlight this rejection of a creature we might think of as, in some way, Frankenstein’s own son.

This recent film version shows the creature learning from Frankenstein just as a child might from its parents: mimicking body movements, looking to the sun for light and heat, mouthing his name, and ultimately copying his violence. We might therefore look on the creature’s later violence as learned behavior, not inbuilt—touching on that integral question about parenthood, nature or nurture. If Frankenstein’s creature is really a monster, is it because Frankenstein made him one?

Shelley shows us several moments in which Frankenstein could display care and love towards his creation. In a poignant scene immediately following the creature’s animation, we read in Victor’s account: “one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed downstairs […] fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life” (chapter 5). Is Frankenstein’s fear of fatherhood—his inability to reach out and take the creature’s hand—to blame for the unraveling of his family and his livelihood?

Is It About Loneliness?

Perhaps an under-appreciated part of Frankenstein‘s relevance today is what it has to teach us about loneliness. Not every reader will relate to Frankenstein the ambitious scientist, or Frankenstein the absent father. However, we can all take something from the novel’s representation of the importance of human connection.

Loneliness, like hurt and violence, multiplies across Frankenstein. It opens with a framing device: the explorer Robert Walton, writing to his sister, describes his expedition to the upper reaches of the globe, picking up a mysterious stranger who, on the brink of death, relates his life story. Walton, at the helm of this forbidding quest, writes: “I bitterly feel the want of a friend” (letter 2). The fortuitous meeting with Victor Frankenstein affords Walton some company and a cautionary tale about pursuing ambition at the expense of relationships.

Frankenstein, too, has been lonely. Describing the period of frenzied research as he worked out how to assemble and animate his creature, he says:

“I could not tear my thoughts from my employment, loathsome in itself, but which had taken an irresistible hold of my imagination. I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my nature, should be completed.” (chapter 4)

In other words, Frankenstein’s experiment blinds him to everything else in his life. He neglects his family and friends, closing himself off from the touches of humanity which might have warned him against his “loathsome” plan.

The irony is that Frankenstein only becomes lonelier after he kills everyone nearest and dearest to him, until the pair end up chasing one another across the desolate landscape of the Alps and finally up to the North Pole, locked in a vengeful folie à deux.

The creature is lonely too, rejected by his surrogate father and vilified by those he meets because of his appearance. Frankenstein calls the creature “a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived,” who was “ugly” while under construction and terrifying once invested with life (chapter 5). The only bond the creature forms is with an elderly, blind man, whose family raises the alarm once they discover the friendship.

It’s no wonder the creature begs Frankenstein for a female companion, made like him, who would be able to sympathize with him. In a fateful meeting at the Mer de Glace near Mont Blanc, the creature tells his maker: “Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend […] am I not alone, miserably alone?” (chapter 10). Seeing only a coldhearted killer, Frankenstein tells him: “There can be no community between you and me; we are enemies” (chapter 10).

Loneliness sets off the “whirlwinds of […] rage” (chapter 10), which the creature promises to unleash. The closing vignette of Frankenstein is of a dying man seeing his greatest achievement borne away on the icy waters to likely death, watched over by another man who tempts fate in his dogged, solitary pursuit of ambition.

Connection sits at the heart of the novel’s structure, with Walton, Frankenstein, and the creature all mutually exchanging their stories, yet the stories they tell are haunted by solitude. Frankenstein is a searching exploration of what happens when we neglect those around us, when we are too quick to judge and condemn, and when we lose sight of our humanity.

Source

• Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1993). Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus. Project Gutenberg edition.

Of all the architects of the foundational social sciences and literary methodology that came to be known as structuralism, few have been such a prolific master builder as the Belgian-born Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009). If old-school structuralism today is often deemed passé in a 21st century dominated by semiotics, deconstruction, and other post-structuralist theories, anyone wishing to dig into their origins can not overlook Lévi-Strauss’s cornerstone contributions.

Who Was Claude Lévi-Strauss?

As a singular testament to his reputation, following the 1981 death of the renowned existentialist writer/philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, 600 French scholars voted Claude Lévi-Strauss the most influential intellectual in the country. While his standing in contemporary academia is not what it was then, he was nonetheless instrumental in the crucial post-World War II ethnological shift that sought to universalize social mythologies between those so-called “primitive” societies and those from so-called “civilized” ones.

He was certainly a trailblazer in criticizing and condemning what would be known as Western “ethnocentrism” vis-à-vis native, non-technological societies. Furthermore, whatever their source, Lévi-Strauss’ notion that social/cultural myths both predate and circumscribe the individual was a first great leap in post-structuralism’s watershed evolution that would reject the bedrock Cartesian affirmation (“I think, therefore I am”) of the autonomous, free-thinking human subject. In 2026, Lévi-Strauss remains high in the pantheon of postwar French academicians, along with such cranial heavyweights as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard.

In Search of Myth

That said, reading Lévi-Strauss is not for the faint of heart. His prolific output of scholarly tracts, from his Brazilian travelogue Tristes Tropiques (1955) to The Raw and the Cooked (1964) and The Savage Mind (1962), can be tough going—not unlike traveling up a serpentine Amazon by canoe—especially when he traces in voluminous detail the manifold vagaries of a particular South American kinship or totemic myth. Lévi-Strauss was fond of using musical metaphors to describe his technique for deciphering the “real meaning” of a myth, as opposed to its literal or surface meaning. A myth, he said, should be interpreted as a complex musical score of sorts, which calls for attentive “listening” to all the various orchestral parts working together, not as separate notes, as well as any recurring leitmotifs underscoring the overall melody.

“Myth” here means those popular traditional stories, usually of a historical nature and passed through generations, in a society or culture that serve to illustrate or explain the world in some fashion. For instance, the ancient Greek myth of Oedipus tells the gruesome tragedy of a young man who unwittingly murders his father, the king of Thebes, and then goes on to marry his own mother, becoming king himself. Sigmund Freud, of course, used the myth as a metaphor for his theory of the Oedipus complex, in which a boy has an unhealthy dependence on his mother, all at the risk of his future maturity—and the wrath of his father. It’s also a tale that serves as a pointed warning with regard to the incest taboo central to nearly all societies. On a much more rudimentary level, the fictionalized American myth of George Washington and his youthful chopping down of a cherry tree was meant to convey the first U.S. president as a person of unimpeachable honesty (“I cannot tell a lie … I did it”) and moral responsibility.

The most formative part of Lévi-Strauss’ life was likely his time in Brazil in the late 1930s, when he accepted a professorship of sociology at the University of Sao Paolo. There, he undertook several expeditions to the hinterlands for anthropological research among the Indigenous tribes, including the Bororo. He made a brief return to France during the war years, but, as he was Jewish, to the United States and New York City, where he became very much taken by the “structural linguistics” of the Russian-born émigré Roman Jakobson, who had begun teaching at the New School of Social Research.

The Binary Mind

One might say Lévi-Strauss had a “eureka!” moment when he began integrating Jakobson’s theories and conclusions into his own anthropological ones. Of course, the key term here is “structure.” As opposed to prior thinking that social or tribal myths were opaque, parochial, or even meaningless, Lévi-Strauss set out to demonstrate that such myths are not only culturally resonant but also deeply entrenched in the human capacity for apprehending the world. Yes, these narrative myths attempt to “explain” certain phenomena; yet critically, those explanations tend to allay and smooth over the contradictions, enigmas, and unresolved questions of life. Perhaps the “ur” example of an age-old human enigma is the question of what happens after death. Almost every society and culture has tried to answer that question, often in religious or mythical terms.

From Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss borrowed his key concept of binary oppositions, again reflecting how the human mind operates, i.e., in a dualistic way. In any myth, especially a complex one, on rigorous examination there appears a pattern of binary values (events, personages, places, techniques, etc.) that seemingly oppose each other. Over the course of the narrative, typically one set of oppositions wins out or is shown to be superior. In many myths—including narratives from popular culture—one can see, for instance, binaries set up in gender and gender roles.

The Western Genre as Myth

Take the classic U.S. Western, which surely has a mythical standing: more than one has tapped into familiar oppositions that dialectically contrast the male hero’s attributes (e.g., active, rugged, laconic, self-reliant, rootless, violent, nature/wilderness, a “Westerner”) with a prospective female romantic partner (passive, feminine, verbal, loving, social, domestic, culture, an “Easterner”).

The great Western High Noon (1952) is exemplary. Gary Cooper plays a marshal about to wed a young Quaker woman (Grace Kelly) and leave town with her, but bravely decides to stay and face the four gunslingers coming to town to kill him for revenge. Despite his gnawing sense of duty and valor, his pacifist bride pleads with him to forgo violence. Ultimately, he shoots it out with the villains, a “happy ending” made possible because his bride doesn’t forsake him. Not only do the marshal’s manly actions win the day, but his bride’s values are essentially discounted or seen to be naive. Yet this particular resolution has its own contradictions since the townspeople are shown to be cowards and not worthy of the marshal’s moral stature. The movie has long been interpreted as a symbolic allegory of Hollywood’s complicity with the McCarthy-era communist “witch-hunts.”

Only half-jokingly, Lévi-Strauss argued that a student of social myths must take the vantage of an “observer from another planet” and dismantle them “like a clock.” It is thus a scientific operation; one can picture these deep structures as a skeleton that propels the human body in much the same way, regardless of all the surface variables (race, age, stature, gender, etc.). This facet summons up a deep criticism of the Lévi-Strauss method, its reductive nature, which tends to be dismissive of the uniqueness or anomalies in the story’s specific elements. For example, consider one remarkably atypical genre scene in High Noon, when the marshal sits all alone in his office, abandoned by almost everyone, including his deputies. In a private moment, he puts his head down on his desk and appears to briefly sob.

Despite all the various criticisms of Lévi-Strauss’s means and methods in the decades since the 1960s (including that his actual fieldwork was sketchy and built toward a priori conclusions), structuralism can still be a valuable tool in analyzing myth and narrative, including in popular culture. For another, more modern example, consider the Oscar-winning blockbuster “disaster” movie Titanic (1997), which remains one of the most financially successful films ever made, despite (or perhaps because of) its exorbitant costs.

Upstairs/Downstairs in “Titanic”

On the surface, so to speak, Titanic is a fictionalized historical romance based on the tragic sinking of what was called the “unsinkable” luxury ocean liner on its maiden voyage from Great Britain to New York in January 1912. To this historical template, writer/director James Cameron foregrounds the star-crossed relationship between Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), a penniless American drifter and aspiring artist, and Rose (Kate Winslet), a refined young lady sailing with both her wealthy fiancé and domineering mother. The film’s legions of worldwide fans (many who claim dozens of viewings) no doubt know the plot backwards and forwards, which in some ways sets sail as a Romeo and Juliet-type tragedy. Over the course of the three-hour-plus length, Cameron parallels the budding love affair with the ship’s doomsday rendezvous with an iceberg in the North Atlantic. Unlike that unforeseen iceberg, readers on this voyage should note here a spoiler dead ahead.

One could picture Lévi-Strauss munching on popcorn in the audience and asking, “What is this movie really all about?” and “What explains its popularity?” One can argue that, indeed, there is a “deep structure” in Titanic, and it has to do with the physical and symbolic orders representing the social tiers of the “upper” and” lower” classes. Throughout, Cameron contrasts in stark binary ways the events and qualities of the upper regions of the ship vs. the lower. Of course, the upper decks are home to first-class passengers, basking in their luxury accommodations, meals, furnishings, and the freedom of the open air. Far down below is third-class or steerage, confined, no-frills accommodations primarily for poor immigrants en route to America, often ethnic ones. The first-class passengers and officers above are invariably upper-crust white Anglo-Americans.

Jack is alone in negotiating between the upper and lower worlds. Unlike the other steerage passengers, he seems to freely travel to the upper decks and promenades (not likely historically), as part of his efforts to win over Rose, his lofty but captive “princess.” In two telling scenes, a tuxedoed Jack first dines with Rose and her mother sitting with their buttoned-up, stuffy, smug Edwardian guests; in the next, Jack escorts Rose down into a joyful, jumpin’ steerage cabin where the plebian passengers dance a fancy jig or two, including Rose, who daringly flings off her constricting shoes.

As the plot proceeds full-steam, their love affair does too, culminating in an amorous tryst in the back seat of a newfangled “horseless carriage” they luckily discover in one of the cargo holds. Jack is not only the catalyst for Rose’s liberation from her subordinate 19th-century gender role, but he is also a figure of modernity at the dawn of the century of technological marvels and the women’s suffrage movement.

Happy Endings?

Nevertheless, the bugaboo of Lévi Strauss’ sticky contradictions haunts Titanic. Can Jack and Rose live happily ever after? Typically in a classic Hollywood movie they would, but Cameron revises his mythmaking both to account for history and for today’s plunging faith in fairy-tale endings. After all, the Titanic did catastrophically sink, with at least 1,500 dead, and most of the victims were either steerage passengers or members of the crew. In another vein, a feminist critic might also argue that Jack is nonetheless the active, decisive agent in “freeing” Rose, i.e., not Rose herself.

Structurally, Cameron’s story coda is also significant. In a framing device, a present-day, elderly Rose is shown sleeping in bed, surrounded by photos of her younger self (including one boldly boarding a biplane). Perhaps she dreams, perhaps she has passed away, but Rose is supernaturally transported down into what remains of the actual Titanic shipwreck, which in turn magically morphs into its glorious, pre-iceberg existence, with all hands on deck, including a beatific Jack welcoming her atop a grand stairway. For Rose, heaven is an egalitarian Eden far under the sea.

The legend of Faust is so powerful and enduring that his name remains a byword for taking an almighty gamble on something potentially dangerous, as in the phrases ‘Faustian pact’ or ‘Faustian bargain.’ For centuries, this doctor has served as a cautionary tale against indulging in the all-too-human desire to strive beyond our limitations, to know more, do more, and experience more. While Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 18th-century play sparked the lasting fascination with Faust, the character originated much earlier in a real person.

The Real Faust and the First Stage Version

Mired in folk legend ever since his death, the historical Doctor Johann Georg Faust is difficult to pin down. Historians agree that he was born in the late 15th century and lived until around 1540 or 1541, when his life was cut short by an extraordinary (perhaps supernatural) occurrence during a scientific experiment.

For many contemporaries who recorded encounters with Doctor Faust, his foolish end was a long time coming. Faust had traveled about his native Germany practicing magic, blending alchemy, astronomy, and astrology, casting people’s horoscopes, and prescribing strange medicines. He seems to have made himself unpopular with many local authorities, as well as with the Catholic Church.

Doctor Faust may have joined the newly popular Protestant cause (which accounts further for the disfavor of the Catholic Church), but he was considered heretical also by Protestant leaders. He never met Martin Luther, but knew his colleague, Philip Melanchthon, who mistrusted astronomers whose claims might displace God’s centrality in the universe.

When Doctor Faust died in an explosion among his alchemical instruments, many felt it was his just reward for tampering with divine mysteries. The reportedly mutilated state of his body led to fast-spreading rumors that the Devil himself had come from Hell to fetch his servant.

Embellished with varying details about the doctor’s wayward life and explosive death, these reports spread fast and far beyond the original German chapbooks. The legend was in full flow when Christopher Marlowe, the English playwright, adapted it for the stage in the early 1590s.

Doctor Faustus was a play for the Renaissance era. The Latinization of the doctor’s name recalls its etymological link to luck or fortune, and the play presents a conflict between making one’s own fortunes (through work and study) and placing one’s fortunes in the hands of fate. Marlowe presents Faustus as a Renaissance man who is tired of knowing everything it is possible to know; he wants more, and he wants magic.

But with magic comes a good and a bad angel, and a fork in the road. Promised prosperity by the bad angel, Faustus chooses the path of the Devil, signing a blood pact with a demon named Mephistopheles. Faustus spends years performing ungodly tricks before, despite his attempts to repent, the Devil takes his soul to Hell at last.

Goethe’s Faust

When Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published the two-part drama Faust, he was already well-known as one of Germany’s foremost intellectuals, having published novels, verse epics, aesthetic criticism, and scientific research, directed the theater at Weimar, and played a major role in the revival of classicism in that city.

Weimar Classicism, which flourished in the last few decades of the 18th century, combined the new learning from the Age of Enlightenment with a renewed interest in ancient Greco-Roman arts and philosophy, along with the first glimmerings of Romanticism. This also grew out of the Sturm und Drang movement, of which Goethe was a prime representative. His works emphasized the centrality of subjectivity, and particularly the emotions, in our experience of the world.

Goethe may have been famous by the time Part One of Faust came out in 1808, but it had been several years in the making, with composition beginning back in the 1770s. Part Two took almost the same length of time again: Goethe finished it in 1831, and it was published in 1832, after his death. This was Goethe’s magnum opus, a significant portion of his life’s work.

Like Marlowe, Goethe made some important modifications to the Faust legend to heighten its drama and plumb the depths of its philosophical possibilities. Goethe’s Faust opens in Heaven, with a wager to parallel the play’s later, more famous deal between the protagonist and the Devil. In Goethe’s opening, Mephistopheles (or Satan) challenges God, wagering that he can turn one of God’s servants away from good towards evil.

When Mephistopheles arrives, Faust is tantalized by the prospect of infinite knowledge that the demon offers. Mephistopheles promises he will serve Faust in life, opening doors to unimaginable avenues never explored by man, and in return, Faust must serve Mephistopheles in the afterlife.

But Faust wants more. He urges Mephistopheles to grant him an experience of transcendence on earth; that unknowable, unreachable infinity sought by the Romantics. If Mephistopheles can show him an infinity so blissful that he wants to remain in it forever, Faust will cease his restless striving and join the demon in Hell.

Following the blood pact, Faust’s life takes a series of cursed turns. His love for the heroine, Gretchen, only brings her the shame of being seduced and made pregnant outside marriage, then the sorrow of killing her own child and being sentenced to death for the crime. As Faust tries desperately to enlist Mephistopheles’s help in freeing Gretchen from prison, the end of Part One leaves the redemption of both protagonists in the balance.

Part Two reveals that, although Faust has lost his bet with Mephistopheles, God has won his. Faust has pursued transcendence, but in the service of good: trying to save Gretchen.

Both parts of the play were instantly popular (although it was more often read as a book than staged), with its wagers cutting to the core of philosophical questions about human nature, creation, the soul, and good and evil.

Faust and Romanticism

With Goethe’s play, Faust became a cornerstone of European art and culture, an everyman whose epic struggle reverberated across myriad works. The doomed, isolated hero whose search for knowledge draws him toward his dark side, and who must finally seek redemption, is so archetypal in Romanticism that we can easily lose track of Goethe’s Faust among his descendants.

For instance, the wager that puts questions of humanity itself in the balance reappears in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid (1837), with the Sea Witch, who offers Ariel a taste of becoming human, acting as a Devil figure.

In a completely different, but contemporary work, Lord Byron‘s dramatic poem Manfred (1816-17) focuses on a tortured hero who communes with spirits in the hopes of finding solace after the death of his beloved (a death he seems, mysteriously, to feel guilt about). The autobiographical resonances in this poem were typical of Byron, whose protagonists generally aligned with the public perception of the poet as (metaphorically, at least) something of a ladykiller.

The Faustian Romantic’s intense subjectivity and soul-searching are borne of both a restless thirst for knowledge and a conviction that he is toxic to everyone he loves. No Romantic protagonist embodies this blend better than Victor Frankenstein, in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel.

Shelley’s masterstroke in Frankenstein is in blurring the distinctions between the characters in previous iterations of the Faust legend. At first glance, the restless student Victor Frankenstein seems purely cast in the Faust mold, but when he creates a human by assembling body parts gathered from corpses and animating the whole, he takes on God-like qualities. In examining the responsibility of Frankenstein, the almighty creator, to his creature, Shelley’s novel extends the preoccupation in Goethe’s play with the covenant between God and humanity.

The creature, on the other hand, may appear Mephistophelean at first glance, but it is his rejection by Frankenstein—as if God had turned away from humanity—which turns him into a killer. Moreover, the creature, as well as Frankenstein, goes on a search for redemption over the course of the novel. He is desperate to shake off the mantle of malevolence that fate has thrust upon him. He is even a zealous reader and polymath in the mode of Faust (and reads The Sorrows of Young Werther, the novel which made Goethe famous a few decades before Faust).

Both Frankenstein and the creature are Faustian, both tempted to usurp God by transgressing the laws of nature, and both taking on Satanic hues in the process. Frankenstein reflects the development of the Faust legend within Romantic thought. Its supernatural elements, the possibility that Faust’s experiments with magic cause his death, were internalized, becoming manifestations of a very human concern with hubris or over-reaching.

In turn, Mephistopheles became internalized too: no longer an apparition of the Devil or an agent of Satan, but a manifestation of part of Faust’s own soul. In Frankenstein and many subsequent Faustian tales, protagonists harbor both Faust and Mephistopheles within themselves.

Faust in France

Following the popularity of Goethe’s play, Faust took on true legend status. It became not just a historical tale with a partial basis in truth, but a story so resonant that it could be referenced by artists across the globe, in all kinds of art.

Faust was an important figure in 19th-century France, thanks to two composers. Charles Gounod and his librettists took inspiration from Goethe for their 1859 opera Faust. With an accompanying ballet, it soon became one of the most frequently performed operas at the Paris Opéra. Audiences were entranced by the music, which brought to life scenes such as Mephistopheles’s first appearance to Faust, Faust’s seduction of Marguerite (an alternative name for Gretchen in Goethe’s version), and Faust’s redemption as Mephistopheles is cast back to Hell.

In Gounod’s version, good vanquishes evil, and Faust is saved because of his selfless willingness to damn himself to save Marguerite. Hector Berlioz, meanwhile, chose to end his version with, as in the title of his operatic composition, The Damnation of Faust. Berlioz had read an 1828 translation of Goethe’s play by the Romantic, proto-Surrealist poet Gérard de Nerval. Fascinated, Berlioz blended the legend with his perennial, autofictional preoccupation with brilliant male protagonists whose capacity for love is a blessing and a curse.

Gounod’s and Berlioz’s musical settings of the Faust legend are only two of the most popular versions, but the story and its characters inspired music by most of the prominent composers of the 19th and 20th centuries: Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, and Gustave Mahler, to name a few. Byron’s Faustian poem Manfred, in turn, inspired compositions by Robert Schumann and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Faust in English Literature

Writers in English took Faust down the perilous paths of Gothic and sensation novels. Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Robert Maturin derives its meandering plot from the central idea of selling one’s soul to the Devil and being cursed to roam the world eternally in search of a confidant to inherit the pact.

Melmoth‘s Faustian tinges influenced writers during the Gothic literature craze at the end of the 19th century. Maturin’s great-nephew, Oscar Wilde, was not only inspired by his relative to adopt the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth on his release from prison: a decade earlier, Wilde created his own Faustian protagonist in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).

Dorian Gray, like Frankenstein, has no explicit Mephistophelean figure, and the Devil’s bargain instead takes the form of part aesthetic, part ethical speculation, as Dorian wonders what might happen if his portrait were to grow old while he himself remains young. As in earlier versions of the Faust legend, this wager allows the protagonist to pursue a life of depraved, transgressive pleasures.

We don’t know, in Dorian Gray nor in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), what exactly these pleasures are. We only know that these protagonists cannot resist the temptation to explore their dark sides. Dr. Jekyll even splits his soul in order to live a double life as the villainous Mr. Hyde. Like Frankenstein, Stevenson’s novella takes an overachieving Faustian scientist and implies that, deep down, he is also Mephistophelean.

Perhaps the most consummately Faustian novel in English literature of this period is Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895). It was a bestseller thanks to its sensational plot, a retelling of the legend wherein a poor author suddenly comes into money just as he befriends a mysterious aristocrat who turns out to be the Devil. The author must choose whether to pursue a rich, immoral life or forsake his fortunes in favor of redemption. As its title suggests, Corelli’s novel followed some Faustian adaptations, such as Frankenstein, in examining Satan’s perspective, especially his feelings of rejection by God and his yearning for redemption.

Faust in Russian Literature

Russian authors also took inspiration from Faust, particularly Goethe’s version. Early Russian versions of parts of the play began to appear in the mid-1800s, via English or French translations from the original German.

These inspired prominent figures in Russian literature, such as Alexander Pushkin, who wrote A Scene from Faust in 1828, and Ivan Turgenev, whose 1856 novella Faust features a protagonist reading Goethe to his love interest.

Turgenev, along with another giant of Russian literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky, took up themes they found compelling in Goethe’s version of the legend, such as the seemingly infinite quest for knowledge, the all-consuming temptation of sin, and the question of redemption and how it might be achieved.

In 1908, Valery Bryusov’s The Fiery Angel offered a historical fiction approach to Faust, recreating the 16th-century German setting and conjuring up a world of the occult. It was followed a few decades later by another Russian novel centring on the Devil’s bargain: Mikhail Bulgakov‘s The Master and Margarita (written 1928-40).

Twentieth-Century Fausts

If not for Faust, we wouldn’t have the Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil. When he wrote the lyrics, Mick Jagger had just been reading the English translation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Begun in 1928, it had undergone various revisions and excisions under the Soviet regime and didn’t appear as a single-volume novel until 1967. By then, Bulgakov had been dead for 27 years.

The Master and Margarita is one of two significant early-20th-century novels that applied the Faust legend to a modern context, locating the tempting forces of evil in contemporary totalitarian regimes. Bulgakov struggled to publish his novel exactly as he wished in Soviet Russia because much of its plot deals with state repression of literature.

There are Faust references dotted throughout: the Devil appears as Professor Woland, a name which Mephistopheles uses to refer to himself in Goethe’s Faust. A member of Woland’s retinue is named Korovyev, based on the Russian word for ‘cow,’ possibly referencing the fact that Mephistopheles, in Gounod’s Faust, mentions a golden calf. There is a further connection to musical versions of Faust when Professor Woland prophesies the death of an author called Berlioz, recalling the composer of The Damnation of Faust. 

Berlioz’s death offers characters proof of the Devil’s existence, and Woland goes about, as Mephistopheles does in other versions, impressing audiences with the powers of evil. A parallel plot about Pontius Pilate’s rejection of Jesus ties in with the Faust legend’s themes of turning one’s back on God. Then, the primary plot soon turns to Margarita (an adaptation of Marguerite, the alternative name for Gretchen in Gounod’s opera), who is offered a wager by Woland. She and the Master (like Berlioz, an author embroiled in the corrupt literary circles of contemporary Moscow) are eventually condemned to purgatory.

The Master and Margarita opens with an epigraph from Goethe’s Faust: “Who are you, then? / I am part of that power / which eternally wills evil / and eternally works good.” This weighty conflict was omnipresent in the minds of authors during this period, as they grappled with manifestations of absolute power right before their eyes, not just in Russia but also in Germany.

Thomas Mann was not the first writer in his family to adapt the Faust legend. Mann’s son Klaus published a novel, Mephisto, in 1936, which arose directly out of his experiences in anti-Nazi resistance. While Klaus Mann was exiled from Hitler’s Germany in 1934, one of his former theater associates remained, embracing the new regime and its opportunities to advance his career as a theater and movie director. Mann likened his former associate to Faust and the Third Reich to Mephistopheles.

Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, the other essential Faustian novel of the 20th century, along with Bulgakov’s, was published in 1947, at which point its author was living in exile in Los Angeles. Like Klaus, Thomas saw the Devil’s bargain at the core of the Faust legend as emblematic of the choice facing contemporary Europe.

Adrian Leverkühn, the composer protagonist of Doktor Faustus, contains elements of German thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner, whose ideas had influenced Nazi ideology. But Leverkühn is also modeled on Arnold Schoenberg, the composer whose 12-tone technique was condemned as degenerate by the Nazis. Mann engages the Faust legend to examine how artists in the midst of a regime such as Nazism can pursue greatness while resisting the temptation to succumb to evil.

Leverkühn’s bargain, his soul in exchange for musical genius, leads only to madness. Having deliberately contracted syphilis in order to deepen his artistry through madness, Leverkühn instead deteriorates, bringing misfortune to everyone closest to him, including his young nephew, who dies while Leverkühn is writing an oratorio called The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus. Leverkühn’s decline plays out against the backdrop of Germany’s own, with Mann decisively applying the Faust legend and its deadly wager to both an individual and an entire nation at a crucial period in its history.