John Sutherland

Jolyon Connell

When The Great Gatsby was first published, in 1925, reviews were mixed. H.L. Mencken called it “no more than a glorified anecdote”. L.P. Hartley, author of The Go-Between, thought Fitzgerald deserved “a good shaking”: “The Great Gatsby is evidently not a satire; but one would like to think that Mr Fitzgerald’s heart is not in it, that it is a piece of mere naughtiness.” Yet, gradually the book came to be seen as one of the greatest – if not the greatest – of American novels. Why? What is it that makes this story of a petty hoodlum so compelling? Why has a novel so intimately rooted in its own time “lasted” into ours? What is it that posterity, eight decades later, finds so fascinating in this chronicle of the long-gone “Jazz Age”, flappers, speakeasies and wild parties? It is, after all, scarcely a novel at all, more a long short story. But it has a power out of all proportion to its length. It is beautifully written, making it feel even shorter than it is, and is full of haunting imagery. It is also, perhaps, the most vivid literary evocation of the “Great American Dream”, about which it is profoundly sceptical, as it is about dreams generally. In the end, however, as D.H. Lawrence would put it, it is “on the side of life”. Gatsby’s dream may be impossible, so much so that the book can end in no other way than with his death, but up to a point he is redeemed by it and by the tenacity with which he clings to it. It is this that makes the novel so moving and so haunting.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

The Connell Guide to Jane Austen's Emma

Great Expectations is one of the best-selling Victorian novels of our time. No Dickens work, with the exception of A Christmas Carol, has been adapted more for both film and television. It has been as popular with critics as it has with the public. In 1937, George Bernard Shaw called the novel Dickens’s “most compactly perfect book”. John Lucas describes it as “the most perfect and the most beautiful of all Dickens’s novels”, Angus Wilson as “the most completely unified work of art that Dickens ever produced”. Great Expectations has been so successful partly because it’s an exciting story. Dickens always had a keen eye on the market and subscribed to Wilkie Collins’s advice: “make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, above all make ‘em wait.” From the violent opening scene on the marshes to the climax of Magwitch’s attempted escape on the Thames, the story is full of suspense, mystery and drama. But while these elements of Great Expectations have ensured its popularity, it is also a novel which, as this guide will seek to show, raises profound questions not just about the nature of Victorian society but about the way human relationships work and the extent to which people are shaped by their childhoods and the circumstances in which they grow up.

Charles Dickens's Great Expectations

“A heroine whom no-one but myself will much like,” the author famously proclaimed. In fact, in any league of likeability Miss Woodhouse is streets ahead of Miss Fanny – the ostentatiously “meek” heroine of Mansfield Park. Meek Emma is not. Indeed it is her sense of absolute sovereignty over her little world of Highbury – her right, as she presumes, to dispose of the marriage choices of those in her circle – which brings her to grief. And that grief, by the familiar course of the heroine’s moral education in Austen’s fiction, makes her, through remorse and repentance, a mature woman capable of forming correct judgements. Not least about whom Miss Woodhouse herself will marry. Emma, of all the six great novels, is the one which conforms most closely to Austen’s famous formula that “three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on”. Emma is, by general agreement, the “quietest” of the novels. Some have complained that there is not enough of a story in it, but others, as this guide shows, have found the plot in Emma the most successful Austen achieved. It is, for example, unusual among the sextet in playing a cunning trick on the reader who – unless they are sharp (sharper certainly than Miss Woodhouse) – may well be deluded as to which eligible young (or less than young) man the heroine will end up spending the rest of her life with. Or whether, given her frequently uttered distaste for marriage, she will end up the only unwed of the six heroines at the end of it all.

Jolyon Connell

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