Author: Wilkie Collins
First Published: 1859-60, in All the Year Round

The below is adapted  from an essay I wrote for The Guardian UK online.

Often singled out as the foundation text of “sensation fiction”—a genre distinguished by its electrifying, suspenseful, and sometimes horrific plots, as well as its unsavoury themes of intrigue, jealousy, murder, adultery, and the like—The Woman in White was an immediate sensation in its own right when it began appearing in Dickens’s weekly journal All the Year Round. Margaret Oliphant hailed it as “a new beginning in fiction”, while at the same time Edward Bulwer-Lytton dismissed it as “great trash.” And while Henry James disliked the “ponderosity” of The Woman in White (calling it “a kind of 19th-century version of Clarissa Harlowe”), he acknowledged that the book had “introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors.”

Despite such drastically mixed reviews, The Woman in White was a mad success with the public, and made no less of a sensation out of its 35-year-old author, Wilkie Collins. In middle-class dining rooms everywhere, discussion turned to the intriguing cast of characters Mr. Collins had invented—mannish, eloquent Marian Halcombe; faithful and angelic Laura Fairlie; sinister, secretive Percival Glyde; and of course Count Fosco, seductive and cunning, with his cockatoo, his canary-birds, and his white mice running over his immense body. Two months in, Dickens was calling the novel “masterly”, and Prince Albert admired it so much that he later sent off copies as gifts.

During its serialisation in All the Year Round (from 26 November 1859 to 25 August 1860), and upon its publication in book form, The Woman in White inspired not only a series of imitators (chief among them Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne [1861] and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret [1862]), but also what John Sutherland has described as a “sales mania and a franchise boom.” Manufacturers produced Woman in White perfume, Woman in White cloaks and bonnets, and music-shops displayed Woman in White waltzes and quadrilles. The poet Edward FitzGerald named his herring-lugger “Marian Halcombe”; cats were named Fosco and thought to look more sinister; and Walter became a fashionable name for babies. As Kenneth Robinson, one of Collins’s earliest biographers, pointed out, “even Dickens had not known such incidental publicity.”

Collins’s storytelling talents were utterly mesmerising for Victorian readers—and they are no less captivating for readers today. He was the master of the “cliff-hanger,” and given the 40 or so of them that strategically punctuate The Woman in White, it’s not difficult to see why this Victorian novel continues to thrill us. Our flesh creeps when Anne Catherick places her hand on Walter’s shoulder; our hearts ache when Marian Halcombe falls ill and Count Fosco violates her diary; our blood curdles when Walter Hartright stands next to his beloved’s tombstone, only to look up and find her standing there. The apparitions that Collins conjures are the ghosts that ensured not just his success but his longevity. They are what have kept readers going back for more during the last 150 years, and they bear testament to the value of Collins’s self-professed, “old-fashioned” opinion that “the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story …”

Author: Bram Stoker
First Published: 1897, by Archibald Constable and Co.

“Denn die Todten reiten Schnell” —
(”For the dead travel fast.”)

I love the opening chapter of Dracula—it’s like walking with someone through their own dark dream that they may or may not be remembering correctly. Jonathan Harker is travelling through a grim region in the Carpathian mountains (modern-day Romania), and from the start, you know that something is off about this place. The people are as nervous and superstitious as they come, foisting crucifixes upon the unwary traveller, whose life and soul they feel are in great jeopardy. Their terror becomes our terror, though we don’t yet know what it’s about. It’s the lack-of-knowing, on top of all the strange behavior, that makes the place so frightening.

The chapter takes us slowly through the Carpathians, revealing nothing but more darkness as we follow carriages and packs of wolves toward the looming Castle Dracula. Stoker’s lush writing infuses horror into the very landscape, providing beautiful descriptions that are as seductive as they are eerie and claustrophobic.

As we wound our endless way, and the sun sank lower and lower behind us, the shadows of the evening began to creep round us. This was emphasized by the fact that the snowy mountain-top still held the sunset, and seemed to glow out with a delicate cool pink. Here and there we passed Cszeks and Slovaks, all in picturesque attire, but I noticed that goitre was painfully prevalent. By the roadside were many crosses, and as we swept by, my companions all crossed themselves. Here and there was a peasant man or woman kneeling before a shrine, who did not even turn round as we approached, but seemed in the self-surrender of devotion to have neither eyes nor ears for the outer world. There were many things new to me. For instance, hay-ricks in the trees, and here and there very beautiful masses of weeping birch, their white stems shining like silver through the delicate green of the leaves.

Again, something is just not right here—there are hay-ricks (hay stacks) in the trees, and the people have goitre (a swollen thyroid condition); but it’s a gorgeous, if sinister, place to be held captive, and Jonathan, like us, will soon find himself simultaneously entranced and terrified by vampires.

The rest of the book—the story really—is of course marvellous, though it’s ridiculous that four able-bodied men and a houseful of servants can’t seem to keep a bouquet of garlic in Lucy Westenra’s room, or ensure that her windows remain closed through the night. But despite unlikely and humorous foibles like these, reading the novel Dracula is a hypnotic experience, and there is a reason why this book, with its countless adaptations and offshoots, refuses to “die.”

Author: Charles Dickens
First published: 1849-50, by Bradbury and Evans

WARNING: Plot spoiler

The year before he died, Dickens called this novel “his favorite child.” While it is not exactly mine, I can see why it was his. In David Copperfield, Dickens created some of the most memorable—if not the most memorable—characters in his entire career. Even Virginia Woolf, who had no great deal of admiration for Dickens, admitted that David Copperfield was a novel so memorable and influential, that the story and characters had become part of most peoples’ consciousness from the days before they could even read.

The full banquet of Dickensian characters is present here in fine form, and you cannot help but love them. It’s one of the reasons why David Copperfield, in conjunction with Great Expectations, is sometimes the novel I tell people to read if they’ve never read Dickens before. You meet some of Dickens’s most likable and hilarious characters: Aunt Betsy Trotwood, Clara Pegotty and her brother, Mr. Dick (“Have him measured for a suit of clothes directly”), the “volatile” Miss Mowcher, Mrs. Micawber, and of course, Mr. Wilkins Micawber. You also encounter some of Dickens’s darkest and unlikable creations: Rosa Dartle, Mr. and Mrs. Murdstone, James Steerforth, and the unctuous Uriah Heep and his mother, who hang “like two great bats” over the whole of the Wickfield house.

Dickens has been criticized through the years, and often rightly so, for developing “flat” (as opposed to “round”) characters. These distinctions were first put forth by E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel. In that work, Forster uses Mrs. Micawber as the paradigmatic example of what a flat character is:

The really flat character can be expressed in one sentence such as “I never will desert Mr. Micawber.” There is Mrs. Micawber—she says she won’t desert Mr. Micawber, she doesn’t, and there she is.

Touché Mr. Forster! He’s right—and there she is—but we’ll take more of her and her kind any day.

There are also those characters—and certainly moments—in this novel that tend towards the round. Though I find the Victorian “angel of the house” ideology in David Copperfield nauseating at times, I think Dickens treats two scenes in particular with incredible skill and emotional poignancy. The first is the discovery of Emily’s elopement with Steerforth (Chapter 31, “A Greater Loss”), and the second is the death of Dora Copperfield (Chapter 53, “Another Retrospect”). In both of these scenes, which have the potential to become un-retractable train wrecks of sentimentality and melodrama, Dickens renders the emotional turbulence that informs these moments with great respect and tranquillity—almost reservation, as if these tragic occurrences were no less a part of the natural fabric of life than Mr. Micawber’s insolvency. Mr. Pegotty’s heartbreak is palpable; and Dora Copperfield’s apologies are enough to make any reader reflect on lifetimes filled with regret. Here then is the artist toiling away at his craft, proving that this most sentimental and melodramatic of writers was also a supreme journalist who chronicled with exactitude the nuances of the human heart.

Author: Edith Wharton
First Published: 1920, in the Pictorial Review

The first chapter of the Age of Innocence is one of those magical first chapters that contains the entirety of the book within it. In fact, it holds a single sentence that contains the entire book:

He had dawdled over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation.

For that is nearly everything that this book is about: Newland Archer’s insufferable dawdling, his dilettantism, the dilettantism of everyone around him, the constant delay of his own pleasures, and satisfactions never to come.

It is one of the most heartbreaking stories ever told.

Wharton presents an archaeological inventory of the Old New York Society into which she was born. It’s the early 1870’s, a time when everything—and everyone—has an exact and prescribed seat at the lavish dinner table of social custom. The relentless detail of Wharton’s novel produces more than just gorgeous prose; it constructs the fine bars of Newland Archer’s gold and crystalline cage. Every item, every word, every mood, every temperature is an essential part of the magnificent social structure that shackles him in velvet chains from which he can never escape.

You can open The Age of Innocence, point to any random paragraph, and immediately find evidence of this delicate, filigreed ironwork. The details and descriptions of Newland Archer’s world are Wharton’s foundation, walls, and ceiling. But there is one paragraph in particular that linguistically unites all of the themes of this great book—the imprisoning details, the social imperatives, the unconquerable addiction to those imperatives, the pain of a life suppressed:

There was something about the luxury of the Welland house and the density of the Welland atmosphere, so charged with minute observances and exactions, that always stole into his system like a narcotic. The heavy carpets, the watchful servants, the perpetually reminding tick of disciplined clocks, the perpetually renewed stack of cards and invitations on the hall table, the whole chain of tyrannical trifles binding one hour to the next, and each member of the household to all the others, made any less systematized and affluent existence seem unreal and precarious. But now it was the Welland house, and the life he was expected to lead in it, that had become unreal and irrelevant, and the brief scene on the shore, when he had stood irresolute, half-way down the bank, was as close to him as the blood in his veins.

This paragraph appears at the end of Chapter 21, after Archer has spotted Ellen Olenska on Granny Mingott’s pier. He plays the game that he so often plays with himself—the game whereby he delays his own pleasure. “If she doesn’t turn before that sail crosses the Lime Rock light I’ll go back.” Of course, she doesn’t turn, and he does go back. It’s the same cowardly march to his own execution that he can’t help but repeat, over and over.

Martin Scorsese’s 1993 film adaptation of The Age of Innocence is my favorite book-to-screen movie of all time, not only because of its visual splendor, but because of its absolute fidelity to Wharton’s original text. It has been dismissed as slow and boring by many, but to me it is probably the greatest film adaptation ever done of one of the greatest novels ever written.

Author: Charlotte Brontë (Currer Bell)
First Published: 1847, by Smith, Elder, and Co.

Poor Jane Eyre—the doormat of 19^th-century literature. Everyone walks all over her, and her mistreatment by other characters throughout the novel is both infuriating and disgusting. From the Reeds and Mr. Brocklehurst in childhood, to the Ingrams and even her beloved Mr. Rochester as an adult, the abuse heaped upon the heroine of this book is difficult to endure. I actually need to put the book down at certain times because I can only take so much of Jane’s undeserved punishments at once.

But beyond that horrible aspect of the book—which, I must own up, is as artful as it is disturbing—there is so much to love about Jane Eyre. One of the things I love most about Jane Eyre herself is that she is one of literature’s great readers (even though she often disavows this). At ten years old we know that she has already devoured Bewick’s History of British Birds, Goldsmith’s History of Rome, The Arabian Nights, Gulliver’s Travels, and no doubt countless other unnamed books. Little Jane has read widely and with great feeling, and her reading has made her “passionate.”

And then there is the language—Brontë’s magnificent, dream-like language. Her imagery is as relentless as it is gorgeous, and I think I might be right in saying that her prodigious vocabulary surpasses that of any other Victorian writer (even Dickens). Here are but a few examples:

. . . it was the hebdomadal treat to which we all looked forward from Sabbath to Sabbath. (Chapter 7)

. . . the heavy supper she had eaten produced a soporific effect. (Chapter 10)

. . . she proceeded to arrange the cups, spoons, &c., with assiduous celerity. (Chapter 13)

To so practiced and indefatigable a horseman as Mr. Rochester it would be but a morning’s ride. (Chapter 22)

. . . you watched me, and now and then smiled at me with a simple yet sagacious grace I cannot describe. (Chapter 27)

The water stood in my eyes . . . but I would not be lachrymose . . . (Chapter 37)

And who but Charlotte Brontë could ever describe a wedding dress like this?

It was enough that in yonder closet, opposite my dressing-table, garments said to be [Mrs. Rochester’s] had already displaced my black stuff Lowood frock and straw bonnet: for not to me appertained that suit of wedding raiment; the pearl coloured robe, the vapoury veil pendent from the usurped portmanteau.  I shut the closet to conceal the strange, wraith-like apparel it contained; which, at this evening hour—nine o’clock—gave out certainly a most ghostly shimmer through the shadow of my apartment.

Jane Eyre is a feast of words. And it is no wonder Virginia Woolf said that we read Charlotte Brontë not for her characters, not for her comedy, and not for her philosophic view of life, but simply “for her poetry.”

Author: Truman Capote
First Published: 1965, in The New Yorker

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of Western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.”

So begins, beautifully, Truman Capote’s meticulously-researched masterpiece about the brutal 1959 murder of the Clutter family in their home, and the pursuit and execution of their killers. It’s hard for us today to imagine airport news stands devoid of true-crime books with their glossy black covers and embossed, bright red lettering, but before In Cold Blood, the modern true crime story as we know it had yet to be born. Literary accounts of crimes and criminals had always been popular with readers, going all the way back to the Newgate novels of the early 19th-century, and even earlier with such “rogue” novels as Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe. But In Cold Blood inaugurated what Capote himself called the “nonfiction novel”—a genre of writing that told the “truth” with the artistry and devices of the traditional realist novel. When you read the book, you step into another densely atmospheric and psychological world, chiefly because Capote’s journalism skills walk arm in arm with his creative powers as a novelist.

The story came to Capote’s attention one day when he read a 300-word, one-column article in the back of the New York Times:

Holcomb, Kan., Nov. 15 [1959] (UPI)—A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged. The father, 48-year-old Herbert W. Clutter, was found in the basement with his son, Kenyon, 15. His wife Bonnie, 45, and a daughter, Nancy, 16, were in their beds. There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines had been cut . . .

Capote immediately traveled to Kansas (escorted by his childhood friend Harper Lee) to investigate the story. The killers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, were captured shortly afterwards, and Capote spent the next six years researching and writing the “novel.” The book has been rightly hailed as the author’s greatest achievement.

I have talked about incredible openings before (García Márquez and Shirley Jackson), but with Capote, it’s the ending that never leaves me. The closing scene of In Cold Blood takes place in the cemetery where the graves of all four Clutters are “gathered under a single gray stone.” Al Dewey, the lead investigator who apprehended Smith and Hickock, meets Nancy Clutter’s high school friend, Sue Kidwell, at the gravesite. After a noticeably unemotional conversation about college plans and boys, Sue trots off, seemingly late for something undisclosed.

“And nice to have seen you, Sue. Good luck,” he called after her as she disappeared down the path, a pretty girl in a hurry, her smooth hair swinging, shining—just such a young woman as Nancy might have been. Then, starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.

Author: Charles Dickens
First Published: 1860-61, in All the Year Round

The two questions about Dickens that people most often ask me are “What is your favorite Dickens novel?” and “If I’ve never read a Dickens novel before, which one should I start with?” My answer to both is usually Great Expectations, though that answer tends to differ sometimes, depending on which day you ask me.

Written at the height of Dickens’s creative powers in 1861, Great Expectations contains all of the best in Dickens: hysterical and eccentric characters, painful, moving, and unforgettable episodes, love unspoiled and love unrequited, and most important of all, an incredible story. John Irving, another one of my heroes, has gone so far as to say that Great Expectations “has the most wonderful and perfectly worked-out plot for a novel in the English language.” I think I have to agree with him, though if you pressed me to declare my favorite novel in the English language, Great Expectations might have to duke it out with Middlemarch.

Not only does Great Expectations contain my favorite story by Dickens, but it also contains my favorite paragraph in all of Dickens. Here it is:

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

The wisdom and the feeling of these words take my breath away every time I read this passage. Dickens is referring here to the day that Pip meets Estella—the day that forever changes his life and sets his expectations in motion. But take any day from your own life that holds special significance, good or bad, then extract it, and extrapolate on what would have happened for the rest of your life instead. The concept is really mind-boggling.

It is a shame that so many people form a bad opinion about this novel and about Dickens in general when they’re forced to read Great Expectations in high school—a time when people are often too distracted, rightfully, by adolescence to weather the book’s various demands. One of the great joys of Great Expectations though, is being able to rediscover it whenever you want. When you re-read Great Expectations as an adult, it’s a very different experience from plodding through that intimidating 400-pager that your teacher might have assigned to you in high school. And if you wait long enough to let your heart get broken once or twice, I can tell you that Great Expectations will speak to you with a power that no other book can claim.

Author: Jo Ann Beard
First Published: 1997, by Little, Brown

This is one of those books that comes along once in a lifetime. It’s so special that as soon as I finished it, I immediately sent a copy to Elizabeth Quinlan, my reading compatriot and the daughter of the woman who brought this reading sickness upon me in the first place. Like Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Boys of My Youth has a voice that is as astounding as it is unique. I’ll let Ms. Beard speak for herself:

Here’s one of my preverbal memories: I’m very little and I’m behind bars, like a baby monkey in a cage. My parents have just put me to bed in a room with bright yellow walls. This is fine with me because in my crib there are various companions—the satin edge of my blue blanket, the chewable plastic circle that hangs down almost to mouth-level on a piece of green cord, and a boy doll named Hal with blue eyes and lickable hands and feet made of vinyl. At this point in my life, I love Hal, and the satin borders of blankets better than any of the humans I know. My mother puts Hal up next to my head as soon as I lie down, which is exactly where I don’t want him. I smack him in the face.

The Boys of My Youth is a collection of non-fiction stories that read like fiction. They jump around to different parts of the author’s life, and together form a kind of memoir. But the book defies categorization, as does Beard’s writing.

One of the things I find most compelling about Beard is her ability to push the boundaries of metaphor and meaning. In this paragraph for example, she juxtaposes an unlikely host of nouns and verbs that give the passage a life of its own:

It is nine o’clock on Saturday night, the sky is black and glittering with pinholes, old trees are bent down over the highway. In the dark field behind, the corn gathers its strength, grows an in inch in silence, then stops to rest. Next to the highway, screened in vegetation, a deer with muscular ears and glamorous eyes, stands waiting to spring out from the wings into the next moving spotlight. The asphalt sighs in anticipation.

The anthropomorphizing of the trees and the corn is just magical. And nearly every sentence in this autobiographical collection, to me at least, sparkles like one of those night-time pinholes.

“The Fourth State of Matter,” first published in The New Yorker in June of 1996, is a grim retelling of Beard’s early departure from work on a day that a graduate student came into her building at the University of Iowa and gunned down the members of the Physics Department. (“At the end of the hallway are the double doors leading to the rest of my life. I push them open and walk through.”) But the story is also about her dying collie, the squirrels that have taken up residence in the spare bedroom upstairs, and a husband who has left her. Only Beard could weave these disparate parts together with such dexterity.

“The piece created a small stir when it first appeared,” wrote Tai Moses in a review for metroactive.com. “Some critics were unsettled by Beard’s application of refined narrative technique to a real-life tragedy. Similar criticism was leveled at novelist Kathryn Harrison after publication of The Kiss, her memoir about her incestuous relationship with her father. It wasn’t just that Harrison had made public such a shameful secret; the real complaint seemed to be that she did it so beautifully. But how could she not? To expect a writer to set aside her aesthetic sensibilities in the face of horror seems absurd.” 

Author: Shirley Jackson
First Published: 1962, by Viking Press

Shirley Jackson is best known for her short-story “The Lottery” (1948), as well as her novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959). But I’ve heard people say that We Have Always Lived in the Castle is one of the best books they’ve ever read, and I am in total agreement with these people. I would go so far as to say that if I had to select my ten favorite books of all time, We Have Always Lived in the Castle would be one of them. The first paragraph is certainly one of the greatest openings ever written:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenent, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

In terms of first paragraphs, only García Márquez comes close.

Mary Katherine Blackwood (or “Merricat” as she’s called in the novel) is the paradigm of the unreliable narrator, reminiscent of the governess in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, only with a more child-like and oddly welcoming writing style. From the beginning, you know this narrator is disturbed, and that you cannot trust anything she says. Her world is a self-created fantasy realm through which the “real story” pokes holes when she is not in control of her narrative. The irony here is of course that Jackson, the author, is in complete control of the narrative, and the book is a marvelous example of the magic a writer can work by withholding bits of information, and revealing other bits at just the right time.

The characters are exquisitely Dickensian (no surprise why I love this book so much), particularly Uncle Julian in his wheelchair, who calls to mind Mr. Dick from David Copperfield. And the final disaster that takes place near the end of the book is like some horrific riot right out of A Tale of Two Cities, or Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. There is an eerie pacing to the story, perfectly timed, that aggravates the mystery behind why everyone else in the family is dead. But it is the voice of the gifted, eccentric narrator that makes it impossible for me to put this book down.

Author: Charles Dickens
First published: 1852-53, by Bradbury and Evans

WARNING: Plot spoiler

Bleak House is Dickens’s great indictment on the Victorian legal system, but also his critique of a world that refuses to endorse love in anything but its most conventional and socially-acceptable forms. As in all of Dickens’s novels, there are many stories within Bleak House, but my favorite is the harrowing story of Lady Dedlock and her daughter Esther Summerson. Running alongside the ancient and irresolvable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, the Dedlock/Esther Summerson plot is the story at the very center of the book—the story that gives the stagnant world of Bleak House not only its momentum, but an emotional force unparalleled in Dickens.

Lady Dedlock and Esther are dead to each other in the sense that neither one knows about the others’ true identity. Lady Dedlock (formerly not a lady at all, but the aptly named Honoria Barbary), believes her child to have died at birth, and Esther, ushered away to hide her mother’s disgrace (Lady Dedlock was not married when she had Esther), is never told what happened to her mother. (”I had never worn a black frock, that I could recollect. I had never been shown my mama’s grave.”) They go through life apart, unaware of each others’ existences, longing for each other all the while and suppressing their longing as the culture demands. (Esther grows up haunted by the bitter castigations of her godmother/aunt: “Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers.”)

One of my favorite scenes not just in Bleak House but in all of Dickens, is the reunion scene between Esther and Lady Dedlock. It is so riveting for the momentary joy Esther experiences and the calamity that shatters the moment, rendering the joy immediately tragic. Discovering who her mother is at last, Esther briefly peeks through an open window into her past; but the window slams shut in an instant when Lady Dedlock, the condemned prisoner of a stratified world, announces that she and Esther can never speak to each other again.

“My child, my child!” she said. “For the last time! These kisses for the last time! These arms upon my neck for the last time! We shall meet no more. To hope to do what I seek to do, I must be what I have been so long. Such is my reward and doom. If you hear of Lady Dedlock, brilliant, prosperous, and flattered; think of your wretched mother, conscience-stricken, underneath that mask! Think that the reality is in her suffering, in her useless remorse, in her murdering within her breast the only love and truth of which it is capable! And then forgive her, if you can; and cry to Heaven to forgive her, which it never can!”

Esther’s and Lady Dedlock’s story is a story of repeated deaths and births. Esther is born, but “dies” in childbirth, and the mother “dies” along with her. Esther is haunted by this dead mother throughout her life, until the dead mother comes back to life, only to “murder” herself and her daughter again. They continue apart, dead to each other once more, until their final reunion in chapter 59 of the novel, when Esther discovers Lady Dedlock’s disguised body at the gates of the poor man’s graveyard: “. . . it was my mother, cold and dead.”

The BBC’s 2005 production of Bleak House, starring Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock, is one of my favorite literary adaptations of all time. Though the writers did alter many parts of the book (including, sadly, the excision of the greatest chase scene in all of English literature—Bucket’s pursuit of Lady Dedlock through the night), the attention to the mood, lighting, and themes of Dickens’s original could not be more faithful.