• About this Book
• About the Author
• Table of Contents

Written by Edward Mendelson

• Format: Hardcover, 288 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon
• On Sale: August 15, 2006
• Price: $23.00
• ISBN: 978-0-375-42408-3 (0-375-42408-3)

about this book

An illuminating exploration of how seven of the greatest English novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts—portray the essential experiences of life.

For Edward Mendelson—a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University—these classic novels tell life stories that are valuable to readers who are thinking about the course of their own lives. Looking beyond theories to the individual intentions of the authors and taking into consideration their lives and times, Mendelson examines the sometimes contradictory ways in which the novels portray such major passages of life as love, marriage, and parenthood. In Frankenstein’s story of a new life, we see a searing representation of emotional neglect. In Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre the transition from childhood to adulthood is portrayed in vastly different ways even though the sisters who wrote the books shared the same isolated life. In Mrs. Dalloway we see an ideal and almost impossible adult love. Mendelson leads us to a fresh and fascinating new understanding of each of the seven novels, reminding us—in the most captivating way—why they matter.

The Things That Matter is a book that will delight all passionate readers.


"Great works of fiction often not only tell a story but reveal how we are to live our lives. This sympathetic, profound, and very readable work by one of the finest literary scholars of our time shows us how seven novels can help us through the stages through which we all must pass in our lives. Edward Mendelson's insights into the meaning of the novels he considers are acute. He reveals dimensions to these works that most of us will never have guessed at, showing, with grace and courtesy, both their deeper significance and the wisdom that they contain about life's challenges. Reading this book places one in the company of an urbane, erudite and sure-footed guide."
—Alexander McCall Smith

"Dazzling…masterly...The highest acheivement of literary criticism is to make the reader hunger to go back to the book and reconfirm what has been opened up."
—Richard Eder, The New York Times

"[Mendelsohn] takes the reader deep into the moral universe of his authors and pulls together thematic threads with extraordinary skill."
—William Grimes, The New York Times

"Masterful…Fluid, wide and deep, The Things That Matter takes a rightful place next to the literature we love" —The Washington Times


"Edward Mendelson's essays are among the best I have read: deeply knowledgeable, appreciative and attentive; and expressed with the affinity of a scholar and critic who is himself an excellent writer. His book is a pleasure to read and to praise."
—Shirley Hazzard

"In this brilliant and humane book, Edward Mendelson makes powerful progress toward repairing what academic criticism has done its best to put asunder—the connection between literature and life. This is a work of deep learning and deep feeling, a book whose consolations are worthy of the mighty genre it takes for its subject."
—Thomas Mallon

"The beauty of this book is the maturity of its thinking.  Mendelson restores the novels to their original, moral context but he does not upholster them in Victorian certainty.  On the contrary, he shows the authors struggling with their ideas.  It's like watching Fabergé inspect diamonds."
—Joan Acocella

“It’s a truism that great novels have something to tell us not only about life but about our own lives. But for decades literary criticism has neglected or scorned this useful truth in favor of “theory” and its babarous jargon. How refreshing then to read a study which dwells without apology, and with genuine insight, on the ways in which novels impinge upon our own experience.…Mendelson is so perceptive and persuasive a reader [he]won me over from the outset.”
—The New York Sun

“Excellent….thought-provoking, imaginative, perfect to have a conversation about.”
--The Washington Post

“Acute…Thrilling…[Mendelson’s] readings will send you hungrily to these classics”
—Newsday

“Filled with sage insights into literature and life…a joy to read”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Elegant… enlightening…. Mendelson is an ideal companion…[the book] reminds us that criticism of the sort that Mendelson practices is one of the things that matter.” —The Los Angeles Times