January 6, 2009
Pride and Prejudice
Written by Jane Austen
“I do assure you that I am not one of those young ladies (if such young ladies there are) who are so daring as to risk their happiness on the chance of being asked a second time. I am perfectly serious in my refusal. You could not make me happy, and I am convinced that I am the last woman in the world who could make you so.”
—Chapter 19, pg.93
Fun Facts
- Jane Austen was only twenty-one years old when she finished writing the first version of Pride and Prejudice.
- The original title of the book was First Impressions, however no copy of the original manuscript under that title is known to exist. She rewrote it into the version we have today fourteen years later.
- Three months after she completed work on the first version of the book, Jane’s father offered it to a publisher who turned it down without ever having read the manuscript.
January 6, 2009
The Scarlet Letter
Written by Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Ah, but let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart.”
—Chapter 2
Fun Facts
- Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine along with Franklin Pierce and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
- Hawthorne was a descendent of early Puritan settlers, a heritage that would haunt him and inform his writing.
- The Scarlet Letter was an instant bestseller but in more than fourteen years, Hawthorne only earned $1,500 from it.
- Hawthorne was part of a brief transcendentalist experiment in group living called Brook Farm, located in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.
January 20, 2009
Frankenstein
Written by Mary Shelley
“All my speculations and hopes are as nothing, and like the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell.”
—Chapter 24, pg. 201
Fun Facts
- Shelley started writing Frankenstein when she was eighteen and finished when she was nineteen.
- The first edition was published anonymously in London in 1818. It was turned down by two publishers — John Murray and Ollier, before being accepted by Lakington, Allen and Co.
- Mary Shelley’s life had many tragic elements including her mother’s death while giving birth to the author, her half-sister committing suicide, and her husband’s drowning in 1822.
- Shelley and the other romantics admired Milton’s character of Satan, seeing him as the hero of Paradise Lost. In many ways, the creature echoes Satan’s resentment when he states, “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.”
January 26, 2009
The Metamorphosis
Written by Franz Kafka
“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”
—Chapter 1, pg. 1
Fun Facts
- The humor of The Metamorphosis is often overlooked. When Kafka read the story to his circle of companions in Prague it would often elicit boisterous laughter.
- His unpublished manuscripts which included his three novels, were left to his friend Max Brod. He asked for Brod to destroy them but instead, Brod edited and published most of Kafka’s manuscripts.
- Kafka always felt like an outsider in Prague: the Czechs considered him a German, since his parents were German-speaking, and the Germans labeled him a Czech and a Jew. Many of his books play upon this theme.
