Product Description

She felt rather inclined just for a moment to stand still after all that chatter, and pick out one particular thing; the thing that mattered . . .
—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

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.

Edward Mendelson—a professor of English at Columbia University—illustrates how each novel is a living portrait of the human condition while expressing its author’s complex individuality and intentions and emerging from the author’s life and times. He explores Frankenstein as a searing representation of child neglect and abandonment and Mrs. Dalloway as a portrait of an ideal but almost impossible adult love, and 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #441406 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-06
• Released on: 2007-11-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Columbia professor Mendelson's interlocking essays on the subtexts of seven great works of fiction (all by women) are lucidly expressed, insightful and often provocative. However, in arguing that one can learn the essentials of human existence from close readings of Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch and three Virginia Woolf works, he stretches Freudian imagination. In the chapter "Birth," for example, Mendelson demonstrates that Frankenstein is pervaded by fears of abandonment and death. Readers must invoke the subconscious to accept that these fears are common to human beings contemplating or existing in that earliest stage of life. What Mendelson does accomplish, and brilliantly, is to analyze these novels as extraordinary representatives of changes in moral and cultural mores in the 19th and 20th centuries. He offers a fascinating glimpse into the hidden visionary narrative in Wuthering Heights; convincingly finds that Middlemarch ("Marriage") and other of George Eliot's novels "expound more knowledge than any other body of fiction in English, and more wisdom than most"; and credits Woolf with groundbreaking insights into human emotions. As literary guides to these seven books, Mendelson's essays offer significant intellectual pleasure. (Aug. s15)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Though the book is somewhat hit-or-miss, critics agree that the hits outnumber the misses. A particular standout is Mendelson's essay on Mrs. Dalloway, which both conveys the essence of the novel and offers acute insights into its eponymous protagonist. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the Frankenstein piece, less coherent and evocative than the others. The writing is sometimes overly constrained by the "stages of life" structure, though Mendelson delves into his characters' moral journeys as well. This collection will be best enjoyed by literary enthusiasts who know these novels well and can interact with Mendelson's work from a standpoint of personal experience and opinion.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
Defying fashionable theories of literature, Mendelson approaches fiction seeking not to understand symbolism but to gather practical wisdom. In seven classic nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels--written by Mary Shelley, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf--Mendelson finds insights into the crises that define the life course. In Shelley's Frankenstein, for instance, he probes the reasons a parent creates life without nurturing it. In the sharply diverging visions of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre Mendelson contrasts a child's obsessive yearning for a world impervious to change with a mature woman's acceptance of the painful transformations that precede real intimacy. Middlemarch clarifies why a successful marriage requires a hard-won realism. And a trio of Woolf novels illuminates the ways in which the human dynamics of the family--often suffused with bitter ironies--diverge radically from those of the public sphere. It may puzzle some readers that Mendelson devotes three life-lesson commentaries to Woolf, particularly since her fictional trajectory anticipates her own suicide. But devotees of all of the authors examined will applaud Mendelson for reconnecting literary art and real life. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Women Who Write and Emotions in the Individual Life

Every so often a book appears with a fresh approach to familiar classics
which reinvigorates our belief in the importance of literature to the
experience of culture. Edward Mendelson is a Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University. As the subtitle declares,
The Things That Matter revisits seven novels with an aim of exploring a
central theme from each that can tell us something about how to
interpret emotional challenges that beset us in the course of our
lifetime. Frankenstein is offered as an examination of birth, Wuthering
Heights of childhood, Jane Eyre for growth, Middlemarch for marriage,
Mrs. Dalloway for love, To the Lighthouse for parenthood, and Between
the Acts for the future. Mendelson's premise is flexible enough to avoid
heavy-handed exegesis; what he has given us is a literary roadmap into
moral and emotional conundrums that the authors of these books have
confronted through story and character.

The selection spans two centuries and the authors are women. Three of
the books were written by Virginia Woolf. Mendelson believes that women
"had a greater motivation to defend the values of personal life against
the generalizing effect of stereotypes..." He makes a good point:
certainly the authors of these books took great pains to examine the
emotional life and its influence on actions and choices.

One gets from his book a keen sense of Mendelson's reverence for the
individual experience, whether as a reader, a writer, an artist, or
merely a soul confronting contradictions; and he seems to be saying that
the best literature offers visions in lieu of answers, and that the
visions given here have something of emotional truth derived from what
women know especially.

Authors exist in a relationship to their characters that creates a
second dynamic to the narrative. "The novels that I write about in this
book all emerged from their authors' arguments with themselves." From
this can be inferred arguments that authors have with their characters,
disapproving of their behavior even as they create situations that allow
it, and with their readers, for whom the story is told. It is precisely
the interpersonal aspects of literature and the visions that emerge from
speculation that excite Professor Mendelson, and he has given new light
to familiar books in this thoughtfully insightful meditation.

seven tastes of greatness !
I just read "The Things That Matter," having seen it on my library's shelf and picked it up out of curiosity. I loved this book not only for its content but for the timing with which it showed up for me to read. My brilliant-at-math-and-science-stuff child was having a challenge with English Lit class; this book has given me a way to relate to them the value of novels to real life stuff, especially thinking about how "universal ideas" in life play out in personal actual life.

I found Mendelson's critical reviews of "What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life" timely and well written. I highlight below several points that struck me.

. I have never, never, NEver realized the intricate complexities of "Frankenstein" til I read Mendelson's analysis. I had heard that the authoress (Mary Shelley) was brilliant and accomplished and connected in her time, but to be honest all I could image in my mind prior to this book was the film treatments of a) Boris Karloff, and b) Mel Brooks. Suffice it to say I have a whole new appreciation of the rich ideas and paradoxes Shelley wove into her story!

. Mendelson does a fine job of weaving seven stories into seven Stages of Life (Birth, Childhood, Growth, Marraige, Love, Parenthood, The Future). Never mind the excellence of each chapter's analyses; the crafting of the whole book, and its demonstration by example of its meta-theme that "things that matter are written about in great literature," excite my professional admiration for a job of craftsmenship and talent well done.

. Further exciting my admiration are several points mentioned in the preface and in the essays as Mendelson distinguishes "universal ideas" that these authoresses (Mary Shelley, Emile Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf) present in their narratives:

1) He chose all woman authors because "it has nothing to do with any fantasy that women have greater moral and emotional intelligence" but rather "a woman writer [in the 19th and 20th centuries] had a greater motivation to defend the values of personal life against the generalizing effect of stereotypes." This is still an issue today for ALL of us, I think, whatever our personal circumstances or lifestyle choices.

2) That opposite life principles may be equally true, that what is publically espoused may be privately doubted. Or said colloquially, "The opposite of a Great Truth may be in itself a Great Truth." Examples include, in "Frankenstein," the espoused principle that a good upbringing of a child will result in a good character of an adult. But: "The opposite may also be true."

To read Mendelson's "take" about these works and their authors has made me feel more acquainted with seven "tastes of greatness!"

Brilliant!
I echo Tom Casey's review below. I read some of these novels thirty years ago, and started re-reading them two years ago. What perfect timing, then, for Edward Mendelson's very interesting approach on these novels. On the surface this book does not appear to be the typical academic work it is, but each chapter on its own could have been a doctoral thesis. To tie these seven novels into passages of life is quite remarkable. In addition, footnotes, though infrequent, shed light on very important issues of the times that are easily overlooked. To enjoy this book one should have a fairly good knowledge of the novels. But you can read the essays in any order that you want; each essay stands alone. Highly, highly recommended.