The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life-Fast Shipping

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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 Englishnovels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights,Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts—portraythe essential experiences of life.

Edward Mendelson—a professor of English at ColumbiaUniversity—illustrates how each novel is a living portrait of the human conditionwhile expressing its author’s complex individuality and intentions and emerging fromthe author’s life and times. He explores Frankenstein as a searing representationof child neglect and abandonment and Mrs. Dalloway as a portrait of an ideal butalmost impossible adult love, and leads us to a fresh and fascinating new understandingof each of the seven novels, reminding us—in the most captivating way—why they matter.