Last week we brought you a short guide to female works of art essential for every sophisticated collegiette to know. This week we bring you five books recommended from esteemed English Professor Laycock.
Compiled by Deborah Laycock, Chair of the English Department and Associate Professor of English
DL: I will start with my list of recommended books for women/by women with my favorite book. All the other works have been influential, revelatory, and surprising in different ways. It is not surprising that I should choose Canadian and eighteenth-century British works to recommend—these are my areas of specialization. But in announcing this, I am not trying to draw readers to neglected fields. I am lucky enough to teach the works that I find fascinating.
1. Frances Burney, Cecilia (1782)
Jane Austen would have appeared on this list, and perhaps at the top, had I not had the pleasure of reading the novels of this writer who influenced Jane Austen. This late eighteenth-century novel is infinitely wise and moving. Dare I say better than Austen?
2. Alice Munro, Open Secrets (1994)
An open secret–“something not startling until you think of trying to tell it.” Munro’s short stories have the power to startle–even after one foolishly imagines one has unlocked all their secrets.
3. Ann Radcliffe, Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
Radcliffe is a gothic novelist who influenced Jane Austen. This novel combines all of the things that I find compelling in eighteenth-century gothic fiction. It is a riveting mystery bordering on the fantastic, and is a travel narrative of the most transporting kind, with stunning depictions of sublime and picturesque landscapes.
4. Barbara Gowdy, White Bone (1999)
Gowdy’s imaginative construction of the lives and the struggles of elephants is hauntingly beautiful and so incredibly sad. Gowdy can create a world so convincingly that one will never see an elephant in the same way again.
5. Fred Vargas (pen name of Frédérique Audouin-Rouzeau), An Uncertain Place (2008)
This is a completely absorbing detective novel by the French historian, archeologist, and novelist “Fred Vargas”–worth reading