Round-up – New Classics, May 2025

From Ashe and Baron to Sinclair and Tawada

Dear classics readers,

One hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway was published on 14 May 1925. To mark the occasion, Oxford World’s Classics are releasing a new edition of Mrs Dalloway this month, edited by Trudi Tate, which presents ‘a fresh examination of Woolf's representations of women in the wake of the first women in Britain winning the right to vote’.

Oxford World’s Classics | 224 pages | introduced by Trudi Tate

On a related note, I will soon be inviting you to join me in a one-day read-along of Mrs Dalloway, on a Wednesday in the middle of June. Put Wednesday 18 June in your diary!

There’s an eclectic mix of reissued classics this May. We are getting new translations of Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Kafka and Rumi; there’s a murderous old house, an East End London gambler, a reclusive Brazilian, a post-war English village and some uncanny short stories; and there are unorthodox, intimate relationships with both a cat and a dog . . .

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Moths by Rosalind Ashe (1976)

Dower House, lush and irresistible, draws people to it like moths to a flame. Among those caught in its spell are James and Nemo Boyce, who buy it, and Harry Harris, who becomes possessed by both the house and its mistress. But disturbing events – the mysterious death of a favorite dog, ghostly music in the woods, fleeting reflections in an old mirror – give warning of another presence. And then, at the Boyces’ housewarming party, an uninvited guest makes an appearance: Sarah Moore, dazzling actress, beautiful, lustful, murderous – and dead for 150 years.

[UK / US:] Valancourt Books | 196 pages | introduced by Lisa Kröger

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The Lowlife by Alexander Baron (1963)

Harryboy Boas is a lowlife gambler. When he’s not at the track, he lives in a Hackney boarding house, reading Zola, eating salt beef, pressing trousers and repressing wartime memories. But when a new family moves into the apartment downstairs, his life starts to unravel and Harryboy soon finds himself sinking into a murky East End underworld where violence, guilt and gangsters are the inevitable result for those who cannot pay their dues.

[UK / US:] Faber Editions | 256 pages | introduced by Iain Sinclair

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The Cat and The Masked Woman by Colette (1933)

The Cat is the story of a middle-class couple in 1920s Paris. It follows the familiar romantic structure of the ‘eternal triangle’, with the unexpected twist that the female rival is not a woman but a cat. The Masked Woman is a collection of short texts, mainly written for the daily newspaper Le Matin, focusing on small moments that mark a transition in a person’s life.

[UK / US:] Oxford World’s Classics | 208 pages | translated by Helen Constantine | introduced by Diana Holmes

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The Image of Her by Simone de Beauvoir (1966)

Weekends in the country, weekdays in Paris – Laurence’s life features all the trappings of 1960s French bourgeoisie. She has money, a handsome husband, two daughters and a lover. She also has a successful career as an advertising copywriter, though her mind writes copy while she’s at home, and dreams of domesticity in the office. All her life she has strived to meet the expectations of others. But when her 10-year-old daughter, Catherine, starts to vocalise her despair about the unfairness of the world, Laurence must finally grapple with a life that prizes image over truth.

[UK:] Vintage Classics | 208 pages | translated by Lauren Elkin

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The Obscene Madame D by Hilda Hilst (1982)

At sixty, Hillé retreats to a recess under the stairs, abandoning social life for spiritual contemplation. There, she is haunted by her perplexed, recently deceased husband, who desperately advocates for simple common sense and tries to coax her into bed – but from her space of dereliction, Hillé seeks only transcendence. The Obscene Madame D is an electrifying masterpiece by one of Brazilian literature’s most important writers. In subversive, riotously funny prose, Hilst slices to the core of sex, death and madness.

[UK / US:] Pushkin Press Classics | 80 pages | translated by Nathanaël and Rachel Gontijo Araujo

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The Diaries of Franz Kafka (1909-23)

This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of Kafka’s handwritten diary entries and provides substantial new content, restoring all the material omitted from previous publications – notably, names of people and undisguised details about them, a number of literary writings, and passages of a sexual nature, some of them with homoerotic overtones.

[UK / US:] Penguin Classics | 704 pages | translated by

Ross Benjamin

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One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes (1947)

A hot summer’s day in 1946. The village of Wealding is no longer troubled by distant sirens, yet the rusting coils of barbed wire are a reminder that something, some quality of life, has evaporated. Together again after years of separation, Laura and Stephen Marshall must find their way in an altered, shabbier world. Their rambling garden refuses to be tamed, the house seems perceptibly to crumble. Hour by hour, as the glorious weather holds, the Marshalls and their daughter Victoria are preoccupied by the small pleasures and irritations of everyday life. But alone on a hillside, as evening falls, Laura comes to see how much could have been lost – and how much the future might still hold.

[UK:] Virago Modern Classics | 208 pages
[US:] Herald Classics | 184 pages | introduced by Elisa Gabbert

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Water by Rumi (13th century)

A follow-up to her ground-breaking translations of Rumi in Gold, poet and musician Haleh Liza Gafori translates a new selection of work by the great Persian mystic that will muster the soul and stir the spirit. As in Gold, Gafori renders with fluid grace and moving immediacy these indisputable masterworks of world literature, drawing on the deep well of Rumi’s work to bring out the worldly wit and wisdom that accompany his otherworldly summons.

[UK / US:] NYRB Classics | 112 pages | translated by Haleh Liza Gafori

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Uncanny Stories by May Sinclair (1923)

Combining the traditional ghost story with Freudian logic and Modernist values, these Uncanny Stories – the first of two supernatural story collections – are a thrilling, familiar read, and yet a shocking departure from the genre as it was known, and makes for as compelling a read today as the day they were written.

[UK:] Renard Press | 208 pages
[US:] Alpha Editions | 190 pages

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The Bridegroom was a Dog by Yoko Tawada (1993)

Mitsuko, a schoolteacher at the Kitamura school, inspires both rumour and curiosity in the parents of her students because of her unconventional manner – not least when she tells the children the fable of a princess whose hand in marriage is promised to a dog she is intimate with. And when a young man with sharp canine teeth turns up at the schoolteacher’s home and declares he’s ‘here to stay’, the romantic – and sexual – relationship that develops intrigues the community, some of whom have suspicions about the man’s identity and motives.

[UK:] Granta Books | 96 pages | translated by Margaret Mitsutani
[US:] New Directions | 64 pages | translated by Margaret Mitsutani

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The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.

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And finally, on Thursday 1 May this week we’ll be discussing the brilliant A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr at the monthly classics book club I host at Hatchards, the oldest bookshop in the UK. If you can get to London, you’d be very welcome to join us.

Penguin Modern Classics | 128 pages | introduced by Penelope Fitzgerald

The details are here. Tickets are £5 if you have a free Hatchards Reward Card.