The Age of Innocence (2 of 4), The Old Curiosity Shop (18 of 18) & The Catcher in the Rye
Carnality, clocks and canal boats
Dear classics reader,
In this week’s old Patroon house you will find:
A selection of forbidden love stories for Valentine’s Day;
Our final discussion of The Old Curiosity Shop – with a parting revelation from Master Humphrey;
The announcement of our monthly read-along for March;
Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”;
Birthday wishes to Georges Simenon;
The week’s new classics – including the breathtaking Queen by Birgitta Trotzig;
A preview of coming attractions;
And our second discussion of The Age of Innocence – with a note on Skuytercliff.
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Forbidden Love
Happy Valentine’s Day. Last year we marked the festival of love with a round-up of erotic classics. This year, with Wuthering Heights in cinemas (see below) and the fact that we’re halfway through The Age of Innocence (also see below) and we’re almost at the end of Anna Karenina, here is a round-up of ten forbidden love stories.
There was a rich field from which to choose – and lots of difficult omissions. I’ve opted for slightly less well-known titles, so I haven’t included several prime contenders, including Doctor Zhivago, Lolita, Madame Bovary and Thérèse Raquin, for example. I’d love to hear what else you think should be on this list!
Pleasure by Gabriele d’Annunzio (1889)
Like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Andrea Sperelli lives his life as a work of art, seeking beauty and flouting the rules of morality and social interaction along the way. In his aristocratic circles in Rome, he is a serial seducer. But there are two women who command his special regard: the beautiful young widow Elena, and the pure, virgin-like Maria. In Andrea’s pursuit of the exalted heights of extreme pleasure, he plays them against each other, spinning a sadistic web of lust and deceit.
[US] Penguin Classics | 384 pages | translated by Lara Gochin Raffaelli | introduced by Alexander Stille
Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane (1895)
Effi Briest is only seventeen when she is married off to Baron von Instetten, travelling to live with him in a provincial town on the remote Baltic coast of Prussia. He is twenty years her senior, an ambitious bureaucrat who is uninterested in his young wife, and lively Effi becomes increasingly isolated, bored and anxious in her stifling surroundings. A half-hearted affair with Major Crampas – a manipulative married man with a reputation for womanising – temporarily distracts Effi from her loneliness. But years later, this brief liaison will return to Effi with devastating consequences.
[UK / US] Pushkin Press Classics | 368 pages | translated by Hugh Rorrison & Helen Chambers
Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz (1960)
During the Second World War, two ageing intellectuals visit a country estate and amuse themselves by imagining a love affair between Henia, their hosts’ daughter, and Karol, the local administrator’s son; but their little game becomes increasingly bizarre and obscene. The novel is a fusion of pastoral romance, melodramatic farce, philosophical fiction, political thriller and murder mystery.
[US] Grove Press | 248 pages | translated by Danuta Borchardt | foreword by Sam Lipsyte
Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata (1949-52)
Kikuji has been invited to a tea ceremony by a mistress of his dead father. He is shocked to find there the mistress’s rival and successor, Mrs. Ota, and that the ceremony has been awkwardly arranged for him to meet his potential future bride. But he is most shocked to be drawn into a relationship with Mrs. Ota – a relationship that will bring only suffering and destruction to all of them.
[UK] Penguin Archive | 144 pages | translated by Edwin G. Seidensticker
[US] Vintage | 144 pages | translated by Edwin G. Seidensticker
Lady Macbeth of Mtensk and Other Stories by Nikolai Leskov (1865)
Nikolai Leskov is the strangest of the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century. His work is closer to the oral traditions of narrative than that of his contemporaries, and served as the inspiration for Walter Benjamin’s great essay ‘The Storyteller,’ in which Benjamin contrasts the plotty machinations of the modern novel with the strange, melancholy, but also worldly-wise yarns of an older, slower era that Leskov remained in touch with. The title story is a tale of illicit love and multiple murder that could easily find its way into a Scottish ballad and did go on to become the most popular of Dmitri Shostakovich’s operas.
[UK / US] NYRB Classics | 448 pages | translated by Robert Chandler, Donald Rayfield & William Edgerton | introduction by Donald Rayfield
Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers (1941)
Set on a Southern army base in the 1930s, Reflections in a Golden Eye tells the story of Captain Penderton, a bisexual man whose life is upset by the arrival of Major Langdon, a charming womanizer who has an affair with Penderton’s tempestuous wife, Leonora. Upon the novel’s publication in 1941, reviewers were unsure of what to make of its relatively scandalous subject matter. But a critic for Time magazine wrote, ‘In almost any hands, such material would yield a rank fruitcake of mere arty melodrama. But Carson McCullers tells her tale with simplicity, insight, and a rare gift of phrase.’
[UK] Penguin Modern Classics | 112 pages
[US] Mariner Books | 192 pages | afterword by Tennessee Williams
Forbidden Colours by Yukio Mishima (1951)
Written when Mishima was only twenty-six, Forbidden Colours is a depiction of a male homosexual relationship, in which a rich older man buys the love of a young man who is stunningly handsome but who lacks the ability to love. As in Mann’s Death in Venice, the older man’s longing for the beauty of youth is associated with aestheticism and death.
[UK] Penguin Modern Classics | 432 pages | translated by Alfred H. Marks
[US] Vintage International | 416 pages | translated by Alfred H. Marks
A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin (1954)
Beautiful, bored and bourgeoise, Sabina leads a double life inspired by her relentless desire for brief encounters with near-strangers. Fired into faithlessness by a desperate longing for sexual fulfilment, she weaves a sensual web of deceit across New York. But when the secrecy of her affairs becomes too much to bear, Sabina makes a late night phone-call to a stranger from a bar, and begins a confession that captivates the unknown man and soon inspires him to seek her out . . .
[UK] Penguin Modern Classics | 128 pages
[US] Swallow Press | 152 pages | introduced by Anita Jarczok
Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost (1731 / 1753)
Manon Lescaut is a tale of passion and betrayal, of delinquency and misalliance, which moves from early eighteenth-century Paris – with its theatres, assemblies, and gaming-houses – via prison and deportation to a tragic denouement in the treeless waste of Louisiana. It is one of the great love stories, and also one of the most enigmatic: how reliable a witness is Des Grieux, Manon’s lover, whose tale he narrates? Is Manon a thief and a whore, the image of love itself, or a thoroughly modern woman? Prévost is careful to leave the ambiguities unresolved, and to lay bare the disorders of passion.
[UK / US] Oxford World’s Classics | 155 pages | translated by Angela Scholar
The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet (1923)
In this novel of desire and perdition, a bored and precocious adolescent pursues the wife of a soldier fighting in the First World War. At first attracted to Marthe out of sheer aimlessness, he finds himself falling in love. Consumed by sensual pleasure and power games, the pair do nothing to disguise their affair – until the consequences of their heedlessness begin to unfold. This shockingly sexy novel rocketed its teenage author into overnight fame in the 1920s – and was all the more scandalous for being based on his life.
[UK] Pushkin Press Classics | 208 pages | translated by Christopher Moncrieff
[US] Melville House | 160 pages | translated by Christopher Moncrieff
The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.
The Old Curiosity Shop (18 of 18)
This month we’ve read ‘Chapter the Last’ and ‘Master Humphrey, from His Clock-Side in the Chimney Corner’ – our final instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop. Here are my closing thoughts on this strange, dark, brilliant novel.
How are you feeling at the end?
It’s been a pleasure reading The Old Curiosity Shop with you, in its original weekly instalments. I can’t believe we started ten months ago!
We are going to stop here, but Master Humphrey’s Clock continued, of course, and contemporary readers went on to enjoy Dickens’s next novel: Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty, which ran from 13 February until 27 November 1841.
So if you would like the full Master Humphrey’s Clock experience, you could now read Barnaby Rudge over the next forty-two weeks.
Here is the Penguin Classics cover and blurb:
Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens (1841)
Set against the backdrop of the Gordon Riots of 1780, Barnaby Rudge is a story of mystery and suspense which begins with an unsolved double murder and goes on to involve conspiracy, blackmail, abduction and retribution. Through the course of the novel fathers and sons become opposed, apprentices plot against their masters and anti-Catholic mobs rampage through the streets. With its dramatic descriptions of public violence and private horror, its strange secrets and ghostly doublings, Barnaby Rudge is a powerful, disturbing blend of historical realism and Gothic melodrama.
[UK / US] Penguin Classics | 800 pages | introduced by John Bowen
Like The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge concludes with a ‘Chapter the Last’, which was published in Master Humphrey’s Clock issue No. 87 on 27 November 1841.
The following Friday, 4 December 1841, saw the publication of Master Humphrey’s Clock No. 88, the last issue of the magazine, in which Master Humphrey bids farewell to his readers and the Deaf Gentleman adds an epilogue about the death of Master Humphrey himself.
Master Humphrey bequeaths his house to the Deaf Gentleman and Jack Redburn (who, it’s implied, is the fictional author of Barnaby Rudge), with the request that his room should be preserved in its accustomed state and his clock stopped.
After 88 weeks of writing to imminent weekly deadlines, you sense a note of relief in Dickens’s final sentence:
The chamber in which we have whiled away so many hours, not, I hope, without some pleasure and some profit, is deserted; our happy hour of meeting strikes no more; the chimney-corner has grown cold; and MASTER HUMPHREY’S CLOCK has stopped for ever.
Here are links to our previous Old Curiosity Shop posts:
The Schedule (14 March 2025)
Charles Dickens (28 March)
0. Forster’s Life of Dickens (4 April)
1. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.1 – and Gog and Magog (11 April)
2. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.2 – and G. K. Chesterton (18 April)
3. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.3 – and Edgar Allan Poe (25 April)
4. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.4 – and the Old Curiosity Shop (2 May)
6. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.6 – and St. Dunstan-in-the-West (16 May)
7. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.7 – and Jack Bamber’s Tale (23 May)
9. Chapters 6-8 – and Master Humphrey, from His Clock-Side in the Chimney Corner (20 June)
10. Chapters 9-16 – and Punch and Judy (18 July)
11. Chapters 17-24 – and Old Giants and Dwarfs (15 August)
12. Chapters 25-32 – and Jarley’s Wax-Work (12 September)
13. Chapters 33-39 – and Sampson and Sally Brass (10 October)
14. Chapters 40-47 – and the Black Country (7 November)
15. Chapters 48-55 – and Daniel Maclise (5 December)
16. Chapters 56-65 – and Quilp’s figure-head (9 January)
17. Chapters 66-72 – and the Death of Little Nell (6 February)
March’s read-along – The Catcher in the Rye
And as we finish The Old Curiosity Shop, I’m delighted to announce our next monthly read-along. Please join me in March to read J. D. Salingers’s cult classic novel, The Catcher in the Rye – which is 75 years old this year.
The Catcher in the Rye was first published in book form in New York on 16 July 1951 by Little, Brown and Company.
What is it?
Seventeen-year-old Holden Caulfield recalls the weekend after he was expelled from Pencey Preparatory Academy. He wanders around New York City at Christmas time, exploring his sexuality, buying records, getting drunk, despising ‘phoniness’ and worrying about the ducks in Central Park. The Catcher in the Rye was an instant success on first publication and remains the classic novel of teenage disaffection.
Why are we reading it?
This year marks 75 years since The Catcher in the Rye was first published, so we are celebrating its anniversary. It will also make a fascinating comparison to two other great American novels we have read recently and are reading – The Call of the Wild and The Age of Innocence – but most importantly we are reading The Catcher in the Rye because it’s a true classic: the definitive portrait of adolescent alienation and of the universal struggle against hypocrisy. The critic Adam Gopnik considers The Catcher in the Rye one of three perfect novels in American literature, alongside The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby.
Which edition should I read?
The Catcher in the Rye is published by Penguin in the UK and in the US by Back Bay, an imprint of Little Brown. Both publishers offer different editions
I will be reading this smart small-format UK edition:
There is also a larger UK paperback edition. The UK hardback and US paperback and hardback editions all replicate the original 1951 cover:
And Back Bay also published a stylish US paperback edition in late 2018 to mark Salinger’s centenary:
How will we read it?
The Catcher in the Rye is 230 pages (in my edition) and has 26 chapters.
I suggest we read it over three weeks:
We’ll start reading on Friday 6th March.
On Friday 13th March we’ll discuss Chapters 1-7;
On Friday 20th March we’ll discuss Chapters 8-16;
And on Friday 27th March we’ll discuss Chapters 17-26.
Then, if you’re near London, you’d be very welcome to book a ticket for our discussion of The Catcher in the Rye at the Hatchards Classics Book Club on Thursday 9 April.
We meet downstairs at Hatchards (187 Piccadilly) on the first Thursday of every month at 6.30pm – tickets cost £5 with a free Hatchards Reward Card and include a glass (or two) of wine. These book club events are not live-streamed, but afterwards I post a report of our discussion here on Substack.
Our weekly read-along discussions of The Catcher in the Rye will be for paid subscribers only. More details here.
If you – or anyone you know – would like to join this or future read-alongs, but can’t afford a paid subscription, just let me know and I’ll send a gift subscription.
If you buy a copy of The Catcher in the Rye through Bookshop.org (UK) or Bookshop.org (US), Read the Classics will earn a commission from your purchase. Thank you in advance for your support!
“Wuthering Heights”
In other news, Emerald Fennell’s film “Wuthering Heights” opens in UK and US cinemas today.
As I mentioned last week, I was lucky enough to watch a preview screening of this crazy, steamy, punked-up film and I loved discussing it on the Penguin Podcast with Harriet Evans and Rhianna Dhillon.
Our podcast conversation is out today! And it includes a conversation between Emerald Fennell and Rhianna. You can find it through Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever else you get your podcasts. I hope you enjoy the conversation.
And if you see the film, I’d love to hear what you think! I love Wuthering Heights and I’m also a big fan of Emerald Fennell’s work.
My recommendation would be to go into “Wuthering Heights” expecting an Emerald Fennell film, not an adaptation of the Emily Brontë novel. Fennell herself is explicit about it being ‘her version’ of the story – hence the quotation marks around the title – in fact, she specifically says she was trying to recreate her memory of the version she read as a fourteen-year-old – with all the elisions, additions and heightened sensibilities of a teenage reading.
The plot, characters and relationships have been changed, but the film is so zany, sexy and luxurious, you relax and stop worrying about that: I found myself simply enjoying the visual treat that Fennell has served up.
Happy Birthday Simenon
Today was also Georges Simenon’s birthday.
Simenon was born in Liège in Belgium. He left school at fifteen and took a job at the Gazette de Liège, where he accessed police investigations and attended lectures on criminology. He had his first novel published while still a teenager and went on to write hundreds of novels, many of which feature the detective Jules Maigret.
Simenon moved to Paris in 1922, where he fell in with artists, anarchists and petty criminals. He loved canals and lived for a while on a boat called Ostrogoth with his wife Tigy, his Great Dane Olaf and his housekeeper, cook and mistress, Henriette Liberge. Simenon married twice and had many affairs: in 1977, he told Federico Fellini that he had slept with 10,000 women. In 1952, he was elected to the Académie Royale de Belgique.
‘My motto, to the extent that I have one, has been noted often enough,’ he wrote. ‘It’s the one I’ve given to old Maigret, who resembles me in certain points [ . . . ] “understand and judge not”.’ The first Maigret novel was Pietr the Latvian (1930).
Pietr the Latvian by Georges Simenon (1930)
In Simenon’s first novel featuring Maigret, the laconic detective is taken from grimy bars to luxury hotels as he traces the true identity of Pietr the Latvian.
[UK] Penguin Modern Classics | 176 pages | translated by David Bellos
[US] Picador | 176 pages | translated by David Bellos
What’s new this week?
There were several new classics published this week, including visions of New York and New Delhi, a rural Icelandic valley and a coastal Swedish farm, missionaries in Mexico, nuns in Rome and an apocalyptic plague novel by Mary Shelley.
Death Comes to the Archbishop by Willa Cather (1927)
Death Comes for the Archbishop is the story of two missionary priests, travelling through the American Southwest in the aftermath of the Mexican American wars. Father Jean-Marie Latour and Joseph Vaillant spread Catholic faith and religious practices, convert and gather new souls, and discipline wayward priests. Their missionary journey takes them towards a greater understanding of the place and people they serve.
[UK / US] Oxford World’s Classics | 288 pages | introduced by Catherine Morley
The Way to Colonus: Sophocles Retold by Kay Cicellis (1961)
The Way to Colonos recasts three seminal plays by Sophocles into tales of modern women and warfare, probing their characters with savage intimacy. Antigone—a stylish woman in her thirties—wheeling her father, Oedipus, onto the ferry to Colonos, is disgusted by his self-absorption, guilt, and evasions. A suburban Electra dreams of a bloody confrontation with her mother, Clytemnestra, that may never come to pass. Philoctetes, a castaway soldier, navigates shifting allegiances in a guerrilla war that divided Greece after World War II.
[UK / US] McNally Editions | 192 pages | foreword by Rachel Cusk
Capital: The Eruption of Delhi by Rana Dasgupta (2014)
When Rana Dasgupta arrived in Delhi at the turn of the twenty-first century, he had no intention of staying for long, but the city beguiled him – he ‘fell in love and in hate with it’ – and fifteen years later, Delhi is still his home. Over these fifteen years, he has watched as the tumult of destruction and creation which accompanies India's economic boom transformed the face of the city. In Capital, he explores the life-changing consequences for Delhi’s people, meeting with billionaires and bureaucrats, drug dealers and metal traders, slum dwellers and psychoanalysts. These encounters, interwoven with over a century of history, plunge us into Delhi’s intoxicating, sometimes terrifying, story of capitalist transformation - one that has repercussions not only for India, but for everybody’s future.
[UK] Canongate Canons | 480 pages
[US] Penguin Books | 480 pages
There’s No Turning Back by Alba de Céspedes (1938)
The young women studying at the Grimaldi yearn for new kinds of life. Monitored by the nuns who run the college, eight of them form a close group, sharing confidences and hopes for the future. But each, too, has her private secrets – a child from an early love affair, frustrated artistic ambitions, burning desires and petty jealousies. With the passing months, their paths begin to diverge, as each woman struggles towards her own idea of freedom.
[UK] Pushkin Press Classics | 304 pages | translated by Ann Goldstein
[US] Washington Square Press | 304 pages | translated by Ann Goldstein
Godlike by Richard Hell (2005)
New York poet Paul Vaughn has a trick for enjoying poetry readings: he simply imagines the reader died a long time ago. Paul is twenty-seven, married, and an admired poet himself. R. T. Wode’s mission is to give offence. He’s also a poet, freshly landed in the city, and, at age sixteen, unknown. Paul worships T. They embark on a tempestuous affair, dropping acid and crashing parties and perambulating the grit and grime of New York City ca. 1972 in pursuit of experience that is the nourishment for art.
[UK / US] NYRB Classics | 160 pages | afterword by Raymond Foye
A Parish Chronicle by Halldór Laxness (1970)
1882. In the still of morning, Ólafur sharpens his scythe on the bone-dry pavestones that separate his farmhouse from the rest of Mosfell Valley, where life revolves around sheep. The sound of his hammer rings out like a high-pitched bell over the tussocky fields. Across the valley, perched on a hill that hoards more sunshine than others, stands Mosfell Church. Nearby, the parish priest’s maid Gunna pours her ‘slosh,’ a weak cup of coffee. Further afield in Reykjavík (‘down south’ as the locals say) the general assembly decides to revisit an old plan to cut costs by consolidating small parishes, and calls for the demolition of Mosfell.
[US] Archipelago Books | 120 pages | translated by Philip Roughton | introduced by Salvatore Scibona
The Last Man and The Journal of Sorrow by Mary Shelley (1822-6)
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley began writing her Journal of Sorrow (c.1822―6) three months after the devastating loss of her husband the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley to drowning. In the privacy of the diary’s pages, she grapples with her overwhelming grief over the tragic losses of her young husband, three of their children, and their friend the poet Lord Byron. Shelley ultimately resisted a suicidal depression by throwing herself into writing the allegorical plague novel and roman-à-clef, The Last Man (1826). Rooted in her own experiences of plagues both real and metaphorical, Shelley set The Last Man in the aftermath of a pestilential, centuries-long war between Greece and Turkey in the late twenty-first century.
[UK / US] Oxford World’s Classics | 592 pages | introduced by Eileen M. Hunt
Queen by Birgitta Trotzig (1964)
Judit is stubborn and singular, distant and unyielding. She is called Queen. Her realm is a windswept farm on a misty Swedish coastline. When she is nine, her dying mother places Judit’s brother Viktor in her arms, and the two are bonded for life. Together with their silent brother, Albert, they forge a precarious family. But Judit has her secrets; she dreams amidst the salt spray. And when Viktor emigrates to America, the ground beneath her feet forever shifts.
[UK] Faber & Faber | 160 pages | translated by Saskia Vogel | introduced by Sarah Moss
[US] Archipelago Books | 168 pages | translated by Saskia Vogel | afterword by Hanne Ørstavik
The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.
Coming Attractions
Future monthly read-alongs
For a sneak preview of our upcoming monthly read-alongs, you can take a peak here.
Our year-long read-along 2026
We are reading The Brothers Karamazov over the whole of 2026: twelve volumes in twelve months, January to December.
Join us! There’s still time to catch up. Here is the full reading schedule – and all our Brothers Karamazov posts will be gathered here.
We discussed Book One the other week – and our discussion of Book Two is next Friday 20 February.
All the Brothers Karamazov posts are accessible to all subscribers for free, but if you would like to view or contribute to the conversation in the comment sections, you will need a paid subscription.
As ever, if you – or anyone you know – can’t afford a paid subscription, just let me know and I’ll send a gift subscription.
Annual book subscription
And if you’re enjoying our read-alongs, why not treat yourself to the Hatchards Classic Book Club annual book subscription?
You (or a friend) can receive all the books we read each month here on Read the Classics, beautifully gift-wrapped and delivered to your door, anywhere in the world, as well as a year’s complimentary subscription to Read the Classics, so you can choose to read along with us, if you wish.
To find out more, follow this link or email Hatchards directly: subscriptions@hatchards.co.uk
The Age of Innocence (2 of 4)
And finally, this week we’ve read the rest of Book One of The Age of Innocence. Here are my thoughts:
