Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without

by Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey, Charles Osborne

Focuses on the flaws in fifty works regarded as classics and discusses the way in which they hinder the appreciation of more important writings

Genres: Nonfiction, Books About Books, Humor, Essays, Literary Criticism, Literature

160 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1967

About the author

Brigid Antonia Brophy, Lady Levey (12 June 1929, in Ealing, Middlesex, England – 7 August 1995, in Louth, Lincolnshire, England) was an English novelist, essayist, critic, biographer, and dramatist. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists since 1960, S. J. Newman described her as "one of the oddest, most brilliant, and most enduring of [the] 1960s symptoms."

She was a feminist and pacifist who expressed controversial opinions on marriage, the Vietnam War, religious education in schools, sex (she was openly bisexual), and pornography. She was a vocal campaigner for animal rights and vegetarianism. A 1965 Sunday Times article by Brophy is credited by psychologist Richard D. Ryder with having triggered the formation of the animal rights movement in England.

Because of her outspokenness, she was labeled many things, including "one of our leading literary shrews" by a Times Literary Supplement reviewer. "A lonely, ubiquitous toiler in the weekend graveyards, she has scored some direct hits on massive targets: Kingsley Amis, Henry Miller, Professor Wilson Knight."

Brophy was married to art historian Sir Michael Levey. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1984, which took her life 11 years later at the age of 66.

Reviews

[Jola · Rating 2 out of 5]

FIFTY SHADES OF ANNOYANCE

EXPECTATIONS:
A hilarious and thought-provoking literary jest.

REALITY:
A heavy-handed and irritating provocation.

CONCLUSION:
We are not amused.
In particular, we are not amused by some jokes and metaphors in Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without (1967). Three examples to give you a feel of Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey and Charles Osborne’s sense of humour:

• Whitman is a garrulous old bore.
• Hopkins’s is the poetry of a mental cripple.
• Galsworthy appeals to the shallowest emotions, the tears of a spinster at a stranger’s wedding

There are at least fifty reasons why we could do without Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without but let’s limit to ten:

I. A big part of the book was written in unbearably portentous, pseudo-academic style, with Oedipus complex as an overused skeleton key.

II. Although Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey and Charles Osborne appear to be linguistic purists – for example they are disgusted by Hemingway who omitted an 'l' in sorella – I came across a few typos in their book.

III. I find it strange that none of the three authors discovered a single positive thing in the discussed works.

IV. The foundation of these essays is quite weird: according to the authors, The critic who lets you know that he always looks for something to like in works he discusses is not telling you anything about the works or about art; he is saying ‘see what a nice person I am’. Well, if we take their philosophy for granted, Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey and Charles Osborne are not telling us anything about the fifty books; they are saying ‘see what rude people we are’.

V. I doubt if the authors actually read some of the books they smash to pieces, as a few arguments they come up with seem to be just made up to arouse a flutter of excitement. I think that even the readers who detest Jane Eyre will be surprised by the authors’ statement that reading this novel is like gobbling a jarful of schoolgirl stickjaw. So much sweetness in Jane Eyre, really? I dare to differ.

VI. Some opinions are simply dogmatic. No room for discussion left when someone announces: The Bride of Lammermoor is the small heap of sawdust or Wuthering Heights is high old rumbustious nonsense.

VII. The authors frequently judge writers, not their books, for instance, in their opinion, William Faulkner was nothing more than a vain and humourless purveyor of turgid Southern tosh.

VIII. Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without makes you feel uneasy, as if you were witnessing an act of vandalism and could do nothing about it.

IX. Even the title of this book sends arrogant vibes.

X. How come the authors with their know-it-all-about-literature attitude are almost completely forgotten now? Quite contrary to the books they ridiculed.

There were some interesting passages in this collection of essays and I enjoyed looking at the literary canon from a different perspective. Nevertheless, I did not like Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without. Of course the authors’ right to genuinely hate the fifty books is undeniable and that is not where the shoe pinches. I just cannot stand unfair generalizations and impertinence, that is all.


Jonathan Wolfstenholme

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Obviously I give this 5 stars because short, unfair reviews are the best and most decent form of writing in all of literature.

Credit for this volume is actually shared 3 ways between Brigid Brophy, Michael Levey and Charles Osborne, who supplied a third each. They don't get individual credits but I suppose a rigorous close reading would show stylistic and critical similarities. I think it's a safe bet that whoever wrote "Defoe-Fielding-Smollett constitute English Literature's belt of Stockbrokers' Georgian." (review of "Moll Flanders") is also the same socially-conscious author who sneers at "The Moon And Sixpence" that Maugham has "a window-dresser's idea of elegance, and a shop assistant's concept of romance... admirable middlebrow stuff, ideally geared to the demands of the stockbroker who likes to parade his literacy but has no taste for literature". Equally, the strident disdain for religion in its different manifestations (York Mystery Plays, "Pilgrim's Progress", Newman's "Dream Of Gerontius") is wearily consistent and repetitive in its dismissal of the whole business as immature and meaningless, and becomes completely pointless when Gerard Manley Hopkins is dispatched in less than a page that was hardly worth the bother. I should think Brigid Brophy is the reviewer concerned to condemn Aldous Huxley as a superficial 6th-former, since I know she also wrote a review of B.S.Johnson & Zulfiker Ghose's "Statement Against Corpses" that condemned it as "jejune" and sixth-formerish. Of course the fidgety self-consciousness about adolescents is very adolescent, and nothing could be more jejune than writing glib reviews. See how easy it is to turn "clever" things around.

This is a book that belongs in a world where English Literature (as an abstraction, and an academic department) was structured around a belief in a canon of excellence, or at least historic importance. It doesn't challenge that idea, just its application. Nowadays we seem to have Eng.Lit. graduates who've hardly read anything except a pick'n'mix from the last 200 or so years. Some of the targets are already slipping out of sight - does anyone except specialists still read George Moore or Francis Thompson? Oliver Wendell Holmes is only mentioned because of his inexplicable persistence in Everymans Classics. So this is now a curiosity that tells us mostly what Educated People were expected to have read or at least heard about, as late as 1969. Various magazines and papers have run "Brought To Book" features in a similar vein over the years, this may have been their inspiration.

[Elizabeth · Rating 1 out of 5]

Don't waste your time with this. If you have two neurons to rub together, you'll be better off on your own than following the guidance of the authors of this monstrosity. (See, Brigid? I, too, can be rude and dismissive about a book without actually offering a cogent reason why it's so bad!) For an honest review, read on.

I don't usually mind books that disagree with the masses. I know how difficult it can be to dislike something that is widely held to be classic. (Check out my review of Grapes of Wrath for an example.) And there ARE parts of this book that do that, and that do it well. The chapter on Hamlet, for instance, explains certain areas in which the play doesn't live up to Shakespeare's usual standard of excellence. It doesn't claim that Hamlet is bad, as much as it claims that some other plays are better. Why is this one particular work so highly praised? And, whether you like Hamlet or hate it, their logic makes sense.

Unfortunately, most of the rest of the book does not take the time to present a careful argument for the works the authors are disparaging. In order to justify the lack of quality of an acclaimed work, it is necessary to demonstrate an understanding of that work, and most of the reviews here left me questioning that the authors even understood the point. The argument against The Scarlet Letter, for instance, hinges almost entirely on the assumption both the author and the story's narrator are condoning the harsh judgments of the Puritans and taking their "side" against Hester. The book, then, becomes a celebration of one woman's punishment. This is ridiculous. For one thing, limiting a book—any book—to one single true "meaning" will usually backfire. Basing that one meaning entirely on an imagined view of authorial intent is dangerous, and it assumes that the work of literature can't stand up on its own merit. Furthermore, The Scarlet Letter lends itself to many sympathetic readings of Hester's character. By the end of the novel, Hester has "won": the Puritans don't want her to wear the letter because it shames them, not her; and she has raised her daughter up out of a powerful stigma and set her up as an independent, wealthy, and respected member of society. Different critics have analyzed this book in different ways over the years, but here's a sampling: Feminist critics have interpreted this story as a woman's ultimate triumph over a system that fails to ruin her. Structuralists have compared Hester's honesty, penance, and subsequent redemption to the ruination that Dimmesdale experiences through his silence. Theorists exploring the psychoanalytic elements have reviewed the mother-daughter relationship in all its subtlety. Fifty Works's abrupt dismissal of any complexity that Hawthorne may have shown is puzzling, as is their connection between The Scarlet Letter and married American men today who ogle other women. (How is that relevant?)

I would have thought that the authors of this book simply didn't understand American literature, except that they are just as clueless about English works. Just because something went over their heads doesn't mean it has no value. I was especially disappointed with their dismissal of older works simply on a basis of their age. They seem to dismiss older works as being primitive just because they're old. They don't (or can't) demonstrate how these works miss the mark, but that doesn't stop them from similarly dismissing the people who made these older literary offerings as incapable of understanding complex ideas. Oh, the irony.

[John Pistelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wanted to read this 1967 book after reading about it on Anthony's blog, and now, after having it shipped from the obscure storage facility where it resides to my main library, I have. The authors—English writer Brigid Brophy; her husband, the art historian Michael Levey; and the little-known John Osborne ("Assistant Literature Director of the Arts Council in England," says the jacket copy)—set out undo the "injustice done alike to great authors and to the public" when inferior work is passed off as great for no other reason than custom to the unsuspecting pupil. They allow "that about taste there is no absolute arbitrating," but their 50 entries offer reasoned arguments and imply standards immanent to what they regard as the best of the tradition. Furthermore, they pronounce their efforts harmless since they do not "exercise the tyrannical power of the magistrate" who orders obscene materials destroyed. Their avowed iconoclasm is of a purely metaphorical variety. So, confining themselves to the English language—hence they include American but not translated literature ("That is why the Bible is not listed")—and to 50 works, they set out to fulfill Eliot's mandate for criticism (which they do not cite): "the correction of taste."

What do Brophy et al. have against these 50 works? Moreover, can we discern any patterns in their judgments?

The strongest comprehensive argument the authors make in this various book is against revering the old merely because it is old. At the beginning of their entry on the York Mystery Plays (I have never had the pleasure myself, but I think I got the gist from Grant Morrison's neglected graphic novel):

Yet too frequently we value the older above the newer for no better apparent reason than that it has lasted longer. This is a peculiar characteristic of the English temperament. How reverently we gaze at any Gothic cathedral: how perplexed and untempted we are by the glitter of Baroque. How stirred by Gregorian chant: how unmoved by the more sophisticated art of Handel. Yet, in the centuries between Gregorian chant and Handel, between Gothic and baroque [sic], the arts of music and architecture made tremendous leaps forward in technique and complexity. It can only be this absurd nostalgia for the remote past, this mindless yearning towards primitivism, towards the time when art was so simple it was not art, which is responsible for the modern interest in and production of the various cycles of mystery plays which flourished in medieval England.

And some of their best polemics are against writers who may possess a certain historical importance, because they were the first to invent a genre or a style, but who are nevertheless by our standards lethally dull (hence their argument that Beowulf is "a fine example of primitive non-art" canonized only to provide "some respectable pseudo-Homeric epic from which to make Northern literature evolve").

I nodded in agreement with their mockery of the pioneering but plodding fiction of Defoe, Fielding, and Scott, fiction so verbosely narrated, so lacking in vivid imagery and drama, that it really is a godawful chore to read. (Really, couldn't we do without the eighteenth-century novel almost in toto, with the possible exceptions of Swift and Sterne [who ought, as Joyce once noted, to have exchanged names]?)

They also assail books that are over-praised but far from their writers' best works, such as Hamlet and The Pickwick Papers. Of the former, they intriguingly note that "the play is the prototype of western literature's most deplorable and most formless form, autobiographical fiction," and call for more study and performances of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Antony and Cleopatra in lieu of the more famous tragedy (I myself might vote for Twelfth Night and The Winter's Tale, but I take the point).

Not only does Brophy—a secularist, humanist, and feminist—argue against the dictation of taste by custom, but she and her collaborators also despise anything that smacks of primitivism or antiquarianism. This is the basis on which they skewer authors as diverse as Spenser, Twain, and Lawrence. This book's artistic touchstones, against which other authors are judged and found wanting, are Donne and Pope in poetry and Austen, Eliot, and James in fiction. (Readers familiar with the history of literary criticism might think they spy the shade of Dr. Leavis hovering between the lines.) In short, they favor the urbane literature of civilization as against the arts of the volk or, even worse, the arts of urbane and civilized writers who don weeds and rags to pretend to be of the volk.

(Politically, this attitude is a double-edge sword: if you apply it to your own tradition, you seem impeccably progressive, but if you apply it to someone else's—especially a tradition that has been oppressed in some way by the West—then you appear to be a condescending imperialist. This apparent contradiction allows us to forget that the primitivist denunciation of European civilization and the white male in the name of primal values was codified in literature and philosophy by European white males.)

Brophy et al.'s anti-primitivism campaign triumphs in this book's single best essay, a funny but judicious demolition of Wordsworth's meretricious doggerel about the daffodils, a poem I have myself always loathed. They use "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" as a case study of Wordsworth's work as a whole, where phony and ill-written anti-intellectual pastoralism alternates with sublime, Latinate, Miltonic rhetoric; this latter strain they view as in line with Wordsworth's actual gift, whereas his Marie-Antoinette-playing-peasant routine they see as both risible and pernicious:

And indeed it in this poem that Wordsworth explicitly enunciates his gospel of philistinism, the great anti-thought trademark he set on English life forever after. He damns 'intellect' as 'meddling,' dismisses the leaves of books as 'barren'….exclaims (could a town councillor voting against a grant for the symphony orchestra have done better?) 'Enough of Science and of Art'….The tragedy of all this is that it's untrue not only to human nature, but to Wordsworth's poetic nature…For the talent Wordsworth mortified and martyred to a doctrinaire simplicity is that of one of English literature's supreme rhetoricians. The reason Wordsworth writes of daffodils and clouds as though he had never really set eyes on either of them is that he is an essentially baroque artist, to whom flowers are invisible unless transmuted into precious metal and to whom clouds are merely what sweep apparitions down on the astounded beholder.

As implied by this critique, in which Wordsworth is praised or damned based on any given poem's distance or proximity to an ideology the authors dislike, a faith that aesthetic and moral judgments can be made in tandem animates this whole book:

For, morality being a mere branch of aesthetics, no book that is morally so warped [as The Pilgrim's Progress] can in any real sense be aesthetically satisfying.

This is a view that has more in common with Wordsworth's dancing heart than with Donne's brain-twisting paradoxes. That art and morals could align so neatly is the perennial dream of Platonists, priests, and politburos, but history gives no evidence in its favor. The moral premises the Homeric epics were based on are long dead, but it seems as if a new translation of the Iliad comes out every year. Someone finds it aesthetically satisfying, since, aside from historical and archaeological interest, there is really no other reason to read it.

The authors' moral judgments lead them astray more than once, as when they derogate Wuthering Heights as "both the first and the meatiest morsel in the long, broad tradition of melodramatic daydreams concocted often by, and always to satisfy the appetites of, women wailing for their demon lovers." While I certainly have no time for that consumerist school of feminism that celebrates whatever bilge teenage girls happen to like just because teenage girls like it, any half-sentient critic should be able to tell the difference between trashy romances and Wuthering Heights, perhaps the most perfectly constructed novel in the language and a brilliant metafictional commentary on the fate of fictional prose narrative itself as it moves from Gothic romance to social realism. Anyway, the authors must have missed the part where Heathcliff cruelly mocks Arabella for mistaking Wuthering Heights for the kind of novel Brophy et al. think it is:

'She abandoned [her home and family] under a delusion,' he answered; 'picturing in me a hero of romance, and expecting unlimited indulgences from my chivalrous devotion. I can hardly regard her in the light of a rational creature, so obstinately has she persisted in forming a fabulous notion of my character and acting on the false impressions she cherished.'

Jane Eyre is a safer target, of course; whatever the merits of its symbolism and style, it is a wish-fulfillment fantasy, and the authors are very funny about the derivative nature of the Gothic elements, showing (but only after quoting a critic on the novel's originality) that Brontë has borrowed a supernatural set-piece whole cloth from Moll Flanders. Yet the authors might have had the decency to mention that Brontë followed Jane Eyre with Villette, a masterful psychological study that is a major advance on the earlier novel—and which absolutely bears comparison with the best of Dickens and Eliot.

The inclusion of American literature was probably a mistake, as these partisans of Henry James (whom I love, by the way) have a tin ear for the main national tradition, as described by Lawrence in his Studies in Classic American Literature:

The furthest frenzies of French modernism or futurism have not yet reached the pitch of extreme consciousness that Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman reached. The European moderns are all trying to be extreme. The great Americans I mention just were it. Which is why the world has funked them, and funks them to-day.

These modern Europeans think extremity a kind of sham, and so they go on funking our great writers. A not totally implausible feminist critique of The Scarlet Letter goes off the rails when, after misjudging the narrator's wry tone, they bizarrely pronounce Hawthorne's historical romance "without irony"—irony might as well have been Hawthorne's middle name! Their assault on Moby-Dick is philistinism itself:

Many novelists have tried to anticipate the critic's task by writing both narrative and a commentary alongside it pointing out the deeper beauties, profundities, and significances of the narrative. Melville alone has supplied the commentary without supplying the narrative.

This reminds me of those one-star Amazon reviews they're always compiling at Biblioklept: "Throughout the book, you may read one chapter with some action only to be followed by 5 or 6 chapters of tangents that are not necessary to understand the story."

With Whitman, the limits of their standard midcentury Freudian moralism come to the fore, as they pathologize his poetry as merely an effusion from the closet, while they are scandalized at Faulkner's cynicism and pompositiy (about the latter, they have a point; about the former, they sound merely pious). Their argument against Huckleberry Finn, a flawed novel by any standard, is more compelling ("It is a vision which can be achieved only by that ruthless dishonesty which is the birthright of every sentimentalist") and they score a few good points on Hemingway, mentioning both his debts to Stein and his ingratitude for them, but if Hemingway was overvalued in the midcentury, the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that these days it might be worthwhile to recover his virtues. (And why did they excuse Poe from their animadversions—Poe, of whom Harold Bloom commented that he was beloved in France because he benefitted from translation and would further benefit from being translated into English?)

Their distaste for religious art of all sorts is sometimes bracing—they are very funny on Bunyan—but their peremptory dispatch of Hopkins is merely insensitive (in the aesthetic, not the political, sense); read the man's poems aloud and you won't care what he believed. Their pronouncement against Rupert Brooke's patriotic verse is homophobic by contemporary standards—"The moral is plain: Don't go in for flag-waving if you're limp-wristed"—but a serious warning against overcompensating for one's own internalized social shame lurks under the ugly formulation (which reminded me, by the way, of Gore Vidal's quip about George W. Bush: "Give a sissy a gun and he'll kill everything in sight").

We are already doing without many of the book's targets—The Essays of Elia, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Lorna Doone, Esther Waters, South Wind, and more. At least one of the now-rarities they scorn perhaps deserves to be revived: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's novel-poem Aurora Leigh, now read only by feminist Victorianists. The Victorianisms Brophy et al. mock in it are no less glaring than are their own now obvious twentieth-century biases, and its defense of the modern epic as realist novel is seemingly in line with their own values.

Their dismissal of To the Lighthouse sums up most of this book's themes: they judge Woolf imprecisely poetic when she should be vividly narrative, a primitivist of the commonplace mind rather than an original thinker, and a university-ready digest of better and tougher writing:

To compare the results with James or Proust would only occur to the Eng. Lit. mind, always timid before the vigour of real art and always happiest with genteel diluted versions of it. Virginia Woolf's is a supreme example of the non-art that is at the same time inevitably (for the art v. life dichotomy is a false one) devoid of vitality.

Even those of us who believe in the possibility, however remote, of authoritative aesthetic judgment as opposed to today's soppy populist relativism (which only lines the pockets of the money-men) will have to allow that there are more things in literature than are dreamt of in Brophy and her collaborators' philosophy.

All in all, this book is a fascinating and entertaining curio, as much the limited product of its time it accuses some of its targets of being, but fun and briskly written. It is a minor entry in the tradition of viciously witty and plain-spoken British criticism that runs from from Hazlitt to Wilde and on through such twentieth- and twenty-first century figures as George Orwell, Rebecca West, Christopher Hitchens, and Martin Amis.

Finally, for the curious, here is a photo of the entire table of contents:

[Christopher (Donut) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have not justified my four-star rating. I can't even remember which books are on the list, but while researching that (and let me get back to you..), I did find a contemporary pan, or slating, in the Spectator archives:

... The authors' depreciations are similarly devoid of critical content. They claim in their `address' to be fighting to challenge, against `the whole weight of received opinion,' the views that `force our children into philistinism.' But Fifty Works—an exhibitionistic pseudo-Shavian joke that has gone absurdly wrong, owing to the authors' humourlessness, casually sketchy knowledge of their subject-matter and refusal to think hard—is in itself aggressively philistine. It is boorishly intolerant without being original or witty; it sets out to destroy `received opinion' without knowing or understanding it; it disguises a set of private prejudices and opinions as a critical view of English Literature; it is ill-mannered and its bad taste is dreary, unredeemed by brilliance or any of the insights of eccentricity. Usually the authors are content with straightforward abuse, couched in hackneyed terms. Whitman is `a garrulous old bore,' in which `le style is undoubtedly l'homme: Favoured adjectives are `stuffiest,' `worthless,' awful' and `unspeakable.'

So check THAT out:

http://archive.spectator.co.uk/articl...

As best I can remember, the books on the list broke down fairly evenly into ones I liked, ones I hated, and ones I didn't care about. The concept is a good one. I remember a book of 'least favorite classic albums' called Kill Your Idols: A New Generation of Rock Writers Reconsiders the Classics, in a similar vein.

Thanks to whoever for photographing the table of contents:

[Tra-Kay · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is both hilarious and unfortunately outdated. I had read only about five of the books discussed, and was familiar enough with only about half of the authors to understand the criticisms against them. "The Alchemist" by Ben Jonson, "She Stoops to Conquer" by Oliver Goldsmith, etc....what ARE these things?

Yet it's very worth looking up if you don't get what all the fuss is about, or outright despise, an author or work it contains. The humorous criticisms can be great fun even if you love something they've chosen. I laughed out loud upon seeing that the first work listed is Beowulf; I couldn't have been more surprised if they listed Shakespeare himself - and they DO (well, Hamlet, for its disproportionate fame). Criticism of Peter Pan ruffled my feathers, but I survived to tumble into laughter over the brilliant parody of my beloved Virginia Woolf.

Are the authors right about all or most of these things? ~shrugs~ Take care not to either get too riled up about their attacks or to take them too much to heart. They have a curious way of saying things that are both perfectly true and perfectly irrelevant (for example, Woolf's writing is more eloquent and touching than the thoughts of anyone I'VE encountered, even though it may read like "mere" thoughts).

This is above all a comedy book: a way of stickin' it to the droning teachers who made you read what you despised, or an answer to the literary community's adoration of a work you just don't think is that great. As the authors themselves put it, "In a sense, the first (if not necessarily the prime) function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain." If you like a book sincerely, that's really all that matters.

[Bonnie Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a gem - literary criticism that made me laugh so hard that tears were literally running down my face.

On Whitman: "What is one to make of this garrulous old bore?"

On Woolf's characters: "They constantly exclaim about being alive - perhaps nagged by some doubt on the subject."

On Walter Scott: "a writer who ... describes events only with the desperate phrase that they 'surpass description.'"

Published in 1968, the authors take on works that they tell us were "revered or treated as required reading ... in current 'guides' meant for the general public." Many of these works are so obscure that I'd never heard of them when I first read this around 1980, and I have no doubt are even more forgotten now. But many are still part of our academic and even general culture.

Of course there is great satisfaction in seeing novels and poems that one detested so thoroughly skewered. On my own list, in addition to the above, there's Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Huckleberry Finn, Wordsworth's "Daffodils" and Eliot's "Wasteland" - and plenty more. But I don't think one would have to agree with every word to enjoy these reviews. After all, I did enjoy "Jane Eyre" - though I think the fact that I was about thirteen at the time explains that.

I am not a literary scholar and sometimes don't even follow some of the critiques, but most of these reviews are quite straightforward and accessible to any reader. Even some reviews of works I'd never heard of still made me laugh.

Four stars only because so many of the reviews are of works that I'm pretty sure have long since been forgotten everywhere except in obscure doctoral dissertations somewhere or another.

[Lise · Rating 1 out of 5]

The authors are either very ironic or very stupid.

[Adam Stevenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the playful antagonism of this book and engaged with it by debating their views of eighteenth century writers.

Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

The first eighteenth century work given the Fifty-Works etc treatment, it starts off by comparing Defoe-Fielding-Smollett as a housing estate of red brick, solid buildings, something unexceptional but functional. Then it argues that Moll Flanders is not particularly functional, containing the “thinnest trickle of narrative”. It says that although the novel catalogues the events with nothing left out, nor does it “put anything in” with a sense of morality and characterisation that is “stunted”. It describes his prose as “clean” but “inept to novels, since it swallows all the vividness of what it recounts into itself”. The section on the book I sonly a page and a half long, given poor old Defoe short shrift.

To be honest, I’d agree with the criticisms of Moll Flanders and of Defoe in general. I’ve said myself that his journalistic training and journalist’s prose are very good at reporting processes (like Robinson Crusoe’s house, or Moll’s own stealing) but less successful at conveying emotion. In my video on the ITV drama of Moll Flanders, starring Alex Kingston, I said that the real benefit of the screen adaptation was to dramatise the emotion that a reader of the book has to imply. However, there is a case that Defoe’s emotional flatness gives space to the reader to ask what they would do in the circumstances. It also has to be remembered that one of Defoe’s big aims in his novels was verisimilitude, the flat, reporting style of them make them seem true - to such an extent that it can be hard to forget that Moll Flanders was not a real person. (I’ll be reading a very intriguing book about Moll Flanders soon).



Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

Now the iconoclastic thrupple go after my favourite novel. It starts off with a very long-winded paragraph describing a Kipling novel called Stalky & Co, in which a boy feels like something less because he isn’t sporty like the titular Stalky. It suggests that Tom Jones has been popular for years because it stands as the one example of a book that isn’t wet and weedy, “Tom Jones has become the accepted epitome of red-bloodedness.”

They agree that the book Tom Jones is vigorous, but that Tom himself isn’t. He’s a “tom cat of remarkable passivity”, who is more flirted with than flirting. But that’s okay, his blankness is typical picaresque stuff, it must be the adventures that are vigorous. The gang argue that the adventures aren’t, just a series of bed-hopping and bonks on the head. They also say that the other characters aren’t all that interesting, that they all have their one thing, something it calls a “sandwich-flag system”, presumably that the flag allows you to know exactly what the sandwich is.

Brophy and co claim the vigour of the book all comes in the narrator, a narrator who they say doesn’t really want to narrate, writing introductory material right up to the end. They say Fielding isn’t all that bothered telling the story, presenting the actual events in a “clerk of the court way”, that is might not be “quite as dull” as Moll Flanders, but goes on twice as long. They say the book doesn’t convey the sights and smells of eighteenth century Britain, and that Fielding as narrator spends the whole time convivially slapping you on the back, leaving the reader, “as aching and bruised as they would have been had they spent the time playing rugby.”

As much as I love Tom Jones, I have to agree that he is a weaker element of the book. He does the job fine, but he is a little bit of a blank slate for the reader. I whole-heartedly disagree that the side-characters aren’t brilliant though. Squire Western might not be a complicated man, but he is a fun one to be with, enlivening any scene he is in. As is his sister, as is Honore the maid, or Partridge, or any number of the folk in the book. I think Sophia is a character that a reader can genuinely fall in love with, possessing a fascinating range of emotions and ending the book on her own terms. If they are a little simplistic, they are in the way that Dickens would later make his characters, and they are vigorous and memorable for that simplicity.

What’s more, I think the characterisation of Fielding’s narration completely wrong. How could they describe it as “clerk of the court”? There are whole chapters written purely ironically, there’s an arch play in every part of the book and the voice is what makes it truly compelling. Even the part they quote, which is intending to show Fielding’s bloodlessness is a beautiful play of mock heroic classical allusion and quotidian truth. I’m afraid the gleesome threesome are utterly off here.


She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith.

They start by referencing how Goldsmith himself was good with children. Then they say that this play is to facile for even the “most naive adults” who would not even find it “tolerable”. They then laugh at a professor in Leeds who called it timeless, which suggests to them, “how slowly things must move in Leeds”. They concur with Walpole that the play is stiff and contrived, clumsy and graceless.

The gruesome gang then go on to pick on Goldsmith himself. They say that at his heart there’s “an uncertainty about how to harness the creative power to any distinct purpose”. They say he dithers over whether to pick up a “scalpel or powderpuff”, never finding the right tool for the job, being torn between being Voltaire and Rousseau and so not really being anything.

They then talk about how likeable Goldsmith is as a person, that the play is as likeable, which is what makes it a poor work of art. They propose that while they want to keep him as a man-of-letters, it’s more generous to keep him and his life and to ditch his work.

I think they fundamentally misunderstand Goldsmith’s writing. It’s not that he dithers between his sharper Voltaire instincts and his softer Rousseau, it’s that he does manage to blend both within his writing. He was widely read in contemporary French literature (and often lifted parts wholesale) and I think was aware of mixing the biting and the stroking, often hiding one behind the other. His ability to write hurried Grub Street compilations that became standard works for centuries is a prime example of how well he could shape material for an audience. He’s more readable and likeable than many of his peers yet is able to slip in real jabs and ideas as well.

I think She Stoops to Conquer has rather dated though. He set out to write, and succeeded in writing a ‘laughing comedy’, there are funny bits in it but having seen a recent-ish production, it is a little creaky now. However, most comedy ages badly, and for it still to more-or-less work three-hundred years later is a sign of quality.

Yet, it’s not my favourite Goldsmith. I think he should definitely remain a standard man-of-letters but his reputation could stand on The Vicar of Wakefield and his essays, particularly The Citizen of the World. Perhaps this is just a me thing, I’m not sure how well those works would go down now, but I really think Citizen of the World is funny, representative of the time and even tells a pretty decent little story as well. She Stoops to Conquer may seem like a slight work, and Goldsmith a slight author, but we’d lose much without him.


The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Another writer they prefer for his personality than his writing, they say that the existence of The Rivals and School for Scandal would have been better as lost works. If they hadn’t survived, the writers argue, Sheridan could be hailed as the continuation of Congreve and the pointer to Wilde but as they stand, one is “clumsy and unconvincing” and the other is “neat and unconvincing”.

His big problem is that he aspired for jeux d’esprit but “tamed his jeux” until all that was left were “limp artefacts utterly lacking in esprit”. They say he was too timid and unwilling to offend that his “always tiny talent” was minimised into even less. They suggest that modern audiences are now robust enough for Congreve and Vanbrugh and no longer need this watered down version.

I can’t speak too much for Sheridan, I have read and seen both The Rivals and The School for Scandal and I like them both reasonably enough. Although I’ve read Congreve’s little novel, I’ve not read and seen his or Vanbrugh’s plays, so I couldn’t tell if Sheridan is simply a watered down version. What I do know, is that Sheridan borrowed many of his comic situations from his mother’s novel, and I plan to read that at some point.

It’s not that I take the remarks of Brophy, Levey and Osbourne too seriously, there’s is a fun game to play and I’ll have to think of fifty ‘classic’ works that I’d be happy to bin and why. I’m sure they had a great time writing this book and can imagine them in a pub, arguing over the choices and trying to top each other over who can say the rudest things. It is also funny how few of the books mentioned are still central pillars of literature, oddly I’ve put some things on my reading list because of the trashing they got in this.

[Karl Kraus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yeah, some of the selections seem a bit odd, or at least out of date; some of the targets are just too easy (e.g., the truly abominable *Beowulf*); and I suppose one should expect a bit of unevenness among the three authors. But even the wrongheaded critiques betray the thoughtfulness of the critic behind them. The essay on Hopkins, for instance, addresses head-on the utter mess that was that poet's psyche (without, strangely, identifying his guiltily homosexual nature in so many words), but fail to note that he somehow forced his neuroses into poetry that -- so rare in any Anglophone literature -- is actually worth reading out loud. The criticism of *Hamlet* faults the play for doing pretty much exactly what I imagine Shakespeare intended: to create a character that more or less forces all the others more or less up- or offstage. Nobody ever said that the emotional crises of someone who simply refuses to enter postadolescence are pleasant to observe!

And then there are those essays that are themselves so mercilessly on target, and so wittily formulated, that they more or less demand to be read out loud themselves. The dismissal of *Leaves of Grass* is laugh-out-loud funny; the dismissal of *A Farewell to Arms* exposes not only its author's inability to write, but ends with the observation, almost unique in Serious Criticism: "Did he have to attempt also the impossible task of proving he was more manly than she [Gertrude Stein, whose style he rendered imbecilic and then plagiarized] was?" *Lady Chatterley's Lover* is disposed of in three paragraphs, which seems about right. And a Citation for Bravery to the three for including *The Waste Land* (in particular for its Notes), written by one of the greatest poetasters of all time not named Cavafy; the essay ends with a brutally hilarious parody of the Eliot style that has to be read to be believed.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written at the time when the "great tradition" concept of English Literature was under attack, and before the gradual descent of literary criticism into banal relativism, this is very much a product of the swinging sixties, when all received opinion was under scrutiny.

A collection of very uneven and arbitrarily selected works of literature is the result. Some miss their mark by a long shot, others seem tetchy and subjective, others irrelevant today. But sometimes they score a direct hit. Whoever wrote the one on Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, got it spot on:

"But what is the artistic achievement of reducing human experience to the gossipy level of the shallowest layer of consciousness. We are all conducting Virginia Woolf novels inside ourselves all day long, thinking how the sunset clouds look like crumbling cheese, wondering why the dinner party guests don't go, puzzling about children growing up, noticing for the first time the colour of a bus ticket. This famed sensitivity is everyone's birthright...."

"Virginia Woolf has filled the novel with people as banal as (if not, indeed, much more banal than) ourselves."

I could not agree more.

Infuriating, challenging, confrontational, hilarious; Brigid Brophy (et. al.) at her best!

[Vicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delightfully funny take on many of those books they made us read to get a degree in English.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another book I read so I can send it away. When I first owned this, some 40 years ago, I found it offensive. Now, being more mellowed in my perspective, I found it fun. The reviews are short, funny (Beowulf), horrifyingly audacious (Hamlet), rigiht on the mark (Leaves of Grass), and often made me want to read the work (Pickwick Papers). You can still find fault with the analysis of these works of fiction, but I'm glad I gave this a second read.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Funny. Gives you the courage to disagee with the masses and write a book review against-the-grain with amusing style. Wish it could be updated to include modern hyperfiction works such as The Gold***** ... no need to mention any specific ones here.