My Favourite Victorian Authors #victober

right so hello and welcome back to cut something and today I'm going to be talking about my favorite Victorian horses I did a video I think two years ago counting down my like top favorite Victorian novels and then last year I did a video counting down through all the 100 Victorian novels I've read from my least favorite to my favorite and but I realized I've never made a video talking about my favourite Victorian authors my favorite Victorian novels lists a most like slightly out of date I will make another favorite Victorian novels video at some point maybe next Victo burr but I feel like it hasn't changed enough for it to be worth me making one yet but I thought instead I would make a video about my favorite Victorian authors so I have six authors to talk to you about today my five favorite Victorian authors add a kind of honorable mention slasher author who I think will probably become one of my favorite authors so I thought I would go through these authors from sort of number six to number one and for each of them I would tell you about why I liked them as an author and then recommend my favorite novel by them and also a good place to start with their work if I feel like that is a different book to the book that is my favorite if that makes sense you may notice the absence of some authors on this list you might expect if I own this list for example thinking of Emily Bronte because weathering Heights is like in my top five favorite novel ever and I loved it a lot but I find it really hard to consider Emily Bronte a favorite author because she only wrote one book and while I liked her poetry a bit I don't adore her poetry and a model of Wuthering Heights hugely as a novel like I love it is a book rather than loving Emily Bronte as an author I mean obviously she wrote a book but I don't know if that makes any sense well Jess will go straight into the books number six on this list my honorable mention is George Gissing now George Gissing is an honorable mention rather than counted as one of my favorite Victorian authors because the only read three of his books and he wrote like 23 and while I have absolutely loved the three of his books that I've read I feel like a comedy class Ian was one of my favorite Victorian authors until I read a little bit more through the body of his work the rest of the five authors who are my top five four four of them I have read all of their novels and quite a lot of their rest of their shorter works and so on and one of them I've read like more than ten books I feel like I can say they're one of my favorite authors whereas George Gissing I feel like I just haven't read enough yet to make that judgement however I love George Gissing a lot he is an absolutely brilliant writer he is quite dark and quite bleak and quite gritty I think if you like Thomas Hardy you would like George Gissing because he is quite similar in terms of looking at kind of tragic situations and the ways in which people can get so close to being happy and not quite succeed and looking at kind of dysfunctional families and her the big issues of late Victorian society and how kind of social pressures can really crack families apart and really ruin people's lives the pressures of kind of class and gender and so many other things he's such a fascinating writer in many ways I consider George Gissing like the urban Hardy like Hardy who tends to writing about the working classes like Hardy he deals with a lot of tragic and difficult situations but like Harding his writing is beautiful his characters are realistic and fully formed and there are amazing seeds of beautiful love stories even if they don't always have happy endings as I said I have read three of his novels the netherworld new Grove Street and the odd woman I read them in that order my favorite of his novels is definitely the odd one which I absolutely loved the odd woman is a very feminist novel which is one of the reasons aren't many why I love it the title the odd women doesn't mean strange women it means odd as in left out not part of a pair it refers to the fact that in late Victorian Britain there were a lot more within the men which meant even more women than before were single and basically this book looks at what a single woman did in the 19th century having been brought up to be told that their purpose in life was to get married and have children what do you do if that's not what you're doing with your life and it looks like kind of women finding work and finding other happiness in life and looks at kind of a group of sisters and various other associated women it's absolutely incredible book this is my favorite one how I said it also I think what I would recommend starting with George Gissing although it's not what I've started I think because although it's not like a happy book it's still pretty grim in a lot of places because it is so kind of impassioned about female empowerment and emancipation I suppose that makes it a really like exciting and joyful read at times as well so although it's still quite dark it's not quite as grim as the netherworld and new Grove streets so yeah we're definitely recommend this I would definitely recommend George Gissing and number five or maybe a number for these two next authors are kind of joint fourth and fifth and I'm trying to work out right over the one I have placed it number four I've just placed there because they wrote more books I don't know I don't know anyway well there just doesn't matter still both two of my favorite authors and number five is the amazing Charlotte Bronte who I love a lot Charlotte Bronte was the author who got me into Victorian lists sure when I read Jane Eyre as a teenager and just completely fell in love with it and with her writing I love Charlotte Bronte a lot I think she is a really really brilliant writer I think she's very good that kind of get him to the heart of her characters I also think she draws very psychologically complex characters and deals quite a lot in her books what kind of loneliness and depression which i think is really really interesting and really read brilliantly done and she also tells brilliant and often surprising love stories often concerning people who are not conventionally attractive which is not that common in the Victorian period and very refreshing she also incorporates quite a lot of the Gothic in her work which i think is really really nice I really like that blend of like a gothic vaguely sometimes supernatural hinting themes with like realistic psychologically complex characters so my favorite Charlotte Bronte novel is Villette which I adore and I think is really like criminally underrated is such an amazing book there's about a young woman Lucy snow who goes abroad to Belgium to become a teacher and looks at her life and unrequited love and so many other things it's just always such it's such a powerful moving amazing book and I love it I really must reread it sometime and it's you're someone that was a little bit disappointed by Jane Eyre in some ways I would really recommend reading for that because it does something slightly different in a way that's really really good it's my favorite Charlotte Bronte novel but the place I would recommend starting with Charlotte Bronte is Jonah I think there is a reason why it has become so famous it is so readable so engaging suck see right in from the beginning and you know this is the book that got me into Victorian this show and I was 13 and I think it's a brilliant brilliant place to start or just with Charlotte Bronte but with Victorian this show because it does suck you in and you follow Jane from a child into her adore hood and there's mysteries and love stories and so much going on in there and Jane is such a compelling character and so relatable I also think Jane Eyre is like a brilliant book for teenagers and which I think I feel like I've said that before I mean got I love an unsent Alysha is actually because a lot of the heroes and heroines especially heroines of 19th century literature are people in their late teens and actually I do think like as a teenager I found it really really helpful especially really about someone like Jane Eyre who has like issues with confidence and things like that and but also at the same time as not thinking very much of herself also like declares her right to happiness and it's great it's so good so that's where I'd recommend starting with charlotte brontë but also Villette if you've read Jane Eyre for less awesome and I'm a full slash maybe at number five having just read about Charlotte Bronte I feel like maybe it belongs to number five but at number four slash number five is Thomas Hardy who I do love a lot Thomas Hardy is a brilliant brilliant novelist there are so many things I love about his work a lot of people say well they laugh about Hardy if the way he writes about a landscape that nature I am not too fussed by the way he writes about landscapes in nature don't get me wrong it's very beautiful but I've never been that interested in like depictions of landscape there's just not something in books that really appeals to me but the way that he writes about how landscape affects people that's what I'm into in Hardy and also the way that he broked about house in a Victorian society affects people how to kind of pressures of class and expectations the constrained nature of Victorian marriage and the way Victorian thinks that can have set some morality like it's so so interesting he deals with so many important themes in his books he wrote a lot of books 14 and I love nearly all of them they're a brilliant range of books dealing with so many amazing themes and there's something about some Hardy books which I find really hard to describe it's not all of them but some Hardy books just have this epic tragic amazing quality that just makes them like so emotionally powerful it's really hard to explain what I mean but he's just got that Hardy ethic thing which is great as I mentioned earlier with gifting Thomas Hardy can be quite dark but he's also a really really brilliant writer of amazing characters and brilliant love stories and even if not all the books have a happy ending I do think that all kind of superbly written and really really fascinating to read and he's certainly an author I would recommend my favorite Thomas Hardy is Gigi obscure which I absolutely love it's about a man called Jude who early in life kind of marries the wrong person and I kind of everything that goes on from there what happens when he then does meet the person who perhaps he would have been happier had he married and things kind of go on from there it's also about Jude's struggle to be educated he's born in a kind of working-class background but he early on in life discovers that he loves Latin and he loves reading and he loves literature and but he can't go to Oxford because he doesn't have any money and he just said Mason and it kind of looks at his struggles with his class it's an absolutely incredible book and one I love but I would not recommend it's a place to start with Hardy because it is perhaps the grimmest of all his books and this pretty it's pretty miserable but it's really really great and so I would recommend starting with Thomas Hardy is far from landing crowd which is a brilliant brilliant book about a woman called Bathsheba who inherits a farm and about her running that farm and about all the men who kind of slightly flock around her there is dark stuff in far from the madding crowd but in general it's not quite so heavy as a GP obscure way to slightly easy win to the tragic nature of a reading Thomas Hardy it's a brilliant brilliant novel and one I really really like Bathsheba is such a compelling character and yeah I would definitely recommend both of these at number three my third favorite Victorian author has got to be Anthony Trollope I love a speech on up a lot he is a brilliant brilliant writer so I read ten out of his forty seven novel so I have a long way to go but I've absolutely loved every single one that I've read and I think he is so so talented while I love the absurdity of Dickens that he'll get onto in a bit I love the realism of talent for me he is the Victorian writer who creates the most realistic characters like I read trollop and I'm like yeah I can imagine all these people I feel like they're all real and I think he does that so brilliantly especially considering he wrote so many books many of which had such vast cast of characters I love the way he looks at themes of religion and marriage and class and social difference and friendships and money and respectability and so many other things he is such a brilliant writer I also think he's one of those writers that writes brilliantly about people who have married the wrong people quite often people who have married people who they don't they're not really that suited to but they kind of have to go on with it anyway I think that's a feeling quite a few of his books do I think is really really well done I think he's such a fantastic author and definitely one I would recommend he also as well as many standalone novels wrote two series separate series of interconnected novels the bar such Chronicles and the palettes of novels which also do have some like overlapping characters between them and I love that like self-contained little world I guess a little bit Mike Hardy's Wessex but not just with places with characters there's something that I love about the way that Anthony Trollope has like crafted a whole county or a whole like system's whole new Victorian world in which all the characters Ingle it's just so rewarding my two favorite antique trauma books are the small house anton and the way we live now and i just i can't pick between them i love them both so much for very different reasons this is a book about a man called Mel Mott who turns up in London with a lot of money and no one really knows but he's got it from and everybody decided they would like to hang out with him because he has a lot of money and this is about two sisters who live in the small house and a new big house they don't have very much money and it's about their kind of relationships with men and in a kind of Sense and Sensibility ask away but better however I always find it really hard to know where to start without any trollop when people ask me I have a feeling there is a perfect novel to start on ask each other and I haven't read it yet but for now the place I started with actually tronic was I either the way they live now or I think more likely was he knew he was right because another really really brilliant ask me Trollope novel which looks at a couple who get married and soon after they get married the husband begin to kind of grow increasingly jealous and it looks at the effect that has on their married life the way we live now and he knew he was right a brilliant book really good places to start with Anthony Trollope except that they're both humongous like he knew he was right it's the size of this as well see if you would like to start with a slightly short time speech Allah I might recommend a Rachael Ray which is a really great love story and really enjoyable read and rather a lot shorter or you might want to start with the bar such Chronicles the small house Anton is the fifth book in the Bassets Chronicles by the way which is why I'm definitely not recommending you start there because I really strongly recommend that you read the passage of Chronicles in order the first few books are the warden and bastard settlers the warden is very very short however it is a lot about church politics if you think you might find it a little bit dry what I would recommend doing is reading the warden and Buster towers back to back and that's a really good place to start with trollop because they link very closely together and if you treat them effectively as if they're one book read them back to back I think that will firmly get you into trollop so anyway next author my second favorite Victorian author and my second favorite author of all time probably I think she does just about most of the time be Jane Austen is Elizabeth Gaskell who I think is absolutely incredible she's a brilliant brilliant writer and really really varied as well as her main novel she also wrote a lot of short stories and across her book she writes gothic fiction and industrial novels and novels set in rural Midlands she writes beautiful love stories and books about murder and like such a reign she sits a brilliant multifaceted talented author and it absolutely absolutely cannot recommend her work enough I love her writing style I find it like so warm and engaging and interesting and so funny at times and I think she I guess maybe maybe as much as trollop she creates really fully flare to realistic characters that you really do believe him I love the way as well she looks at what it's like to be a kind of young woman in Victorian society growing up and the kind of pressures on you I think she examines families absolutely brilliantly the relationships between parents and children and siblings so so well she also writes wonderfully about religion and morality and changes and viewpoints about industrialization and strokes and workers and the difficulties of working classes in cities in the nineteenth century like she searched a talented talented author and I just I just love her so much I just think she's absolutely absolutely brilliant so in my favorite Elizabeth Gaskell novel is north and south and that is also the place I would recommend starting with Elizabeth Gaskell I think you could also very happily start with wives and daughters to North and South follows a young woman called Margaret who must be I think 18 or 19 years old when her father gives up his job as a minister because he has doubts about the Anglican Church and he becomes a kind of dissenter minister and teacher and he uproots his wife and his daughter from their home in the south to the industrial town of Milton which is based it's basically a Manchester I like to fondly refer to this as Pride and Prejudice and industrialization or Pride and Prejudice with Mills because it is in some aspects of it fairly Pride and Prejudice desk but also likely looks at strikes and the pressures of industrialization in mid 19th century northern towns so yes we've definitely definitely recommend this I would definitely recommend Elizabeth Gaskell but my number one favorite Victorian author as I'm sure a lot of you already know is of course the amazing of Charles Dickens I love Dickens a lot I discovered his work when I was 14 years old I just completely fell in love with his writing he does such interesting and weird things with language he is in some ways an absurdist writer especially in his use of similes listen as you're just like what you talking about Dickens but I love it I love it it feels like all the words just tumbled out of his brain and somehow made like a perfect amazing brilliant thing I also think he is like a master storyteller like there are many great novelists of like interesting themes and obviously I have brilliant brilliant themes but he also just he can tell a damn good story like his books are so plot driven he does tell such good love stories such great crime mysteries like his books are just full of twists and turns and you never know what's gonna happen next so I absolutely love that I mean I do now know what's gonna happen next as I read them all but you know still I still feel like I don't because they're that compelling it was I think it has great characterization and makes use of kind of exaggerated characters which are in some way familiar to realistic characters so he has these characters which are really really extreme but also you know people that have just like a little bit of that character in them I also really love the balance between like light and dark in his work and the fact that like where he deals with very very dark themes he also has a lot of light relief and comedy and a lot of like a real happiness and joy and beautiful love stories and all of that kind of stuff along with the dark themes and I really really love that I mean I could go on for a really really long time about why I love Charles Dickens because there were a lot of reasons there were a lot of reasons my favorite Charles Dickens novel is a mutual friend which I absolutely love tells the story of a fortune left behind by a man who made his money in rubbish due to go to his son but on the way back from abroad the son is found murdered and everything kind of goes on from there is that what happens to the money and all the people who are connected who via that money and it's great I love it I love it however is not necessarily the best place to start with Charles Dickens obviously it's one of his longer ones and also it's got a lot of a lot of clocks like I mean like a good kind of 15 subplots going on if you are new to Dickens what I would recommend is either starting with something like the Christmas Carol which is a bit shorter and contained and really really lovely and you probably have a vague idea of the story already all picking up one of his novels that are in the first person so great expectations or David Copperfield David Copperfield is a bit longer but it's still really really engaging I do you think because Dickens is writing is a little bit unusual and it takes that we have time to get used to his writing I think it's worth starting with one of his first-person narratives because it means you don't have to worry about remembering all the characters are but have one central character that you can like remember and you know who they are and you follow them about and that makes it just much easier to get into his work I think so I would recommend starting with great patience or david copperfield great rotations of specialized hoses it's shorter and also brilliant but so is this and also the [ __ ] scale and also everything he wrote I feel like that has been more than enough talk about my favorite Victorian authors for now thank you very much for watching please let me know down the comments who your favorite Victorian authors are now we're back very soon with another Victo video

Channel: Books and Things

Views: 7,130

Rating: 4.9882007 out of 5

Keywords: booktube, books, literature, #victober

Id: EEBqp_T6kH8

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 02 2018