The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy

Nine hundred odd pages - wow! I'd read this before, when I was much younger, and had seen the television adaptation. But it still has great power, the horror of being stuck in a loveless marriage, or worse in fact, one where you are actively repelled by the man you're married to. And that period where a woman is the property of the man, with no more power than a child. We've all been watching Downton Abbey, set in the same period, but really there is no comparison. One is romanticised and forgiving, set amidst perpetually sunny rose gardens, while the Galsworthy is incisive, shrinking from nothing. I enjoyed reading the saga of the beautiful Irene, the breakaway Young Jolyon, the oily Soames and his conniving, property obsessed relatives. It helps me see where all those middle-class attitudes about hard work and saving come from! It's also interesting to see how bad decisions and sadness in one generation can pass down a family and affect the future generations. It's a sort of English version of Anna Karenina, both in sentiment and length.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

I really wish I hadn’t seen the film of this book even though it was so many years ago. The incredible force that is Maggie Smith still pervades the book, which I’m re-reading for the NSW Art Gallery lecture series on at the moment. I like reading it as a mature person though as it puts the foolishness of Miss Brodie into perspective. What a character. And of course it really is all about her, with the six girls and the drawing and music masters, all lightly drawn, orbiting her like the sun. Everybody is a bit in love with Miss Brodie, and more than a few them get burned by the heat. She really is a very dangerous woman when let loose on a bunch of impressionable children. This is a one of those delightful pieces of writing where the characters and the story are teased out in the retelling, and although it all seems quite genteel when you read it, it’s really a story about sex and lust and procurement and manipulation. One thing I really enjoyed abut her character is that she is a ringer for a friend I had once, a similarly dangerous person who is utterly convinced and religiously fanatical about her beliefs. I hear her speaking every time Miss Brodie opens her mouth to make one more confident pronouncement. Isn’t that great writing when a character is so authentic?

A Room With a View by EM Forster

I’d seen the film, listened to the music, but never read the book. It’s charming, as the young and inexperienced but potentially ‘wonderful’ heroine Lucy Honeychurch discovers herself. She and her cousin Charlotte spend time in a pensione in Florence and meet up with a group of people who become part of their lives – George and Mr Emerson, Mr Beebe the clergyman, Miss Larkin the novelist – and when Lucy returns home and becomes engaged to Cecil Vyse, all of these characters play an important part in what happens next. It’s a story about manners and customs and pretensions, beautifully written, with some period moralizing, but with a sort of wonderful, almost languid rhythm that carries you along with the flow of the story.