novels – Anne Z

Day 400 of 1000: Hawthorne’s Heroine Hester

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s emergence as a bestselling author in his forties, and how he introduces his heroine Hester Prynne.

Does Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina objectify women or is it a proto-feminist critique of society’s double standard about extramarital affairs?

Sharing a passage from Iris Murdoch’s novel A Word Child, in which she introduces the main character not with description but with sensory detail.