Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Seven of the best books about family dynamics

Salley Vickers's newest novel is The Librarian.

One of the author's favorite books about family dynamics, as shared at the Guardian:
Mansfield Park is perhaps Jane Austen’s least loved novel, but in my view it is possibly her best for its depiction of the upper-middle-class neglect suffered by Maria and Julia, the spoilt Bertram girls; this in turn leads to their failure to make happy marriages. The novel also adumbrates something that is often overlooked but reads to me like a pre-Freudian grasp of the allure of incest: Fanny, the book’s principal, falls in love with Edmund, the cousin she grows up with, and ultimately he with her (an idea I borrowed for my own novel, Cousins).
Read about the other entries on the list.

Mansfield Park is among Travis Elborough's top ten books featuring parks. Maria Bertram in Mansfield Park is among Melissa Albert's five fictional characters who deserved better than they got.

--Marshal Zeringue