Our fascination with vampires goes back a long way, before they became the standard fare of Halloween costumes and campy melodrama. Several cultures across the globe have a folkloric tradition surrounding undead, human-like creatures who prey on human blood. In 19th-century Europe, the idea of vampirism gained popular currency as a metaphor for various kinds of insidious influence. At the same time, the cartoonish image of the vampire was brought to prominence in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. Since then, vampires have only gone from strength to strength.

Vampires in Folklore

There are versions of vampiric creatures in the folklore of cultures across all the continents. West Africa has the tree-dwelling Sasabonsam, which feeds on humans passing through forests; Madagascar has the ramanga, which specifically drinks the blood of nobles. The Aztecs believed in Cihuateteo, spirits of women who died in childbirth, who might steal the spirits of children. Many cultures across North, Central, and South America believe in the chupacabra, a vampiric cryptid that preys on livestock. The Mandrurgo, in the folklore of the Philippines, appears as a beautiful young woman by day, but sucks men’s blood by night.

In fact, blood-sucking demons feature in just about every ancient mythology: the fear they encapsulate is perennial, though the form they take shifts with time and place. But the version of the vampire which conquered the novel, starting in the 19th century, was a variation on Slavic folklore which began to spread early in the 18th century.

These vampires were undead people, the inspirited corpses of those who had lived evil lives or been buried in unconsecrated ground. They often appeared in their shrouds, their mouths dripping, their bodies ruddy and bloated from feasting on blood. One bite from them could turn healthy, living people into vampires, too. Most features of the folkloric vampire’s appearance relate to concerns about burying the dead safely, respectfully, and—crucially—for good. They reflect a culture’s fears about what might happen if the dead refuse to stay buried.

Vampires in Romanticism

Folklore concerning vampires in places such as Bulgaria and Romania mostly spread orally until the 18th century, when ethnographers began to record folk traditions in writing. One important, if sometimes under-acknowledged, strain of the Romantic movement in literature was its authors’ interest in folk traditions, excavating material for their tales from sources beyond those which had previously kept writers busy: Greco-Roman mythology and the Bible. These authors also benefited from the opportunity to travel more extensively than many of their forebears, encountering these stories firsthand and carrying them home.

Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), inspired by the poet’s travels in Portugal and encounters with ancient Islamic tales, includes a sinister vampiric spirit. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who traveled and shared ideas with Southey, wove vampirism into his poem Christabel (1816). The innocent title character is preyed upon by the mysterious Geraldine, who cannot pass certain thresholds and is averse to Christian prayer.

Lord Byron‘s The Giaour (1813), with a similar Orientalist slant to Southey’s Thalaba, describes vampires as those “rent” from their tombs, who haunt the place where they died and suck the blood of those left there. But Byron was to have an even more important role in bringing the vampire into popular culture—not as a poet, but as a character himself.

During the infamous gathering of Romantics at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in 1816, Byron’s physician John Polidori wrote a novella called The Vampyre. The storytelling contest that produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein also led to Polidori’s tale about a mysterious, charming aristocrat, Lord Ruthven, who corrupts everyone he encounters. Ruthven’s powers are indiscriminate: he will prey on any impressionable young woman or man, and will not stop until he has drained their blood.

Polidori’s story conspicuously blends elements of the Eastern European folk character with elements previously absent from any tales about vampires, such as the vampire’s high social status and charisma—elements which recall Byron himself. Whether this is because The Vampyre drew on Byron’s own, unfinished story from the Villa Diodati contest, or because Polidori envisioned Byron as (socially, at least) a kind of vampire, Polidori’s version of the vampire had a decisively transformative effect on subsequent depictions of the vampire.

Penny Dreadfuls and Sensation Fiction

In mid-19th-century Europe, novels and magazines took hold of the literary market thanks to new printing technologies—and vampires took part in this takeover. Readers were gaining a taste for sensational, Gothic horror, and penny dreadfuls (the name for novels serialized in cheap magazines) satisfied their appetites.

Varney the Vampire (1845-47) takes up the two strains of vampirism in Polidori’s novel: the literal vampire, who sucks blood to stay alive (or, more accurately, undead), and the metaphorical vampire, who drains their victim of their lifeblood in more figurative ways.

Varney is another aristocratic vampire. In taking a once-wealthy family as his victims, Varney prefigures Stoker’s Dracula, a destitute nobleman who craves a return to his former glory—a financial vampire. Varney is also the first fictional vampire to have an important iconographical feature: fangs.

Thrillers and sensation novels gave readers insight into the vampire’s motives, even transforming the malign figure of folklore into a sympathetic creature who is in thrall to their instincts. In Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897), the protagonist, a mixed-race woman who has grown up in Jamaica, discovers with horror that her influence over others is fatal. The title unexpectedly turns our attention away from the blood of the victims to that of the vampire, blending the Gothic tradition with prevalent (and generally racist) late-19th-century ideas about miscegenation and degeneration.

The bestselling sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon similarly put a scientific spin on the vampire’s obsession with blood in Good Lady Ducayne (1896). Despite the sinister bat hovering in the illustration on the title page, this novel features a distinctly medical vampire, who drains her victims’ blood through a combination of chloroform and transfusion, after engaging their help in her experiment to prolong her life as long as possible. The novel eerily echoes the vampiric undertones that linger in medicine and beauty treatments today.

The Emergence of the Gothic

While the 19th century saw the vampire take on forms far beyond its folkloric incarnation, the most popular and enduring vampires in fiction from this time are the literal ones, who come forth from unquiet graves to suck the blood of innocent victims. Their refusal to stay dead, their dealings in darkness, their part-human monstrosity, and their inexplicably seductive hold over their victims made vampires a key feature of the Gothic genre.

By the second half of the century, Gothic novels as a form often featured a story within a story, or stories cobbled together out of various modes such as letters, newspaper fragments, and documents. This was particularly effective in stories about vampires, heightening the sense of the vampire as an elusive, uncontainable figure whom no amount of description or taxonomization, by whichever narratorial authority, can capture.

Carmilla (1872) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu uses this multi-layered narrative to enclose the firsthand testimony of a woman seduced by a female vampire inside a pseudoscientific casebook. Le Fanu wants the reader to imagine that this vampire might really have existed, while conveying at the same time the force of her seduction.

Carmilla is one of the most seductive vampires in literature. What was a latent homoeroticism in the relationship between Christabel and Gertrude in Coleridge’s Christabel becomes, here, overt. Carmilla openly caresses her victim and mounts her like a succubus, the mythological female demon who seduces men in their sleep. Only, unlike the succubus who drinks men’s bodily fluids to survive, Christabel sucks the blood of another woman.

Carmilla, along with earlier novels such as The Vampyre and Varney the Vampire, was an influence on the most famous vampire novel of all time, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In all of these stories, the vampire comes from an ancient, noble line, reflecting dual anxieties: inside the noble families, an anxiety about the purity of their bloodline, and outside them, an anxiety about their power over lower-born people. The vampire’s restricted movements and desire to infuse their bodies with the blood of others encode concerns about social mobility in a fast-changing world.

Dracula satisfies the reader’s desire to encounter a truly Gothic villain while connecting this villain to deeper contemporary concerns. Less overt than Carmilla with its homoerotic vampirism, Dracula nonetheless tapped into debates of the day about gender and sexuality, especially through its representations of Lucy Westenra, who falls prey to Dracula’s charms, and Mina Harker, a resourceful heroine who has attracted much feminist discussion. With Dracula, the vampire’s conquest of the novel was complete, and it soon began to transcend the pages of fiction.

Vampires in Art

By the early 20th century, the word ‘vampire’ was being shortened to ‘vamp’ to refer to alluring, but dangerous, women. Although the most prominent vampires in fiction thus far had been male, a trope surrounding female vampires emerged in visual culture, taking its cue from the seductive charms of Le Fanu’s Carmilla and the Brides of Dracula in Stoker’s novel.

Images of deadly vampiric women were also inspired by the 19th-century trope of the femme fatale. In Victorian Britain, changes in women’s legal status and repeated attempts to regulate the sex work industry brought about heightened fears of female sexuality. While unbridled female sexuality has been a perennial source of anxiety in cultures across the globe, it took center stage in mid- to late-19th-century art.

Félicien Rops frequently depicted insatiable devil-women in Gothic scenes blending sexual ecstasy with death, destruction, and the Black Mass. Rops creates a similar ambiguity to Stoker in the character of Lucy Westenra, as to how voluntarily these women have surrendered to vampiric lust.

Rops was inspired, as were many artists of the period, by the decadent movement and its early practitioner, the poet Charles Baudelaire. Les fleurs du mal (1857), Baudelaire’s notorious volume of poetry, included several poems about femmes fatales, and even one titled ‘The Metamorphoses of the Vampire.’ This poem, featuring a “putrescent thing, all faceless and exuding pus,” who drains the speaker of his “very marrow,” was censored from Les fleurs du mal after attracting the outraged attention of the French censors.

Along with five other censored poems, ‘The Metamorphoses of the Vampire’ was published in Belgium in 1866 in a volume titled Les épaves (‘scraps’ or ‘wreckage’), with a frontispiece by Rops depicting a skeleton emerging triumphantly from a wasteland.

Edvard Munch‘s 1895 painting Love and Pain has often been known by an alternative title (not used by the painter himself), Vampire. While ostensibly showing merely a woman kissing a man on his neck, her consuming embrace and flowing, flame-colored hair connote the kinds of dangerous sexuality that preoccupied so many contemporary artists.

Munch repeatedly returned to the image of the scarlet-haired seductress whose red vitality might, it seems, come from draining the blood of her lovers, culminating in the painting Vampire in the Forest (1924-25). He explicitly related this motif in his work to the changing social role of women with the advent of feminism: “it became the woman who seduces and entices and deceives the man […] In the transition period, the man became the weaker one.”

In Britain, too, artists responded to women’s emancipation by revamping the longstanding image of the female blood-sucker. Several Pre-Raphaelite artists dealt with women’s power in their work by representing demonic or magical female figures from myth and legend: witches, enchantresses, sirens, and vampires.

This reflected the Pre-Raphaelites’ interest in Romantic poetry. Painters took inspiration from Coleridge’s Christabel, Byron’s Giaour, and two poems by John Keats about seductive women. The first, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci,’ depicts a fairy-like woman who drains the spirit of every man she meets. In the second, ‘Lamia,’ the female character, like the vampire-like creatures in several world cultures, seeks to consume children.

Edward Burne-Jones painted several dangerous women, from mermaids and sirens to the Arthurian seductresses Morgan le Fay and Nimue. But it was his son, Philip Burne-Jones, who would paint a work titled The Vampire in 1897, inspired by a Rudyard Kipling poem of the same name.

Burne-Jones’s painting resembles one from a century earlier, Henry Fuseli‘s The Nightmare, in staging a bedroom scene of fearful seduction—only now the roles have been switched. The woman in Fuseli’s painting, preyed upon by an incubus, becomes the succubus of Burne-Jones’s. Kipling’s poem, along with Burne-Jones’s painting, inspired a 1913 silent film called The Vampire, marking the triumphant entrance of the vampire onto the big screen.

Vampires on Screen

Appropriately enough, vampires on screen have refused to die, in spite of attempts to vanquish them. In 1922, Bram Stoker’s widow, Florence, sued the makers of the groundbreaking horror film Nosferatu because of its similarity to Dracula. These are substantial: a young man is sent to Transylvania to meet a mysterious client, and scion of a distinguished old family, who is looking to purchase a home in England. Count Orlok—as he is renamed in Nosferatu—sleeps in a coffin, becomes ravenous at the sight of blood, and is intent on claiming the protagonist’s love interest as his own.

One key difference that F.W. Murnau’s film introduced into the genre is the vampire’s susceptibility to sunlight, which in Dracula is dangerous but not fatal. Moreover, Nosferatu set the tone for the visual representations of vampires that would delight audiences for the next century.

Although the court found in Florence Stoker’s favor and ordered all copies of Nosferatu to be destroyed, the film survived, and it was too late to stop the spread of Dracula adaptations. The novel has always been in the public domain in the United States due to a copyright error, leading to hundreds of Draculas in film and television.

Each incarnation of Dracula has brought a new angle to the vampire, though elements of the original folklore, Polidori’s Byron-inspired novella, and Stoker’s novel have remained intact throughout.

Béla Lugosi in 1931 and Christopher Lee in 1958 played Dracula as a suave aristocrat, often garbed in white tie beneath his bat-like cape, his brooding mouth hiding sharp fangs. Gary Oldman’s portrayal, in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), departed from the now-traditional costume and brought in elements of the steampunk aesthetic.

Film and television have explored the plot and characters of Dracula and the broader vampire myth from every possible angle. Vampires roam the dystopian streets of a post-virus New York in I Am Legend (2007); they pose as a wealthy couple in order to prey on a sleep doctor in The Hunger (1983); they navigate the pitfalls of eternal life in Only Lovers Left Alive (2013); they deal with racism and abuse in New Orleans in Interview with the Vampire (film version 1994, television version 2022 to present).

Other adaptations have taken the perspective of previously sidelined characters who are trying to defeat the vampire, such as the 2004 film Van Helsing and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003). Vampires became a staple of young adult fare in books, later adapted for the screen, such as the Twilight series (2008-12) and The Vampire Diaries (2009-17).

Thanks to the popularity of the goth subculture since the 1980s, with bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Cure adopting costumes inspired by Lugosi’s and Lee’s vampires, and the band Bauhaus even releasing a song titled ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead,’ the image of the vampire seems destined to live forever.

Publishing The Celtic Twilight in 1893, Yeats combined folktales and myth from rural Ireland and treated the subject with reverence and a literary imagination. Along with his peers (particularly Lady Gregory, with whom he founded the Abbey Theatre), his deep love of myth, magic and national identity created a powerful new literary movement in the country.

This was largely in response to British colonial rule (as seen most clearly in his poem Easter, 1916) and profound cultural loss felt by Yeats and other literary figures who shaped a new national identity through the arts. This article explores how Yeats’ profound sympathy for a mystical Ireland created a new cultural identity.

The Celtic Twilight: Yeats’ Vision of Ireland

The Celtic Twilight (1893) is a collection of essays and folklore by W.B. Yeats that explores Ireland’s mystical traditions. Drawing on stories from rural communities, Yeats blends personal insights with tales of fairies, visions, and supernatural encounters. In one chapter, “Village Ghosts,” he recounts a local belief that certain houses are haunted by spirits who appear at twilight, reflecting the thin boundary between everyday life and the unseen world. The book marked a shift in his work, deepening his interest in the occult and shaping his view of Ireland as a land rich in symbolic meaning. It also helped define the Celtic Revival, a movement that reclaimed Irish identity through myth, magic, and art.

Myth and National Identity

Yeats used myth to help shape a distinct Irish national identity during a time of cultural and political upheaval. Drawing on Celtic legends and folklore, he reimagined Ireland not just as a nation but as a spiritual and symbolic landscape. His early poems, like The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), blend myth with nationalism, offering an alternative history rooted in native tradition rather than colonial influence. Influenced by thinkers like John O’Leary, Yeats believed that myth could unify a people and restore a lost cultural memory. In doing so, he helped define the Irish Literary Revival and gave poetic form to Ireland’s search for self.

Yeats and the Occult Tradition

Yeats’s interest in the occult was central to his poetry and philosophy. He joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890, exploring ritual magic, astrology, and symbolic systems to uncover hidden truths. For Yeats, the occult offered a way to connect the material and spiritual worlds, blending Celtic mythology with mystical ideas. These beliefs shaped works like A Vision (1925), where he developed a personal system to understand history, identity, and creativity through symbolic patterns.

Folklore and Irish History

Yeats saw Irish folklore as a living link to the country’s past, using it to shape a poetic vision of national identity. In Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), he gathered stories of fairies, ghosts, and rural beliefs, blending oral tradition with literary craft. One example is the tale of the banshee, which Yeats describes as a spirit whose wailing (or keening) foretells death: a figure rooted in Irish superstition and symbolic of ancestral memory.

For Yeats, such stories preserved a spiritual and imaginative history that modern Ireland risked losing. He believed folklore could reconnect people with a deeper sense of place and purpose, offering an alternative to colonial narratives and rationalist thinking.

The Poetic Self and Transformation

Yeats’s poetry often explores the self as something changeable and conflicted. In A Dialogue of Self and Soul (1933), he stages a debate between the spiritual soul and the passionate self, ultimately choosing to embrace life’s messiness and repeat it “again and yet again.” In Sailing to Byzantium (1928), he seeks transformation through art and immortality, leaving behind the ageing body for a timeless, golden form. These poems show how Yeats used myth and symbolism to explore identity: not as fixed, but as something shaped by experience, memory, and creative vision.

Mysticism in a Modern Age

Yeats’s mysticism evolved alongside the modern world, offering spiritual depth in an age of uncertainty. After World War I and the Irish War of Independence, his poetry became more symbolic and philosophical, reflecting the tensions of a changing society. In The Second Coming (1919), he uses mystical imagery to express cultural collapse and spiritual crisis. Though modernity embraced science and reason, Yeats turned to the occult, myth, and personal symbolism to explore deeper truths. His work shows how mysticism could still speak to modern anxieties, offering meaning beyond logic and history.

Paris, 1836. Dilettantish ladies and gentlemen of the upper classes mix with the poets and artists who, now more than ever, constitute the city’s true nobility: a meritocracy, founded on a veneration for art’s spiritual importance. The lights are low; the conversation turns on revolution, freedom, democracy: this is the height of Romanticism. It is the optimal setting for a meeting which will forever marry the music and literature of this era, an auspicious meeting (or was it?) between the composer Frédéric Chopin and the author George Sand.

Who Were Chopin and Sand?

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this meeting in a Paris salon in 1836 comprised two men. George Sand, aged 32 and already the author of a dozen novels, had taken her pen name from a former lover and co-author, Jules Sandeau. She also abbreviated her first name, removing the final ‘s’ that ordinarily ends the name Georges in French, constructing a pseudonym which successfully confounded her audience and her peers.

Over the course of a prolific writing career, Sand (born Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin) came to be regarded as an equal by contemporaries such as Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Gustave Flaubert. The latter addressed her as “Chère Maître,” blending the feminine word for ‘dear’ with the masculine word for ‘master.’ Hugo once commented:

“George Sand cannot determine whether she is male or female. I entertain a high regard for all my colleagues, but it is not my place to decide whether she is my sister or my brother.”

This was in part because Sand had obtained police permission (as was necessary in early 19th-century Paris) to wear men’s clothing. Ostensibly, such permits were for occupational purposes, or for horse-riding, but Sand used her dress (and habit of cigar smoking) to move uninhibited among men’s circles.

Then there was her writing, begun after a scandalous separation from her duke husband and a string of public affairs, including poets, politicians, and possibly an actress. With their frankness about relationships between men and women, Sand’s novels shocked and delighted people as much as her behavior did, and encouraged public uncertainty around her gender presentation.

This explains Chopin‘s notorious slight on meeting Sand that night in 1836: “What an unattractive person la Sand is. Is she really a woman?” Not the most auspicious start, but it is unlikely Chopin had ever met anyone quite like Sand.

The pianist, aged 26, had moved to Paris five years earlier, fleeing political unrest in his native Poland. As an émigré who retained a strong connection to his homeland, he was reluctant to shake up society in the way that Sand, a passionate socialist, was doing.

By most accounts (and he left very little about himself in his own words), Chopin was intensely private, shunning the showy world of virtuoso performances (then a very popular spectacle thanks to his friend Franz Liszt) and carefully selecting students for his piano teaching from the best Parisian families.

It was thanks to Liszt that Chopin and Sand met, although it would take a little while for Chopin to be grateful for this. Liszt was engaged in a Romantic liaison of his own, with another author who had left her high-born husband: Countess Marie d’Agoult. When d’Agoult invited various artistic friends to her salon one evening in 1836, Liszt invited Chopin, but they didn’t hit it off. That would take another couple of years.

Turmoil: Winter in Majorca

According to one possibly apocryphal story, Sand tried to wear down the reluctant Chopin at one soirée following their initial meeting by robing herself in a silk dress of red and white, the colors of the Polish flag. It was a demonstration of her fierce support for revolutionary uprising, for ordinary people claiming their freedoms, as many interpreted the outbreaks of civil unrest in both Poland and France at this time.

The sentiment may or may not have appealed to Chopin; the extent of his support for a free Poland remains the subject of critical debate. When their relationship ended, Sand got rid of nearly all their letters, so it is difficult to get close to the real Chopin or imagine how the two conversed.

Writing in 1838 to another Polish émigré and close friend of Chopin, Count Wojciech Grzymała, Sand wrote that she had, with surprise, realized the strength of her feelings for Chopin. She was prepared to throw over any other potential suitors if he would just ask. Soon he did, and in the winter of 1838, they set off together to escape the wagging tongues of Paris, making for the Spanish island of Majorca.

It was intended to benefit them both. Chopin sought the warmer southern climate to soothe his periodic bouts of ill health (later to develop into tuberculosis). Sand hoped to discover in the Majorcans a group of people primed to rise up and claim their independence.

Our source for the trip is Sand, who wrote up the experience as a travelogue published in 1841 (A Winter in Majorca). The island was not quite what she hoped. It was November, cold and wet. The locals were hostile to the unmarried, bohemian couple, who had pitched up with Sand’s two children. Struggling to find adequate food or lodgings, the four ended up staying in a damp disused monastery in the village of Valldemossa.

Curiously, Chopin is only a shadowy figure in Winter in Majorca, referred to not by name but as “the sick man.” Sand is tight-lipped on a topic which has since garnered a lot of interest from Chopin scholars: his composition, during their stay, of his Preludes, Op. 28.

This collection of 24 preludes was modeled on J.S. Bach‘s Well-Tempered Clavier, which contained preludes and fugues written in every key (12 major and 12 minor). Chopin omitted the fugues and concentrated on the prelude as a complete work in its own right, revealing an interest in fragmentation and smaller forms which was characteristic of Romantic piano music. We know that Chopin took a copy of Bach‘s collection to Majorca, though it is difficult to tell which of his own pieces he finished there, and which had already been completed back in Paris.

Although Chopin underwent quite a saga in getting his preferred make of piano (a Pleyel) shipped to Majorca so that he could compose, he must eventually have found the environment stimulating enough to compose these celebrated pieces, including the ‘Raindrop’ Prelude. This title came not from Chopin (who never gave titles to his works beyond simple descriptions of their form, such as Ballade or Waltz), but from Sand.

Later, in her autobiography, she wrote about inventing the title on a rainy day during their sojourn in Majorca:

“When I called [Chopin’s] attention to those drops of water which were actually falling upon the roof, he denied having heard them. He was even vexed at what I translated by the term, imitative harmony. He protested with all his might, and he was right, against the puerility of these imitations for the ear. His genius was full of mysterious harmonies of nature.” (Huneker 2004, chapter 7)

Were any of Chopin’s Preludes really inspired by, or even written in, Majorca? Was he as constantly ill as Sand suggests? Can music, like poetry, imitate nature? This most Romantic of getaways leaves open these questions and many more.

Tranquility: Summers at Nohant

Most biographers, even the least sympathetic to Sand, credit the relationship with helping Chopin to write his best compositions. James Huneker, who generally demonized Sand for her numerous affairs and accused her of draining artistic geniuses of their talent like a vampire, admitted:

“Chopin had some one to look after him—he needed it—and in the society of this brilliant Frenchwoman he throve amazingly: his best work may be traced to Nohant and Majorca.” (Huneker 2004, chapter 2)

Nohant was Sand’s country house, inherited from her grandmother, where she and Chopin spent every summer from 1839 to 1846. Guests joining them included Liszt, Balzac, Flaubert, the renowned soprano Pauline Viardot, and the painter Eugène Delacroix, who (like many Romantics) was deeply inspired by music, and who began an unfinished double portrait in 1838 showing Chopin at the piano and Sand at his side, rapt in listening to his music.

We know that Nohant gave Chopin a tranquil base, away from the hustle and bustle of Paris, to compose pieces such as his ‘Heroic’ Polonaise. But what did Sand gain? Did Chopin supply her with ideas, as she furnished Romantic fantasies surrounding his compositions?

In 1838, Sand wrote a closet drama (a play written for private reading, not the stage), which suggests that conversations with Chopin (and perhaps Liszt, a voracious autodidact and writer himself) influenced her thought. The Seven Strings of the Lyre is Sand’s reworking of the Faust legend, in which the scientist Faust is tempted by Mephistopheles, a servant of the Devil, to forsake his soul in the pursuit of knowledge.

Sand’s version is even more Romantic than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe‘s famous play. Faust is replaced with Albertus, who suffers the characteristic ennui of the Romantic hero. As Mephistopheles tries to win his soul, Albertus is helped by the angelic Helen and her lyre, whose seven strings represent different virtues of human nature. The lyre becomes instrumental, literally, in transmitting harmonious music representative of human goodness.

Recent readers of the play, although interested in Sand’s ideas about the spiritual power of music, have been disappointed that this version of Faust by such a radical proto-feminist as Sand seems to preserve Goethe’s one-dimensional, heavily idealized portrayal of womanhood. But given that the play was written during, and inspired by, her relationship with a musician, it’s tempting to read Chopin as an inspiration for the lyre-wielding Helen.

Romanticism’s Odd Couple

Chopin and Sand have always been swathed in gender ambiguity. Sand was the cross-dressing cigar smoker who defied expectations to claim her place in a literary pantheon dominated by men. Chopin, many contemporary sources note, was as picky about his clothing as any high-society woman. He wrote almost solely for the piano, which in early 19th-century Paris was played by women in their droves. His pieces were heard as light, airy, delicate, not quite feminine but androgynous, like an angel or a sprite.

Recent speculation has centered on Chopin’s letters to his schoolfriend Tytus Woyciechowski, which address him in passionate language and refer to kissing. While it’s important to remember that understandings of sexuality are constructed differently across places and times, and these expressions of love may not have correlated to a modern, Western view of homosexual identity, this speculation about Chopin’s identity does offer a different slant on his relationship with Sand. Think back to his early comment casting aspersions on her femininity: perhaps he was drawn to her cross-dressing, not repelled by it.

Another way of seeing the relationship, fueled by Sand’s comments as the years went on, is in terms of a mother and child. Although she was only six years older, she came to view Chopin as her third child, especially during his periods of illness when she took on a caregiving role.

Although the two lived together in Paris and Nohant, they gradually ceased to have a physical relationship, if they had ever had one. This question is also swathed in ambiguity, not least because many subsequent commentators (conscious of Sand’s reputation and eager to rescue Chopin from scandal as he grew, posthumously, into a revered icon of the classical canon) represented the relationship as “a pure and cordial friendship” (Hadow 2012, p. 128). Was her “little angel,” “beloved little corpse,” a lover in the same sense as the ones before him?

What Drove Chopin and Sand Apart?

You might think that airing dirty laundry in a novel is a good reason for a break-up. When Sand published Lucrezia Floriani in 1846, mutual friends of the author and of Chopin were taken aback by the close similarity between the real-life couple and the fictional Lucrezia and Prince Karol. Lucrezia is older, a retired actress, with children from a previous relationship; Prince Karol is sickly, reclusive, and jealous of Lucrezia’s interactions with other men.

Is this a portrait of Sand and Chopin’s relationship? She later insisted that, although her writing achieved its trademark realism by drawing on her life, she had the artist’s skill of transforming her material into art through her imagination. If this seems a flimsy excuse, what about the fact that Chopin, apparently, listened to Sand recite passages of the novel and did not object once?

Romanticism is known for blending life and art. These artists prided themselves on creating works that could truly claim to give insight into the human soul. Whose souls did they know best? Their own, and those around them. The roman à clef, or novel with a key, in which characters correspond to real people in the author’s life, was rife in this period.

While the Romantics had the same debates as we do about the ethics of displaying our private lives, they prized verisimilitude, or faithfulness, in art. If Chopin did recognize himself in Lucrezia Floriani, perhaps he chose to ignore this and pay more attention to the truth of the feelings Sand was representing.

A more prosaic cause of the breakdown between Chopin and Sand was the composer’s relationships with the author’s children as they grew into adults. Maurice, the son, was resentful of Chopin, while Solange, the daughter, doted on him (there has been speculation about their relationship). In 1847, Chopin took Solange’s side in a dispute between Sand and her daughter and son-in-law, sculptor Auguste Clésinger. Sand and Chopin separated, seeing each other only once more: a chance meeting, when neither spoke.

When Chopin died of tuberculosis in 1849, Solange was among the mourners at his deathbed. Clésinger sculpted the monument of a weeping woman (Euterpe, the classical muse of music) on Chopin’s tomb in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery. Sand kept away.

To her detractors, Sand’s absence is further proof that she was to blame for Chopin’s death. Many 19th-century accounts, in the absence of widespread knowledge about tuberculosis, represent the composer as dying of heartbreak. But from a modern perspective, we might speculate that Sand stayed away because it was too painful, or out of a desire not to cause more harm.

Sand and Chopin remain one of Romanticism’s quintessential pairings, precisely because of the unlikeliness and tempestuousness of the affair. They leave more questions unanswered than answered, suspending us in an essentially Romantic striving after impossible knowledge.

They united music and literature in a melting pot of fascinating mutual influence. Like all the great Romantics, they testify to the important results that come from the overlapping of art, genius, and love.

Sources

Hadow, W. H. (2012). Studies in modern music, second series: Frederick Chopin, Antonin Dvořák, Johannes Brahms. Project Gutenberg edition.

Huneker, James (2004). Chopin: the Man and his Music. Project Gutenberg edition.

Victor Hugo was a towering literary figure and outspoken political reformer throughout his life. Originally a royalist, he later became a champion of republican ideals. His works (both fiction and journalistic) advocated for free education, universal suffrage and the abolition of the death penalty as well as supporting liberal political ideals. His outspoken critique of Napoleon III’s coup led to Hugo being exiled to the Channel Islands for 20 years, where he wrote some of his most political works and solidified his reputation as a national hero. 

Youth and Political Awakening

Victor Hugo’s literature consistently cast young characters as the moral compass of a fractured France, using idealism as a weapon against tyranny. In Les Misérables (1862), Marius and Gavroche embody political awakening: one through romanticized revolution, the other through raw defiance on the barricades. In The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), the young poet Gringoire navigates a corrupt medieval society.

His novel about the Reign of Terror, Ninety-Three (1874), offers a brutal meditation on youthful conviction, as Gauvain sacrifices himself for a vision of justice that transcends partisan violence. Even The Man Who Laughs (1869) presents Gwynplaine as a tragic symbol of innocence. Across these works, Hugo positioned the youth not merely as victims or dreamers, but as agents of conscience, capable of confronting entrenched social injustice with courage and conviction.

Romantic Revolution in Writing

Victor Hugo’s Romantic revolution reshaped literature into a tool for truth and justice. Turning away from strict classical rules, he embraced emotion, imagination, and social critique. In the preface to his play, Cromwell (1827), Hugo argued for blending the grotesque with the sublime. This bold idea shaped The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862). His writing gave voice to suffering and hope, using vivid characters and sweeping language to challenge injustice. For Hugo, Romanticism was not just style; it was a way to inspire change.

Les Misérables and Social Reform

Les Misérables (1862) is Hugo’s most powerful call for social reform, blending personal tragedy with systemic critique. Jean Valjean’s journey from convict to benefactor reveals the cruelty of a justice system that punishes poverty more harshly than crime. Fantine’s descent into destitution (selling her hair, teeth and, eventually, her body to support her child) exposes the brutal cost of economic inequality.

The suffering of the child, Gavroche, and the idealism of the student revolutionaries reflect Hugo’s belief in the need to uplift the vulnerable. The novel’s impact reached far beyond literature; it influenced debates on prison reform and social justice in 19th-century France and continues to resonate in modern discussions of inequality and access to justice. Through vivid storytelling, Hugo urged readers not just to feel compassion but to demand change.

Notre-Dame de Paris and National Pride

Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) was more than a novel; it was a rallying cry for national pride and cultural preservation. At a time when the cathedral had fallen into disrepair and faced possible demolition, Hugo’s vivid portrayal of its Gothic grandeur reignited public interest in France’s architectural heritage.

Through the tragic figures of Quasimodo and Esmeralda, he framed the cathedral as a symbol of collective memory and identity, urging readers to see it not just as a relic, but as a living monument to France’s past. The novel’s success directly influenced the 1844 restoration led by Viollet-le-Duc, proving that literature could shape public opinion and policy. Hugo’s passionate defense of historic buildings helped transform Notre-Dame into a national icon.

Exile and Legacy

Victor Hugo’s exile from France between 1851 and 1870 became a turning point in his political and literary legacy. Forced out for opposing Napoleon III, he settled in Jersey and later Guernsey, where he wrote fierce critiques like Napoléon le Petit (1852) and Les Châtiments (1853), as well as reflective works like Les Contemplations (1856). Although Napoleon III granted amnesty to all political exiles in 1859, Hugo refused to return home, making his exile a statement of principle. When he returned after the fall of the Empire, he was welcomed as a national hero. His time abroad proved that literature could challenge power, defend liberty and shape public conscience for generations.

Have you ever imagined you saw your own double, just for a second? A perfect replica of yourself, not seen in a reflective surface, but somehow out there in the world, walking and talking just like you? The sensation can be chilling, shocking us into recognition of our identity and mortality. Literature has for centuries been fascinated by this phenomenon, haunting and thrilling readers with tales of characters who encounter, or imagine, their other selves, from evil twins to split identities.

How Long Has the Doppelgänger Been Around?

Most world cultures have some concept of the doppelgänger under another name. In various global mythologies, we find stories of spirit doubles who live out a person’s life differently to reality: they may represent a better way to live, or the temptations of following the wrong path. Humanity is perennially interested in the alter ego and what it might tell us about our ‘real’ selves, if there is such a thing (the doppelgänger is often used to destabilize the very idea).

In early modern English, the idea of the double was closely linked to ghosts, or wraiths, and the term ‘fetch’ more specifically referred to an exact double of the person seeing the ghost. As the word ‘fetch’ suggests, these visions were understood as portents, come to ‘fetch’ the viewer to the other side of the veil separating life and death.

The 17th-century metaphysical poet John Donne, according to his biographer, saw the double of his wife one night, carrying a dead child in her arms… on the very night that she gave birth to a stillborn daughter.

It wasn’t until the early 19th century that English speakers began to use the German loanword ‘doppelgänger,’ literally ‘double-walker.’ The word originated in a 1797 novel by the German Romantic author Jean Paul, in which the protagonist’s alter ego convinces him to fake his death and begin a new, better life.

Romanticism, with its interest in human nature, is replete with doppelgängers. The title character of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) fears the sudden realization that “a frightful fiend / Doth close behind him tread”; his own double, pursuing him across the earth. This passage from Coleridge is quoted in Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley, whose own wandering protagonist is pursued by a deadly double: the human he has created out of the limbs of corpses.

Victor Frankenstein dreams, soon after making the monster, about going to kiss his fiancée, only for her to swoon and die in his arms, and then turn into his dead mother. Shelley uses the idea of the doppelgänger to link Frankenstein and his monster, with the latter enacting the former’s repressed, violent desires, and to link Frankenstein’s lover and mother in a scene of proto-Freudian terror.

This was not Shelley’s only experience of the disturbing power of the doppelgänger. Just a couple of weeks before her husband, the poet Percy Shelley, drowned in a boating accident in 1822, he had seen his double in an apocalyptic dream.

Mary, reporting the incident to a friend, wrote that, strangely enough, another member of the household had seen this second Percy wandering about. A week after Mary miscarried a child, and two weeks before Percy’s drowning, the Shelleys were steeped in an atmosphere of death which brought the double into sharper focus.

The Doppelgänger According to Freud’s Theory of the Uncanny

Romantic art and literature, at the beginning of the 19th century, are often seen as predecessors of psychoanalytic theory, at the end. Think of the emphasis laid on dreams in Frankenstein or Henry Fuseli‘s painting The Nightmare (1781). Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the pre-Raphaelite painter and poet, extended the Romantic interest in the doppelgänger with his eerie painting How They Met Themselves (1851/64).

Doppelgängers and their recurrence across cultures and history were a point of interest for early psychoanalysts such as Otto Rank and Sigmund Freud. For Rank, writing in 1914, the literary theme of the double was a way of exploring forms of mental disturbance such as paranoia, amnesia, schizophrenia, neurosis, and ego death.

Freud elaborated on Rank’s ideas in his classic study The Uncanny (1919). The uncanny, or Unheimlich in the original German, is the sensation triggered by the ordinary being made unfamiliar in some way, which seems to touch our unconscious desires and fears.

Freud and Rank both cite various associations of doubling: mirrors, shadows, guardian spirits, the soul, ghosts. As Freud explains, the double has not always been sinister, but:

“[T]he ‘double’ was originally an insurance against destruction to the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death,’ as Rank says; and probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first ‘double’ of the body […] [the double represents] all those unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in phantasy, all those strivings of the ego which adverse external circumstances have crushed…” (Freud 1919, pp. 9-10)

How did the double become a source of the uncanny, more than a source of comfort, if it originates in a self-protective impulse to imagine what our truest and best selves might look like? Freud suggests that the double is also “a regression to a time when the ego was not yet sharply differentiated from the external world and from other persons” (Freud 1919, p. 10). When it comes back later in life, then, the doppelgänger has the power to remind us of everything we might have been, had life been otherwise.

The Evil Twin

One kind of doppelgänger in literature is the malevolent double or evil twin. Not every evil twin is necessarily a doppelgänger. Many stories feature an antagonist who is very similar to the protagonist; action films, comic books, and soap operas are full of evil twins. Protagonists embarking on a moral journey need a foil, and often this foil is simply a bad version of the hero.

What makes an evil twin into a doppelgänger is the uncanny sensation they trigger in the protagonist. As Freud describes, this experience unsettles one’s sense of self. In The Devil’s Elixirs (1815) by the German master of uncanny literature, E.T.A. Hoffmann, the protagonist’s life is turned upside-down by a carbon-copy half-brother, who is convicted for murders committed by the protagonist, only to vengefully murder the protagonist’s beloved after he is freed.

Hoffmann’s closest equivalent in English, Edgar Allan Poe, featured an evil twin in his 1839 story William Wilson. The title character’s double has the same name, nearly the same appearance, and the same birthday (Poe’s own, January 19). The doppelgänger follows William at every turn, seeming to thwart his every move. Only, we realize as the story goes on, it is William’s desire to sink into sin and debauchery that his evil twin keeps thwarting.

Is the twin really evil? In a climactic ending, William Wilson kills William Wilson (‘son’ of his ‘will,’ perhaps?), only for the double to reveal they were the same person all along: “In me didst thou exist—and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”

The Split Self

Another type of literary doppelgänger is the other self, who forms your other half, in cases of split identity or double lives. Woven into the idea of the doppelgänger is a moral duality: the possibility that our double leads a diametrically better, or often diametrically worse, life than ours.

Gothic tales just before the emergence of psychoanalysis offer a kind of literary trial run for theories by Rank and Freud as to the significance of the doppelgänger in cases of identity crisis.

Take Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). The morally upstanding, respectable Dr. Jekyll has a latent dark side. Combine this with his egotistical ambition to advance medical science and a large pinch of curiosity, and Hyde emerges: a double who, externally, doesn’t resemble Jekyll at all, being hideous to look at and prone to fits of anger. Yet they are one soul, and must continually swap bodies so that Jekyll can keep up his double life.

The other self takes on a more symbolic form in Oscar Wilde‘s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Like Jekyll, Dorian wants to cast off the restrictive life of a Victorian man about town and delve into London’s seedy underbelly. Dorian’s double, however, looks exactly like him, to start off with. Dorian unwittingly makes a Faustian pact when he flippantly voices a wish for his portrait to grow old, while his real body remains young. Thereafter, the portrait takes on the visible signs of his moral dissolution.

The novel’s climax resembles that of Poe’s William Wilson. As Rank would soon discuss, doppelgänger literature frequently culminates with the protagonist destroying their other self. Like in Poe’s story, Dorian’s final act of violence—stabbing the hideous, decaying portrait—reverberates on himself. His quest to keep his aesthetic and moral selves separate ends in complete self-destruction.

The Harbinger

So far, we have dealt with doppelgängers who, according to the authors of the tales they are in, really do exist. They have bodies of their own, even if, in Jekyll and Hyde’s case, they are two distinctly different sides of a person manifesting in distinctly different versions of the same body.

But some doppelgängers are even harder to pin down. Some are manifestations of the disturbed states of mind that Rank and Freud associate with the idea of the double.

How realistically, for instance, should we read the doppelgänger who takes over the protagonist Golyadkin’s life in The Double (1846) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky? As in some versions of the doppelgänger theme, the double shows Golyadkin a better life he might be living, as he is more charming and more successful. Yet this only torments Golyadkin, ultimately causing him to break down and be taken to an asylum.

This framing allows us to interpret the novel as a study of mental illness. Perhaps Golyadkin never saw a double, only imagined that he did. Each scene in which his double outperforms him is merely a hallucination. In this way, the double heralds his inevitable decline into madness, acting as a harbinger.

When characters see double, it is often a sign that they will go mad, die, or both. David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2017) drew on the Surrealist interest in doubles (see the recurring figures in bowler hats in René Magritte’s paintings, or twin-like figures in the paintings of Remedios Varo).

Twin Peaks opens with the death of Laura Palmer, but her doppelgänger haunts the ensuing episodes in the shape of her cousin Maddy (played by the same actress, Sheryl Lee). Maddy’s appearance increasingly blends with Laura’s, blurring the line between life and death. The idea is pushed even further in the Black Lodge, a mysterious spirit realm where the series protagonist, Agent Dale Cooper, encounters a series of doppelgängers, including an evil version of himself who tries to prey on his increasing detachment from reality to entrap him.

Modern-Day Doppelgängers

We live in the age of the doppelgänger. Proliferating versions of ourselves, which make it harder to tell what is real and what is fake: putting it this way, it looks like the authors of doppelgänger literature throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries were uncannily predicting the modern intersection of identity and technology.

Identity theft is easier than ever. The modern equivalents of Poe’s William Wilson, or Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde, are committing fraud or catfishing. Wilde’s Dorian Gray is all over social media, meticulously crafting idealized versions of himself. We might often feel alienated like Dostoyevsky’s Golyadkin by discovering, online, someone who seems to be living our exact life, but better.

Modern storytelling remains fascinated by the doppelgänger. Its core questions around the nature of humanity have become more pressing in the age of artificial intelligence. In 2021, a Danish theater company turned to a story by Hans Christian Andersen, The Shadow (1847), to imagine the modern possibilities in a tale of terror in which a man’s shadow takes on his personality and ultimately kills him.

The production modernized the story, transforming The Shadow into a tale of man versus machine and asking what happens when “the humanized capabilities of AI become enriched the more that man loses oneself within the digital expanse.” The production cast an AI actor as the shadow, but interestingly, conjured it using the 19th-century illusion known as ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ (involving a figure hidden from the audience and projected onto a mirror).

We remain tantalized by the prospect of splitting ourselves and discovering whether our ‘other half’ might live the way we’ve always wanted to, or whether this might conjure up a dark side we never knew we had.

The Substance (directed by Coralie Fargeat, 2024) blends core themes from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dorian Gray, but applies them to a woman, a fading celebrity in modern Los Angeles. Elisabeth’s desire to live as her younger, more beautiful doppelgänger, Sue, is a product of contemporary pressures on women. In the uncanny way described by Rank and Freud, this desire is a form of ego protection and yet leads inevitably to destruction. Like Jekyll and Hyde, Elisabeth and Sue cannot coexist, a warning about the dangers of indulging our doppelgänger dreams.

Author Henry James constantly moved between two worlds: from the 19th century to the 20th, realism to modernism, and America to Europe. Like many expatriate American writers who followed him in the 20th century, he developed a double consciousness, taking on the ways of his adopted English society but retaining an ability to analyze it as an outsider. He drew on this double life to write novels revered as much for their notoriously difficult prose as for their presentation of contrasts between the Old World and the New.

Early Life in New England

The James family was famously brilliant. Henry James Sr. was a utopian theologian immersed in the intellectual life of mid-19th-century Massachusetts, rubbing shoulders with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

When his children were born, he was living in Washington Square, New York City, the eponymous location of an early novel by his son. Henry James Jr. would describe the neighborhood as having “a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city.” Here, one might “come into a world which appeared to offer a variety of sources of interest” (James 2001, p. 13). He would never completely lose this interest in the genteel world of high-society New York, but he would cast his sights further afield before long.

Henry James Jr. was born in 1843, a year after his brother William, who would go on to become an eminent and innovative psychologist. William James’s experimental, empiricist psychology was founded on his early training in physiology and medicine, as well as an interest in philosophy, in which he took after his father.

William and Henry James were close to their sister Alice, whose bouts of mental illness seem to have influenced both brothers’ work. Alice was also a writer, keeping a diary for the last three years of her life, which has become a source of scholarly interest for its revelations about the James family and in its own right, as a study of illness.

A Cosmopolitan Youth

A cosmopolitan, in the 19th century, was someone whose worldview was untrammeled by national borders; someone who had spent time absorbing the culture of multiple countries. In America, particularly, someone who had traveled extensively in Europe. The James family was as cosmopolitan as they come.

Henry was not yet one when his father sold the house in Washington Square, and the family upped sticks to Europe. They returned intermittently to New York, but between the ages of 12 and 17, Henry spent more time abroad than at home. His father’s work took him to intellectual centers such as Paris, Geneva, and London.

According to 19th-century tradition, a young American returning from such travels could now consider himself sufficiently worldly and cultured to become a writer, which James did after quickly abandoning his studies at Harvard Law School. From the very start, James was interested in what he would later term ‘the art of fiction,’ publishing criticism as well as stories, and making friends with important figures in the literary circles of New York, Boston, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In his late twenties, he felt a pull to return to Europe. There, he mixed with even more eminent Victorians, many of them cosmopolitans like himself. From the world of English literature, he met George Eliot (who was working on her own novels set partly in Europe, 1871’s Middlemarch and 1876’s Daniel Deronda), Charles Dickens, and the critics Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin.

Rome and Paris offered long-term prospects for James as a foreign correspondent for American publications. In 1875, he spent a year living in Paris’s famed Latin Quarter, again managing to make the acquaintance of authors whose names would go down in history: Émile Zola, the master of literary naturalism; Guy de Maupassant, practitioner of the short story; Ivan Turgenev, advocate of Russian literature in the West.

The stage was set for James to start penning classics of his own. His early novels dealt, perhaps predictably enough, with wealthy heiresses in New York society, struggling artists in Rome, and the contrasting values and ways of life in the New World of America versus the Old World of Europe. See his revealingly titled novels The American (1877) and The Europeans (1878).

Settling in England

It was not until he settled in London that James hit his stride, drawing together the influences of his affluent, learned New England upbringing with his cosmopolitan education and passion for the literary traditions of France and England.

Moving among the upper echelons of British society, James developed an interest in (and a keen ability to analyze) both the people within this society and the effects of this society on outsiders such as himself. Americans, with their innocent optimism and zeal for taking life by the horns, might easily find themselves at odds with world-weary Europeans, whose cynicism comes from having seen and done everything that the Old World, stuffed with so many artistic treasures that beauty becomes passé, has to offer.

Many of James’s friends and readers were well-off women. Unsurprisingly, his first successful novels featured protagonists plucked from this demographic: Daisy Miller (1878) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Both novels examine the problems of courtship for young, wealthy, and brilliant women whose privileged, cosmopolitan experiences set them at odds with the norms of behavior for married women.

James has been both praised and criticized for how he portrays women. He claimed to have been inspired by George Eliot’s ordinary yet remarkable heroines, such as Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. “Place the centre of the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness,” he wrote, “and you get as interesting and as beautiful a difficulty as you could wish” (James 1908, Preface).

This is partially an explanation of James’s approach in Portrait of a Lady, which is considered his first masterpiece for the way it interrogates the interiority of its heroine, Isabel Archer, as she contemplates marriage and throughout her marriage to the egotistical Gilbert Osmond. It is also more broadly a defense of his highly interiorized technique. James admired Eliot’s ability to prove how much her female characters “insist[ed] on mattering” by placing them front and center in her novels, making their consciousnesses adequate subjects for serious, intellectual fiction, and he aimed to do the same.

The 1890s: James’s Crisis Point

By the late 1880s and early 1890s, James was living in London, often visiting Paris and re-immersing himself in French literature. His 1890 novel The Tragic Muse, with its actress protagonist, revealed his strong interest in the theater, and was followed by an attempt to conquer the West End.

Guy Domville, which premiered in January 1895, ran for just one month and was greeted with booing. Audiences did not quite share James’s interest in the conflict between worldly and religious lives, played out in the 18th-century protagonist’s flirtations with entering a monastery versus continuing the family line. Famously, when the protagonist spoke the line, “I’m the last, my lord, of the Domvilles,” an audience member shouted out: “It’s a bloody good thing you are!”

The conflict in Guy Domville was pertinent to James: not because he had designs upon a religious life but because celibacy and all-male companionship were on his mind. Guy Domville was staged by the manager of the St. James’s Theater, George Alexander, already known for promoting Oscar Wilde’s comedy Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892). Alexander would become notorious later in 1895 as the producer of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, which was running at St. James’s when the playwright was arrested and convicted for homosexuality.

Perhaps in the spirit of rivalry, James had called Wilde’s play An Ideal Husband “crude,” “feeble,” and “vulgar.” But in a letter reacting to Wilde’s arrest, he stressed the “sickening horribility” of having one’s private life exposed and made into a “spectacle” (Matheson 726).

Objecting to the indignity of being made conspicuous for one’s sexuality, James here fuels the theory of several critics who have speculated that he was closeted. Like his friend Robert Louis Stevenson in the classic Gothic novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, James seemed interested in the possibilities afforded by modern, urban life for hiding in plain sight.

The 1890s brought James a series of personal and professional crises, which, as the themes of Guy Domville suggest, must have made him conscious of his public perception. He was brought down by the deaths of his sister Alice in 1892, then Stevenson in 1894, and then his close friend Constance Fenimore Woolson.

An erudite, cosmopolitan writer like James, Woolson had kept up an intense, 14-year friendship with him, founded on rivalry and mutual obfuscation. Both felt they had something to hide. It remains open to debate what, exactly, they felt for each other: words flowed freely between them when discussing each other’s work, but when it came to their feelings, a wall of silence sprang up. Undoubtedly, James was affected by her probable suicide in Venice in 1894. From here on, his work grew yet more contemplative, yet more complex.

Henry James’s Masterpieces

After the hardships of the 1890s, James reached his apex as a writer, although he now stuck firmly to novels, short stories, and criticism. In works from the late 1890s and 1900s, he integrated his previous ‘international theme’ with an interest in drama, psychological depth, and awakening consciousness of sexuality.

He published The Turn of the Screw in 1898: a Gothic horror novella which turns on the unreliable narration of a governess who believes her young wards to be possessed by the spirits of former staff at the mansion. Part of the governess’s outrage (although it is not quite overtly spelled out) comes from the possibility that these children have, through these evil spirits, been exposed to sexual knowledge.

The Awkward Age, the following year, was less Gothic in style but similarly explored a young girl’s awareness of sexuality among the adults around her, as did What Maisie Knew (1897). James’s increasingly oblique style matched this subject. The novels are full of euphemism and circumlocution, mimicking the way people talk around their feelings (and juxtaposing it with the straight-talking of children).

Other masterpieces from this period were The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). James’s themes of cosmopolitan experience and the problem of marriage, especially for women, remain intact. With these novels, though, James mastered the prose for which he is known: both wandering and precise, fixated on pursuing every facet of a character’s inner workings and thought processes.

Final Years and Impact

Henry James wrote most of his masterpieces after settling in the English seaside town of Rye in 1898, in a Georgian villa called Lamb House. He lived here for the next 18 years, only returning to America for short visits. He never married, but devoted himself to filling Lamb House with art, developing its gardens, and inviting numerous literary friends, including H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad.

In the early 1900s, James undertook the huge task of editing and compiling his novels for a collection known as the New York edition, revising some and writing prefaces explaining his intentions. By this time, he was dictating his words to a secretary rather than writing or typing them himself, which has been proposed as a reason for his labyrinthine sentences.

Yet each word is scrupulously chosen, and it can often take more than one reading to comprehend a Henry James sentence. Take this example, from his 1908 preface to Portrait of a Lady:

“These are the fascinations of the fabulist’s art, these lurking forces of expansion, these necessities of upspringing in the seed, these beautiful determinations, on the part of the idea entertained, to grow as tall as possible, to push into the light and the air and thickly flower there; and, quite as much, these fine possibilities of recovering, from some good standpoint on the ground gained, the intimate history of the business – of retracing and reconstructing its steps and stages.” (James 1908, Preface)

By the time the First World War broke out, James had good reason to consider himself more English than American. Like many in Britain’s artistic circles, he was horrified by the prospect of war in Europe, a place he saw as a cradle of culture and freedom. As an American, James was doubly horrified at his home nation’s initial lack of intervention. In 1915, in an act of protest, he gave up his American citizenship and became a naturalized British citizen.

His fiction remains difficult to categorize because of this straddling of worlds. In terms of style, he matured to a prolix, dense prose that, especially in its psychological complexity, anticipated modernist writers who would come to maturity just after his death in 1916, such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

He can be grouped with British writers of the period, sharing the cosmopolitan vision of predecessors such as George Eliot and John Ruskin; but his reflections on American sensibility set him apart. Ultimately, this double vision from a long, transnational life makes Henry James unlike any other author. It’s no wonder readers call him The Master.

Sources

• James, Henry (1908). The Portrait of a Lady, New York edition.
• James, Henry (2001). Washington Square. Project Gutenberg edition.
• Matheson, Neill (1999). ‘Talking Horrors: James, Euphemism, and the Specter of Wilde’, American Literature Vol. 71, No. 4.

One of the key figures of German Romanticism, ETA Hoffmann was not just a composer and music critic, but also an author and important innovator of tales of the fantastic, supernatural, and uncanny. Drawing on folkloric elements, childhood imaginings, and the deep workings of the subconscious, Hoffmann’s stories have profoundly shaped literary history since they first appeared in the early 19th century. Beyond that, they have provided inspiration for operas, ballets, films, and television shows. Here are five of his most compelling works.

1. The Nutcracker and the Mouse King

Every Christmas, a ballet company somewhere is bound to be performing The Nutcracker. First performed in 1892, the ballet was a collaboration between Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and choreographer Marius Petipa. Tchaikovsky’s sugary score, Petipa’s delicate and dazzling set pieces, and the enchanting scenery (The Nutcracker was intended as a “ballet-féerie,” a subgenre of ballet that relies on spectacular visual effects) are all elements that capture the magic of ETA Hoffmann’s original short story, first published in 1816.

There are minor differences between Hoffmann’s story and Tchaikovsky’s ballet: the heroine is named Marie in the story and Clara in the ballet, while the ballet does not include a subplot from the story that details how the young prince was turned into a nutcracker. Tchaikovsky’s and Petipa’s libretto was not based directly on Hoffmann’s story but on an 1844 adaptation by the French author Alexandre Dumas père. 

By and large, though, the ballet retains the essential components of Hoffmann’s story. On Christmas Eve, young Marie is given a nutcracker in the traditional shape of a soldier figurine by her imposing and mysterious godfather, Herr Drosselmeyer. More interested in his own toy soldiers, Marie’s brother Fritz accidentally breaks the nutcracker, but Drosselmeyer (who turns out to be a skillful toymaker) manages to do some remedial repairs, and Marie sets down the nutcracker to rest.

Overnight, she goes to check on the invalid and finds the house under attack by the terrifying, seven-headed Mouse King and his army of mice. The nutcracker, now grown to human size, defends Marie, backed by an army of gingerbread men and the children’s other toys, and Marie clinches the battle at the last moment by throwing her shoe at the Mouse King.

Tchaikovsky was drawn to The Nutcracker and the Mouse King because, characteristically for Hoffmann, it blurs the lines between reality and fantasy through the lens of childhood. In its young female heroine, Marie, the story celebrates childhood as a time of access to imaginative dreamscapes that, as adults, we long to recover.

The story emphasizes Marie’s ability to find magic in ordinary household objects such as the grandfather clock and the toy cabinet, and the adults’ insistence that she is only imagining things. Although the story employs a classic trope by consigning its most exhilarating moments to dreams, there is no moment when the author pulls away the curtain and definitively says: “It was only a dream.” There is no clear division, in Hoffmann’s writing, between the dream world and reality.

2. The Sandman

One of Hoffmann’s other best-known stories similarly fascinates readers because of its exploration of dreams and the unconscious. The Sandman is a truly terrifying story whose complexities, both psychological and literary, give it its power to surprise and entrance readers even today.

Beginning with a series of letters between the protagonist, Nathanael, his fiancée Clara, and Clara’s brother Lothair, the narrative soon unravels as the narrator (a friend of Lothair) interjects and confesses that he has contrived to open the story in a way “calculated to arrest your attention.” Henceforth, he promises, the story of Nathanael’s “ominous life” will get only more bizarre—but, he insists, it is all true, for “nothing is more wonderful, nothing more fantastic than real life.”

The opening letters establish that all through his childhood, Nathanael lived in fear of the Sandman, a character from folklore who is said to scatter sand onto our eyes as we fall asleep to help us sleep soundly and peacefully. Nathanael, though, associates the Sandman with having to leave his parents at night, and his fears are worsened by old wives’ tales about this evil visitor throwing sand into children’s eyes so that they will pop out and he can steal them. Worse still, he imagines that a lawyer friend of his father’s, Coppelius, is the Sandman in disguise—a grotesque figure whom Nathanael sees, one day, conducting a mysterious alchemical experiment. Surrounded by apparitions of eyeless faces, Coppelius pulls embers out of a furnace and hammers them into shape: “Eyes here! Eyes here!,” he cries, advancing on a terrified Nathanael before his vision (was it real or a hallucination?) ends.

Later in the story, an older Nathanael has moved away but is still so haunted by Coppelius that he becomes suspicious of a glasses merchant he meets called Coppola, who hawks his wares by shouting about “fine eyes.” Nathanael has also fallen in love with the daughter of Coppola’s friend Spallanzani, Olympia, a beautiful, accomplished pianist and singer, but responds stiffly and mechanically to his advances. As it turns out, Olympia is an automata created by Spallanzani with the help of Coppola. Finding the two men tussling over her, Nathanael discovers not only that Olympia is a doll but that Coppola is really Coppelius. As the fight ends with Olympia’s glass eyes falling out, Nathanael is dragged back into the psychic trauma of his childhood.

Hoffmann’s story has had an afterlife as vivid as the tale itself. Its exploration of women’s objectification through automata was especially suggestive for works of opera and ballet, which place women front and center whilst obliging them to perform mechanically. Jacques Offenbach’s opera Les contes d’Hoffmann (1851) used the plot of The Sandman for its first act, while the ballet Coppélia (1870), with music by Léo Delibes and libretto by Charles-Louis-Étienne Nuitter, borrowed names and the central conceit from Hoffmann’s tale.

The Sandman also caught the attention of Sigmund Freud, who offered a psychoanalytic reading in his 1919 essay The Uncanny. Though not the first to theorize about the uncanny (an unsettling sensation of simultaneous familiarity and unfamiliarity), Freud took up the suggestion of his predecessor, psychiatrist Ernst Jensch, that Hoffmann’s stories were a perfect literary case study of the phenomenon. Discussing the story’s eyes motif, which he understands as indicative of the Oedipus myth or castration complex, Freud calls Hoffmann “the unrivaled master of the uncanny in literature.”

3. Ritter Gluck

Hoffmann’s first published story was another uncanny tale and an early example of the doppelgänger in literature. While The Nutcracker and the Mouse King and The Sandman bear some imprints of Hoffmann’s musical pursuits, and indeed most of his stories involve music in some way, Ritter Gluck (1809) actually features a composer—or does it?

The narrator of Ritter Gluck meets a mysterious stranger in Berlin’s Tiergarten as the two listen to one of the orchestral performances that typically took place in such parks in the 19th century. They find they have a shared admiration for the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (whose middle name Hoffmann adopted as a sign of his own admiration) and Christoph Willibald Gluck.

The stranger gets the orchestra to perform the overture to one of Gluck’s operas, and the narrator suspects he must therefore be a Kapellmeister—a music-master employed to write and perform for a German church or court. But the stranger is given to sudden disappearances and is gone before the narrator can work out who he is and where he has come from.

They meet again, and the stranger laments the sorry state of the music scene in Berlin, where the orchestras neglect Mozart and, worse, ruin Gluck. He disappears again, and the narrator eventually finds him outside a theater where Gluck’s opera Armide is being performed. Promising to give the narrator a better rendition of the work, the stranger takes him to a curious house, where everything is furnished in an outdated style. The stranger performs a masterful and true-to-the-original version of Gluck’s overture and finally reveals—or claims—that he is Gluck.

Hoffmann’s story is set in 1809 when the real, historical Gluck had been dead for over twenty years. This might account for the outdated furnishings of the stranger’s house: perhaps he is Gluck’s ghost, lingering in his strangely unchanged surroundings. Or perhaps the stranger is just a Gluck aficionado, who convinces himself, because he can play his music so brilliantly, that he really is the composer—it is for the reader to decide.

4. The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr

One of Hoffmann’s most unusual works, the novel The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr was left unfinished on the author’s death in 1822. Its title pays homage to a similarly experimental novel, Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759). However, while Sterne’s work was a freewheeling take on the conventions of the Bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel, in which the protagonist narrates the story of their life from beginning to end (Tristram Shandy does not get to his birth until Volume Three), Hoffmann’s satire goes a step further: the protagonist proudly telling his life story is not a human, but a highly literate cat.

For much of Tomcat Murr, we are reading, as the title suggests, the life and opinions (he has many) of a cat named Murr, who has secretly learned to write by raiding the library of his owner, the magician Master Abraham. But, as the novel’s full title suggests, Murr has not used totally blank paper for his memoirs: we are reading The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr together with a fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper.

Murr’s memoirs are frequently interrupted—sometimes mid-sentence—by passages from Johannes Kreisler’s biography. Like the ghostly Gluck in Hoffmann’s earlier story, Kreisler is a Kapellmeister employed by a court to write music. The grouchy, eternally unfulfilled Kreisler’s sections of the novel tell of his unrequited yearning for a beloved muse, Julia, and the mistreatment he receives as a jobbing composer from society.

If this complex narrative structure and the inclusion of a proto-magical-realist literate cat were not innovative enough, Hoffmann’s novel contains another postmodern flourish. Johannes Kreisler was not just a character in Tomcat Murr, but featured in a series of earlier, semi-fictional writings about music that Hoffmann published under the title Kreisleriana (1813). Using Kreisler as a mouthpiece allowed Hoffmann to distinguish between his music criticism and more satirical, often scathing, pieces of writing about the contemporary music world.

Like the blurring of reality and fantasy in Hoffmann’s other works, the invention of Kreisler has both helped and hindered later critics and historians in understanding Hoffmann’s own life and opinions, since it is hard to draw a line between the author and his alter ego. Kreisler may have been fictional, but he seemed to many to embody the values of Romanticism so completely that his importance in literary and musical history is equal to that of his creator. The composer Robert Schumann was so inspired by Kreisleriana that he wrote a set of piano pieces under the same title, while a young Johannes Brahms styled himself as Johannes Kreisler (Schafer 1975, 119).

5. The Golden Pot

First published in 1814, the novella The Golden Pot is another work that displays Hoffmann’s remarkable capacity to include a host of stereotypical Romantic fairytale elements and, simultaneously, to work outside the parameters of form, style, and genre. Like The Sandman and Tomcat Murr, The Golden Pot employs an unusual structure, told as a series of twelve “vigils,” and features a metanarrative device: towards the end of the novella, the narrator becomes a character in the tale.

Magical touches abound in The Golden Pot, although unlike the other stories mentioned here, these are less suggestive of childhood fantasies or childhood trauma and more connected to traditions from folklore, mythology, and even alchemy and theology. There is a lovelorn student protagonist, Anselmus; an old apple-monger who turns out to be a witch; a mysterious archivist, Lindhorst, who turns out to be a salamander; and his daughter, Serpentina, with whom Anselmus falls in love. Set to work by Lindhorst transcribing ancient Arabic and Coptic texts, Anselmus is also tasked with not spilling a drop of ink on the originals, a task he succeeds in with the help of Serpentina.

As a fire snake, Lindhorst has been sent out from the mythical land of Atlantis. He can only return when he has succeeded in marrying off his three snake daughters to humans, bestowing at the same time their dowry: a golden pot. But when the apple-monger bewitches Anselmus with a magic mirror, he comes to believe that the salamander and Serpentina are not real and mistakenly splashes one of the ancient texts with ink. Lindhorst (or the salamander) takes revenge by imprisoning him in a tiny crystal bottle. Eventually, after a battle between the witch and salamander, all is well, with Anselmus and Serpentina finally ending up in Atlantis.

Just as The Sandman lent itself to operatic and balletic retellings, The Golden Pot is steeped in the theatrical culture of its time. Hoffmann was working as a music director in Dresden while he wrote the novella. During this time, he conducted Mozart’s The Magic Flute, which has similar themes of the protagonist undergoing trials to win the love of a magician’s ward. Hoffmann was also working on his own opera, Undine (premiered in 1816), which is similarly about an anthropomorphic woman-creature who gains immortality through the love of a human man. These touches, along with the apple monger with a magic mirror who recalls the witch in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (first published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812), make The Golden Pot a quintessential fairytale. Its idiosyncratic manner of telling, however, is pure Hoffmann.

Reference List:

Schafer, R. Murray (1975). E.T.A. Hoffmann and Music. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Jane Austen’s novels promote the idea of virtuous living within a complex social setting, delivering stories that contain moral education. Austen drew on a classical tradition that had enumerated the virtues necessary for a good life and the ideas of Christian virtue that permeated her own life. In the novels, moral improvement involves, as writer and critic C.S. Lewis observed, the experience of a profound self-awareness. Austen carefully choreographs her characters’ actions, using what Lewis calls a “grammar of conduct,” leading them on a journey of success or failure in achieving moral improvement.

Austen’s Use of Classical Virtues

The Greek philosopher Aristotle defined virtue as that which “will be the state of character which makes a man good and which makes him do his own work well.” Jane Austen’s novels flesh out the complexity of that process. For Austen, a virtue is not the capacity to obey rules and meet obligations. She focuses on character virtues developed through life experience that define the choices her characters will make.

Many critics have speculated about the sources of Austen’s approach to virtue, with some pointing to similarities she shares with Aristotle, who, in his work The Nicomachean Ethics, outlined a detailed scheme of what was necessary to achieve happiness. For Aristotle, the pursuit of happiness was both practical, rooted in action and choices, and philosophical, leading to wisdom.

Aristotle produced what philosopher Gilbert Ryle described as “copious and elastic discriminations,” focusing on excesses and deficiencies that strayed from what Aristotle defined as the mean, or the ideal middle way. For Aristotle, the way to happiness was to find the middle way in conduct.

Thus, in Austen’s novels, characters are drawn away from this middle ground by complex family and social relationships as they strive for happiness. For some, like Darcy and Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, this results in joy; for others, like Lydia and Mr. Wickham, the refusal to follow the path of moderation ends in hardship.

Some critics detect a Christian aspect of Austen’s view of the virtues. Her father, a clergyman, had a scholarly background and may well have influenced Jane’s interest in the virtues. As a result, although not explicitly depicted in the novels, Christian virtues such as faith, hope, and charity were added to the classical virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude.

The Challenges of the Virtuous Life

In Jane Austen’s novels, the virtuous life is not easy. Happiness comes at a cost and is won by struggle and sacrifice. The choice to pursue a course of virtuous action can follow careful deliberation, as with Elinor in Sense and Sensibility. It can also emerge from a natural inclination learned through habit, as Fanny Price demonstrates in Mansfield Park. In both cases, the decision to pursue virtue and seek personal happiness creates obstacles that disrupt the lives of the protagonists and those in their immediate social circle.

In Sense and Sensibility, unlike her sister Marianne, who allows emotion to overwhelm her, Elinor keeps her head, preserving the vital virtue of prudence. By contrasting the two sisters, Austen highlights the importance of maintaining self-control in society. For Elinor, the virtues of temperance and prudence are essential. For Marianne, their lack becomes problematic.

Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, is placed in a domestic situation with the Bertram family, which requires her to draw on her hard-won internal resources. She becomes what Lewis calls the “spectator of deceptions.” While the characters who inhabit or pass through the grand Bertram family house act out their virtues and vices, Fanny remains constant in her refusal to be affected or changed by them. Fanny resists the advances of Henry Crawford and the attempts by his sister Mary to tempt her into making ill-judged choices. Fanny emerges resolute and, by the novel’s end, is ready to marry Edmund.

The Complexity of a Life of Virtue

Aristotle described the path of the virtuous life as one of moderation. In Jane Austen’s novels, we also witness the complexity and variety of virtues. There are no simple choices between good and evil in Austen’s work. Her characters are not cardboard characters inhabiting a simplistic moral universe. This enables subtle comparisons of temperament, desire, and capacity. Fine details of excess or deficiency in virtue are examined for narrative effect.

In Sense and Sensibility, the difference between Lucy Steele and the Dashwood sisters lies in the contrast between false emotion and the capacity for careful deliberation in moral matters. With Elinor and Marianne, we see the inner complexity of their lives as they struggle for coherence in their ethical judgments.

Darcy, in Pride and Prejudice, is portrayed as a snob who is disdainful of those he considers inferior. But Elizabeth senses depth to Darcy’s character and explores these throughout the novel, challenging him whenever necessary. Darcy eventually succumbs to Elizabeth’s pressure. But Austen does not stop there. In prompting the transformation of Darcy, Elizabeth comes to important self-knowledge. “I never knew myself,” Elizabeth admits after encountering Darcy in all his complexity.

Austen displays skill at delineating subtleties of character, even with someone as imperturbable as the hero of her most famous novel. Austen does not confine this approach to her hero and heroine. Each of the Bennet sisters exemplifies an aspect of pride gone wrong. Jane’s lack of pride becomes indifference to consequences, while Lydia’s presumption leads to an ill-judged marriage.

Doing the Right Thing in Austen’s World

For Aristotle, what was correct in personal conduct was whatever was done “at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way, is what is both intermediate and best, and this is characteristic of virtue.”

In Jane Austen’s novels, this principle dominates the narrative. It is the principle of the moderate middle way, and few characters escape its controlling effect. At the foundation of this principle is the necessity of deliberation. In Austen’s novels, characters who cannot deliberate bring disorder into their lives. Even with a character as prudent in her judgments as Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, it may take the course of the entire narrative for the right balance to be achieved.

Emma Woodhouse in Emma takes it upon herself to become a matchmaker. She fails to deliberate sufficiently about the consequences of this choice, and it falls to Mr. Knightley to act as the correcting force. He stands back, viewing the results of Emma’s interference. Throughout the novel, George Knightley openly critiques Emma, ultimately guiding her to moral improvement. In his eyes, Emma has failed to do what was right for the right person at the right time. Her scheming has been born of a deficiency in practical reasoning, which leads to an insensitivity toward others. Emma has strayed from the middle way of careful reasoning.

In Emma, the heroine illustrates the negative impact upon others of a lack of empathy. Acceptance of the judgment of others and personal humility are the only ways this vice can be corrected. Mr. Knightley becomes the source of that correction.

The Rewards of Virtue

For Aristotle, each person seeks a goal, or what Aristotle called a “telos.” In Jane Austen’s novels, this end is dramatized as the final reward of virtuous acts, often in the form of marriage. While the novels have been described as domestic comedies, and marriage ultimately plays a central part in their conclusions, the happiness achieved by Austen’s characters is not confined to marital bliss. Happiness is achieved in a life lived well, meeting the demands of virtue, and in accordance with the principle of moderation. It is also illustrated by the establishment of a renewed social order.

Throughout the course of the narratives, each of Austen’s characters is challenged. They must show the extent to which they possess the virtues. Some meet the challenge, achieving personal union with another. Elizabeth and Darcy marry; Emma and Mr Knightley are wed at the end of the novel. By contrast, Henry Crawford and Maria in Mansfield Park reap the rewards from their transgressive choices, outcasts of the Bertram family society. Mr. Elliott and Mrs. Clay in Persuasion also suffer social banishment after straying from the path of moderation.

The virtues gained by Austen’s characters strengthen society. In this sense, she adds a Christian dimension to her narratives. Charity, the central virtue of Austen’s Christian faith, becomes the means whereby the disorder of polite society is banished, to be replaced by an order essential for the future lives of her characters.

Jane Austen’s novels promoted virtuous living through stories that dramatized the challenges of being virtuous, its complex nature, and the dangers of straying from the middle way into excess and deficiency in conduct. Her large array of characters allowed Austen to use narrative to overcome the limitations of moral instruction delivered in philosophical and religious tracts.

Though Thomas Hardy began writing poetry from a young age, he gained notoriety with his novels. As a Victorian realist, Hardy did not shy away from criticizing Victorian society and was sympathetic toward the declining rural populations in the United Kingdom. Many of his novels are set in a fictional region of rural Wessex in southwest England. Hardy’s novels are often dark, suspenseful, and even controversial, as he illustrated the darker side of human nature within his texts.

Here are ten of his most prominent novels. Most were inspired by Hardy’s own life, the people in it, and the rugged countryside surrounding him.

Who Was Thomas Hardy?

Born on June 2, 1840, in Dorset, England, Thomas Hardy grew up with a father who was a stonemason and a mother who devoted her time to educating her son before he began school at age eight. Hardy demonstrated academic potential. However, his formal education ended at age 16, as his parents could not afford to send him to university. He instead became apprenticed to a local architect and, skilled at the trade, moved to London in 1862 to work in the field. He enrolled in King’s College, London, in that same year.

Hardy never grew accustomed to life in London. He felt inferior to others in the city and was infuriated by the class divisions in its society. He became interested in social reform initiatives and began reading the works of English philosopher John Stuart Mill and English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold.

After a few years, Hardy returned to Dorset and settled in Weymouth, where in 1871 he began his writing career. In September 1874, Hardy married English writer and suffragist Emma Gifford. Her death in 1912 profoundly affected Hardy, who fell into a deep depression. He married again in 1914 to an English teacher and children’s writer named Florence Emily Dugdale.

In 1910, Hardy was appointed a Member of the Order of Merit and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. By 1927, he had received 25 nominations and was a finalist for the prize in 1923.

In his later years, Hardy adopted a Wire Fox Terrier, Wessex, who remained by Hardy’s side as he continued to write. On January 11, 1928, at the age of 87, Hardy dictated his final poem to his wife before passing away.

Hardy’s reflections on such themes as morality, social judgment, class, fate, and remorse were controversial in his own time and remain vital subjects of discussion in the 21st century. Hardy’s ashes can be visited in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey in London.

1. Desperate Remedies (c. 1871)

Hardy’s first published novel and one of his lesser-known works, Desperate Remedies, follows Cytherea Graye, who, after her father’s death, seeks employment and becomes a lady’s maid to the mysterious Miss Aldclyffe.

Cytherea falls for the architect Edward Springrove, but complications arise when she discovers he is already engaged. Meanwhile, the sinister Aeneas Manston pursues her, hiding a dark secret involving his supposedly dead wife.

Hardy interweaves gothic suspense into his sensation novel as arson, blackmail, and mistaken identities threaten Cytherea’s safety. Ultimately, Aeneas’s crimes are exposed, Edward’s prior ties dissolve, and Cytherea achieves both freedom and a hard-won future with Edward. The novel was released anonymously by the publisher Tinsley Brothers.

2. A Pair of Blue Eyes (c. 1873)

Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes follows Elfride Swancourt, a young, impressionable woman drawn into a love triangle with her first suitor, the earnest architect Stephen Smith, and later the older, intellectual critic Henry Knight. When Elfride’s past with Stephen is revealed, social prejudice and pride undermine both men’s claims to her affection.

Henry’s dramatic rescue binds him to her emotionally, but his moral rigidity soon drives them apart. Seeking security, Elfride impulsively marries another man, then dies tragically. Stephen and Henry confront their failures as they travel together to Elfride toward the end of the novel, both unaware that she had married another man and subsequently died. A Pair of Blue Eyes was Hardy’s first novel not to be published anonymously.

3. Far From the Madding Crowd (c. 1874)

Perhaps Hardy’s most celebrated novel, Far from the Madding Crowd follows Bathsheba Everdene, an independent young woman who inherits a farm and attracts three very different suitors: steadfast shepherd Gabriel Oak, wealthy but lonely farmer William Boldwood, and reckless soldier Sergeant Troy.

Bathsheba’s impulsive marriage to Sergeant Troy leads to heartbreak, financial strain, and tragedy, especially after Sergeant Troy’s neglect. William’s obsessive love culminates in violence when Sergeant Troy briefly reappears. After Sergeant Troy is killed and William is imprisoned, Bathsheba learns the value of loyalty and quietly builds a future with Gabriel, whose devotion endures.

Far from the Madding Crowd explores the conflict between independence and emotional responsibility through Bathsheba’s romantic relationships. By contrasting Gabriel’s stability with William’s obsession and Troy’s recklessness, Hardy critiques impulsive desire and romantic idealism. The novel highlights how chance and social conventions shape people’s lives, with Hardy ultimately arguing that stability, patience, and quiet endurance should be valued over passion.

4. The Hand of Ethelberta (c. 1876)

Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta depicts Ethelberta Petherwin, a clever, ambitious young woman who rises socially after marrying a wealthy, elderly man, only to have him die soon after their marriage.

Determined to support her large working-class family, Ethelberta becomes a celebrated poet and storyteller while carefully concealing her origins. Pursued by multiple suitors, including the loyal architect Christopher Julian, the aristocratic Lord Mountclere, and others drawn to her beauty and talent, Ethelberta navigates social ambition, romantic pressure, and family duty. Ultimately, she marries Lord Mountclere for security rather than love, only to find the union stifling.

The novel critiques class mobility, performance, and pragmatic marriage. Hardy employs the hallmarks of Victorian realism, a 19th-century literary movement that focused on social issues and the day-to-day lives of people, to depict life in the Victorian era, particularly the experience of ordinary people in rural communities in the southwest of England.

5. The Return of the Native (c. 1878)

The Return of the Native begins with Clym Yeobright’s return from Paris, in hopes of uplifting his community, but he is met instead by his mother, who disapproves of his marriage to the beautiful, restless Eustacia Vye.

Eustacia dreams of escaping her new home and grows disillusioned as Clym’s ambitions falter. Misunderstandings involving Clym’s cousin Thomasin and her unreliable husband, Damon Wildeve, intensify the tensions within the family.

A tragic chain of events leads to the drowning deaths of Eustacia and Damon. Clym, grief-stricken, becomes a wandering preacher, while Thomasin eventually finds stability with Diggory Venn.

The novel is set on Egdon Heath, a fictional moor of Hardy’s Wessex. Although the area is depicted as rural and largely uninhabited, residents earn their living by cutting the furze that grows there.

6. The Trumpet-Major (c. 1880)

Set during the Napoleonic Wars, Hardy’s The Trumpet-Major follows Anne Garland, who is pursued by the steady, honorable trumpet-major John Loveday, his impulsive sailor brother, Bob, and Festus Derriman, the cowardly nephew of a local squire.

Anne’s household is unsettled by military encampments, wartime anxieties, and the vain attentions of the boastful Festus Derriman. While John’s quiet devotion offers stability, Anne is drawn to Bob’s charm, despite his unreliability.

After romantic misunderstandings, departures, and returns, Bob ultimately reforms and wins Anne’s hand. John, heartbroken but dutiful, withdraws. The novel blends romance with the tensions of wartime England. The Trumpet-Major was Hardy’s only historical novel.

7. The Mayor of Casterbridge (c. 1886)

Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge follows Michael Henchard, a hot-tempered laborer who drunkenly sells his wife and infant daughter at a fair.

Years later, now a prosperous grain merchant and mayor of Casterbridge, Michael is shaken when his wife and daughter return. His attempt at restitution is undermined by pride, secrecy, and rivalry with the capable Donald Farfrae, who gradually surpasses him in business and public favor.

Michael’s past deceptions erode his remaining relationships. Bankrupted and isolated, he dies alone, leaving a note asking to be forgotten, embodying the novel’s themes of fate and remorse.

8. The Woodlanders (c. 1887)

The Woodlanders depicts Grace Melbury, raised above her humble origins by her ambitious father, and Giles Winterborne, the loyal woodsman who has long loved her.

When Grace marries the sophisticated but morally weak Dr. Edred Fitzpiers, jealousy, betrayal, and class tensions unravel their union. Edred’s affairs leave Grace isolated, while Giles’s unwavering devotion leads him to sacrifice his health and ultimately his life to protect her reputation. After Edred seeks reconciliation, Grace realizes too late the worth of Giles’s steadfast love.

The novel explores loyalty, desire, and the painful cost of social aspiration.

9. Tess of the d’Urbervilles (c. 1891)

One of Hardy’s most controversial novels, Tess of the d’Urbervilles follows Tess Durbeyfield, a poor but dignified young woman whose family’s claim of a noble ancestry sets her on a tragic path.

Sent to seek favor from the wealthy d’Urberville branch, she is exploited by Alec, an experience that shadows her life. Tess later finds love with the idealistic Angel Clare, but when she confesses her past, he rejects her. Poverty and desperation drive her back to Alec until Angel returns, repentant. Tess kills Alec in anguish and briefly escapes with Angel before her capture and execution.

The novel condemns social hypocrisy and rigid moral judgment and reflects on class, gender, and sexual norms in Victorian society. It exposes the double standards that punish Tess for her victimization while excusing male wrongdoing. Hardy presents Tess as morally pure yet socially condemned, emphasizing the role that rigid social structures have in shaping her tragic life. Through Tess’s suffering, the novel challenges notions of justice and purity, and portrays a society that destroys innocence through hypocrisy rather than compassion.

10. Jude The Obscure (c. 1895)

Hardy’s last major work of fiction, Jude the Obscure, portrays Jude Fawley, a bright, ambitious stonemason longing to study at Christminster, a fictional city modeled on Oxford. Trapped by a loveless marriage to Arabella Donn, he later falls deeply in love with his cousin, Sue Bridehead, whose intellectual independence challenges social norms.

Their attempt to live together outside marriage sparks public condemnation, poverty, and instability. The burden worsens when Sue’s children die in a horrific murder-suicide by Jude’s neglected son, “Little Father Time.” Crushed by guilt and societal pressure, Sue returns to her estranged husband, while Jude dies alone and defeated.

The novel critiques social rigidity, marriage laws, and thwarted aspiration.

The 14th century was a time of major economic and societal changes in the Italian peninsula. As commercial activity increased and generated considerable wealth, a new social structure began to form, with new actors and a new sensibility, more focused on earthly matters than spiritual concerns. Florence, where Giovanni Boccaccio spent much of his life, was at the heart of this upheaval, which found its way into his work. Indeed, his Decameron, a collection of 100 novellas written in Italian vernacular, laid the foundations for the humanist attitude of the Renaissance, breaking with medieval sensibilities.

Who Was Boccaccio?

Born in 1313 in Florence or in nearby Certaldo, Boccaccio was the son of Boccaccio di Chiellino, nicknamed “Boccaccino,” and an unknown woman. A wealthy Florentine merchant, Boccaccio officially recognized his illegitimate son. Thus, young Giovanni spent his childhood years in the San Pier Maggiore neighborhood among the Florentine gente nova (new people), the rising merchant class. In 1320, “Boccaccino” had another son with his wife, the noblewoman Margherita de’ Mardoli, whose family claimed a connection with Beatrice, Dante’s muse.

In 1327, at the age of 13, Boccaccio went to Naples with his father, who had received the influential position of agent of the Bardi Bank, one of the leading Florentine financial institutions. As Boccaccio’s father wanted his eldest son to follow in his footsteps, Giovanni began working at the changing desk of the Bardi Bank’s Neapolitan office.

At the time, Naples was a major economic and political center in the Mediterranean region. His “apprenticeship” at the bank gave young Boccaccio the opportunity to interact with people from all walks of life, honing the observational skills that would inform his future literary works.

Boccaccio, as the scion of a partner of the wealthy Bardi Bank, was admitted into the Angevine court, where he mingled with the local aristocracy and experienced the courtly chivalry of an elite yearning for an old world of refined customs and traditions. In Naples, Boccaccio also pursued his literary interests, coming into contact with the city’s learned circles, where he read, alongside the Classical Latin authors, Petrarch’s poetry.

In 1340, however, following the bankruptcy of the Bardi Bank, Boccaccio was forced to return to Florence, bringing his first literary works with him: Il filocolo (The Love Afflicted, ca. 1336), Il filostrato (The Love Struck, ca. 1338), and the epic Teseida (1340-41). Combining the courtly themes of chivalry and love with Boccaccio’s acute observation of real life, these early works had an important impact on the literary circles outside Italy, serving as inspiration for Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales.

In Florence, Boccaccio experienced financial difficulties, especially after his father’s death during the 1348 Black Death. In the same year, the deadly plague and its impact on Florence’s society inspired him to start penning his major work: the Decameron.

Italy in the 14th Century: Society, Religion, Literature

The bubonic plague was a catalyst for crucial changes in the social fabric of Europe, shaking the foundations of the feudal system. By the time the pandemic spread in the Italian peninsula, likely carried by Genoese ships traveling between Asia and Europe, 14th-century Italy was already experiencing a period of social and political reconfiguration.

Indeed, around this time, the considerable wealth generated by the flourishing commercial activities introduced a new key player in the urban landscape: the merchant class. The increased social standing of these gente nova challenged the status quo of the Italian city-states, where the ruling aristocracy saw their power base and worldview threatened. The tensions between these two classes caused a series of social, political, and religious conflicts.

The financial and social success of the rising merchant class also marked a change in values. While the Catholic Church continued to condemn money lending, branded as usury, and commerce, the attitude toward dealing with money and amassing wealth through trade began to shift.

Meanwhile, the general dissatisfaction with the tight control of the Church over religious matters, exacerbated by the weakening of the papacy’s power during the Avignon period (1309-1377), generated friction between the religious authority and lay institutions. The result was the emergence of a new “materialistic” sensibility, which promoted, especially among the merchant classes, a renewed concern for the earthly world and the interplay between its various actors and forces.

An acute observer of the world around him, Boccaccio infused the emerging worldview taking shape in Italy at the time into his Decameron, laying the groundwork for a new, secular literature.

The Decameron: Storytelling in the Time of Plague

Like Dante’s The Divine Comedy, the Decameron begins with a crisis that causes chaos and social upheaval. While Dante embarks on a supernatural journey from Hell to Paradise to seek redemption, Boccaccio finds a remedy to adversities in humankind’s resilience and ingenuity.

Indeed, in the proem introducing the Decameron, ten young people (seven women and three men) flee from Florence, where the Black Plague is causing death, anguish, and the breakdown of all social and moral norms. They find refuge in the countryside in nearby Fiesole, where they spend a fortnight holding banquets, dancing, playing, and inventing stories.

Every day, the brigata (brigade) elects a queen or king who directs their leisure activities and, more importantly, sets the rules for their storytelling. So, over the course of ten days (hence the title of the work, Decameron, meaning “Ten Days’ Work”), each member of the group tells a story (for a total of 100 tales). At the end of each day, the storytellers sing a ballad. In the prologues to the days and in some individual tales, Boccaccio adopts a classical style and vocabulary. However, the Decameron mostly features a vivid, swift, and tense prose.

On the first day, Pampinea allows her friends to “discourse of such matters as most commend themselves to each in turn.” The second day, under the rule of Filomena, the young men and women take turns in telling tales “of the fortunes of such as after divers misadventures have at last attained a goal of unexpected felicity.” On the third day, Neifile instructs the brigade to come up with stories where human will triumphs over fortune.

The fourth day, under the rule of Filostrato, is dedicated to tragic love stories. The following day, Fiammetta asks her companions to tell love stories where “good fortune [befalls] lovers after divers direful or disastrous adventures.” On days five, six, seven, and eight, Elissa, Dioneo, and Lauretta instruct the others to invent (often bawdy) tales focused on wit, trickery, and deceit.

After a ninth day, where, under the rule of Emilia, each member is free to choose a theme, the Decameron ends with Panfilo asking his friends to tell tales “of such as in matters of love, or otherwise, have done something with liberality or magnificence.” The final tale of the collection is The Patient Griselda, in which Boccaccio recounts the story of a popular character of medieval romance.

Key Themes: Fortuna & Amore

In the hundred tales narrated by the ten young Florentines, two fundamental forces are at play, causing various mishaps and vicissitudes: Fortuna (fortune) and Amore (love).

The idea of fortune as a force that distributed its gifts unevenly caught the imagination of many medieval writers. In their worldview, despite its apparent randomness, fortune was part of a preordained, divine plan. In Inferno VII, for example, Dante asks his guide, Virgil, about the nature of fortune. The Roman poet describes it as an agent of divine providence, giving away its gifts according to God’s inscrutable will.

With the rise of mercantile society, however, the concept of fortune undergoes a fundamental change. From an agent of divine design, it becomes a “natural,” if not yet entirely “materialistic,” force that presents a constant challenge to human enterprise. The son of a wealthy merchant, Boccaccio was well aware of how an unforeseen event can make or break a carefully devised plan.

In the Decameron, however, humankind is not helpless against the irrational turning of the “wheel of fortune.” Indeed, for one of the first times in the Middle Ages, Boccaccio praises those who use their industria (ingenuity) to struggle against adverse fortune, seizing every available opportunity to overcome it.

In the Decameron’s more “modern” world, the concept of love is also the subject of a radical transformation. In the last lines of Paradise (33, 145), Dante refers to God as “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Conversely, Boccaccio shows love as a natural force that should not be repressed.

The numerous sexual references of the Decameron and the bawdy tone of a number of tales have led to much debate over the work’s moral values. Some believe Boccaccio showed a blatant disregard for the morality of his time. On the other hand, others argue that it is no longer possible to consider his work obscene, emphasizing that he simply approached the concept of love from a “naturalistic” perspective.

The Decameron’s Legacy: A Step Out of the Middle Ages

In his influential analysis of Italian literature, 19th-century literary critic Francesco De Sanctis referred to the Decameron as a “Human Comedy” that introduces a new worldview and moral order after Dante’s Divine Comedy.

De Sanctis’s view may imply an overly rigid divide between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. However, the Decameron’s spirit, alongside its open celebration of ingenuity as a human virtue, is undeniably new, spearheading Humanism and the Renaissance. Indeed, Boccaccio’s collection of tales is both a celebration of all human experience, tragic and comic alike, and an attempt to raise vernacular literature to the status of the Classics.

In his later years, Boccaccio devoted much of his time to the study of Latin texts, and his Florentine house became a meeting spot for the circle of early Italian humanists. At the same time, he remained interested in Italian vernacular poetry. His Trattatello in laude di Dante (Little Tractate in Praise of Dante), written between 1351 and 1365, is a testament both to his passion for vernacular literature and admiration for Dante.

By the time of his death in 1375, a year after his friend and fellow poet, Petrarch, died, Boccaccio had already laid the foundations for the development of the Italian Renaissance.