It’s hard to separate life, legend, and literature when it comes to Mary Shelley. As the author of Frankenstein, she created a monster which outgrew the pages of her novel and took on a huge stature (often greenish, seamy, with bolts in its neck) of its own. While many know Shelley as the inventor of this proto-science fiction tale, plenty of people also know her as the young woman who was swept into the world of English Romantic literature by Percy Shelley. Is there more to the life of this remarkable Romantic?

Mary Shelley’s Illustrious Parents

With parents like hers, Mary Shelley was destined for literary fame. She wasn’t a modern-day ‘nepo baby’ so much as a child of pure intellectual radicalism. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, as she was named at birth on August 30, 1797, was the only child of a short-lived marriage between two of Britain’s most prominent enlightened thinkers: Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.

The marriage was short-lived (just five months) for two reasons. Firstly, Wollstonecraft and Godwin had known each other for years before they married. From a stormy start after a heated debate at a mutual friend’s dinner, they fell in love when they were reintroduced a few years later. Initially, there was no question of getting married.

Most know Wollstonecraft nowadays as a pioneering feminist and the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In this tract, Wollstonecraft argued that women were restricted by the expectation to make an advantageous marriage at all costs. What little education they received was aimed at making them decent wives rather than useful members of society.

Although she was not against partnerships between men and women, marriage, in its current state, struck Wollstonecraft as an unequal contract. Pursuing a relationship outside marriage—even a sexual one, contravening the moral standards of her society—was not unusual for Wollstonecraft. Before Godwin, she had attempted to found a partnership of equals with the painter Henry Fuseli (who was already married) and the explorer Gilbert Imlay (with whom she had a daughter, Fanny).

Godwin was also interested in living outside established norms, putting into practice the ideas in his best-known work, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). The notion of free love was just one facet of the book’s anarchism. Godwin believed that any exertion of state control over the individual ought to be scrutinized, from monarchy to property ownership to marriage.

As it turned out, the couple bowed to convention, getting married once Wollstonecraft discovered she was pregnant, so that their child would be legitimate. Although this cost Godwin several of his more radical supporters, far more importantly, he lost Wollstonecraft soon afterwards. On giving birth to Mary, she contracted a childbed fever and died within a fortnight.

Young Mary Godwin would never know her mother, though she may have heard scandalous gossip following the publication of William Godwin’s memoirs about her, which made publicly known her extramarital relationships. Aged four, Mary gained a stepmother when Godwin married his neighbor, Mary Clairmont, and a stepbrother and stepsister, Charles and Claire, joined the household along with her half-sister, Fanny Imlay.

Although Mary had no formal education, her father made sure she was well-read in literature, history, philosophy, and the sciences. Godwin may not have been the most present father, with his attentions increasingly drawn in multiple directions by the demands of his new family, but he was set on Mary becoming a writer. For a while, Mary enjoyed a level of parental support many female writers of the period did not receive.

She Ran Away With a Romantic Poet

Ironically, Mary lost her father’s support by living up to the radical principles he and Wollstonecraft had instilled in their daughter.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was 21 when he began visiting the Godwin household frequently, drawn by the prospect of conversation with the author of Political Justice, a work he considered formative. By this time, Shelley had already begun circulating poetry that some publishers rejected as too radical and had been expelled from University College, Oxford, for distributing a set of poems and tracts titled The Necessity of Atheism.

It’s not clear exactly what happened in the churchyard of St. Pancras, at Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave, in summer 1814. The story is shrouded in the kind of speculation that fuels our ongoing fascination with the figures of the Romantic period. Some say this was where Mary Godwin, aged 16, first declared her love to Percy Shelley. Some say this was where they first slept together.

Undoubtedly, St. Pancras’s churchyard had become a place of solace for Mary, who went there to think, read, and write, undisturbed by her stepfamily. Writing was her favorite hobby. What she loved most, she later recalled, was “the formation of castles in the air—the indulging in waking dreams” (Shelley 1831, introduction). She had learned to read by tracing her hand, with Godwin’s help, over the letters on Wollstonecraft’s gravestone. The place couldn’t have been closer to her heart.

In a rerun of her mother’s entanglement with Fuseli, however, Mary and Percy faced an important barrier to their relationship—he was already married. Despite his advocacy of free love, Percy had convinced the 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook to join him in re-envisioning what marriage might look like. All of this idealism became more complicated when he met and fell in love with Mary.

Godwin was not pleased at the prospect of his bright, brilliant daughter living with a political firebrand and spendthrift who had already displayed a tendency to flit from one woman to another. When Godwin tried to prevent the relationship, the couple decided to elope. They set their sights on France, accompanied by Mary’s 16-year-old stepsister Claire.

The Infamous Ghost Story Contest

Thanks to Claire, the Shelleys ended up making a return trip to the Continent in 1816. They had gone back to England the previous year, low on funds, Mary about to give birth. Her daughter was born prematurely and died within a couple of weeks. Depressed, she and Percy remained in London, and before long, they had a son, William, born in January 1816.

In the meantime, Claire was pursuing a poet even more infamous than Percy Shelley. Hoping to become a writer or actress, she began sending letters to, then visiting, Lord Byron at the Drury Lane Theatre, where he briefly served on a committee. Their blossoming affair need not be hindered, Claire felt, by Byron’s separation from his wife (amid rumors of abuse and incest with his half-sister) and self-exile in Europe. No, she and the Shelleys would follow him.

By May 1816, Byron was staying at the Villa Diodati, on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, with his doctor, John Polidori. Mary, Percy, their months-old son William, and Claire took up residence nearby.

It was a “wet, ungenial summer,” Mary later wrote, “and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house” (Shelley 1831, introduction). 1816 has since been famously termed a ‘year without a summer,’ the skies clouded and temperatures cooled by the aftershocks of the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the previous year. What could these five literary lights—all, to a greater or lesser degree, aspiring authors—do but hole themselves up and tell ghost stories?

After they had warmed up with a German collection called Fantasmagoriana, Byron suggested they each try to write their own ghost story. A sense of competition sprang up among them. Byron began a story, later published as a fragment, about a vampire. Polidori also wrote about a vampire, a conspicuously aristocratic vampire with some similarities to his patient. Percy Shelley channeled their talk about ghosts and spirits into his poem Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.

Growing more and more mortified, Mary struggled in vain to think of a story. She couldn’t conjure something out of nothing. What had she and her companions been touching on in their intellectual discussions? Experimental science, the origins of life, galvanism—using electrical currents to animate organisms as if they were alive. She pondered: “Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated” (Shelley 1831, introduction).

All it took now was a terrifying dream—of course, in this dreary, hallowed location, she could expect to have terrifying dreams—and Frankenstein was born. She began to write, and two years later, her “hideous progeny” (Shelley 1831, introduction) was published.

She Really Did Write Frankenstein as a Teenager

Appearing anonymously, with a preface by Percy Shelley and dedicated to William Godwin, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) was initially attributed to one or other of these prominent men.

Mary Shelley’s own introduction to a later edition, in 1831, credited Percy with encouraging her to expand the dream she had in Geneva into a fully fledged novel. She also set the record straight about its authorship: although he wrote the preface, she was responsible for inventing the whole story. After all, forming “castles in the air” and “indulging in waking dreams” had been her favorite activities since early childhood.

Now scarcely more than a teenager—just 20 when the novel was first published—Mary did not initially receive recognition for Frankenstein and its flights of imagination. She had not put her name to the first edition because some of its themes, especially its ambitious protagonist assuming the role of a God-like creator, might prove controversial.

But critics have debated the extent of Percy’s involvement ever since 1821, when her name first appeared on the title page. Some have argued that the novel is an instance of such close artistic collaboration, with the couple moving in the exact same intellectual circles and corresponding so closely on all of their ideas that it is impossible to separate their individual contributions.

Others argue that it is entirely Mary’s work, with Percy only providing minimal editorial suggestions, which can be spotted in different editions in 1818, 1823, and 1831, as well as in Mary’s original notebooks for the novel.

It’s possible that some readers over the decades have found it difficult to believe that an 18-year-old woman, as Mary was when she began Frankenstein, could turn out to be the progenitor of an entire genre we now call science fiction. Yet Mary’s own account of the novel’s origins, in her 1831 introduction, shows how she benefited from a rich intellectual circle and a predilection for Gothic stories.

Moreover, Frankenstein bears an emotional resonance that only Mary could have given it. It is a story of brilliant, negligent fathers: her portrait of Godwin. It is a story about a child whose entrance into the world brings devastation to his creator: her pain, perhaps, at never knowing Wollstonecraft. Its reflections on life, loneliness, and abandonment came from an author who knew the pains of both losing a child and being a lost child.

Perhaps, even, the novel’s wronged women (Frankenstein’s doomed love Elizabeth, the wronged servant Justine, the creature’s female companion who is destroyed before she is even born) come from Mary Shelley’s firsthand experience of women being cast aside: her mother, Shelley’s first wife Harriet, and Claire, who apparently said that “a few minutes of pleasure” with Byron had caused her “a lifetime of trouble.”

Mary Shelley’s Romantic Life

From the moment she was born, Mary Shelley was a true Romantic: unshackled by convention, always in search of knowledge, and unafraid to let her imagination roam free. Frankenstein, of course, went a long way towards confirming her status among Romantic writers, but like most of these writers, she continues to fascinate because of her life as much as her work.

After the infamous summer of 1816, she and Percy returned to England for what would be their final stint there together. Tragedy awaited them. In quick succession, they learned of the suicides of Fanny Imlay (Mary’s half-sister) and Harriet Shelley (Percy’s wife). Clouded in scandal, Percy and Mary got married, partly to gain custody of the two children Percy had had with Harriet. To make matters worse, Claire, who was still living with them, soon gave birth to Lord Byron’s daughter, Allegra.

Dogged by emotional trauma, ill health, mounting debts, and outrage at their unconventional domestic arrangements, the Shelleys left England for good shortly after the publication of Frankenstein in early 1818. They made for Italy, home of several Englishmen and women who found their native country’s social mores too restrictive (including Byron).

While their life in Italy was freer, Mary faced even more tragedy in these years. She lost another daughter in September 1818, and the following year, her son William died aged three. Ultimately, the couple’s only child to survive into adulthood would be Percy Florence, born later in 1819.

Did She Keep Percy’s Heart?

Tragedy struck again in 1822, when Percy drowned in a boating accident. Mary herself had had a near brush with death a few weeks before, during a miscarriage. Although Percy’s quick thinking (stanching the bleeding by sitting Mary in a bath of ice water) probably saved her life, the couple had become distant in recent years. Loss after loss weighed heavily on Mary, while Percy kept up his lifelong tendency to wander from woman to woman, in keeping with his belief in free love.

In July, Percy set off from the coast near Livorno with his friend Edward Williams (with whose wife Jane he was having an affair) for a sailing trip. They never returned. Ten days later, their bodies washed ashore near Viareggio.

A much later painting by Louis Édouard Fournier depicts the cremation of Shelley’s body on the beach, inaccurately showing Mary at the scene. An infamous Romantic story, possibly fabricated by Edward John Trelwany, a friend of the group who was at the cremation, tells that Shelley’s heart remained intact, calcified during the drowning. Trelawny wrote that he reached in and took the heart.

Of course, the idea of Shelley’s heart surviving the flames lent itself well to the fast-growing mythology around the Romantic poet. It made him sound like a saint—their bodies, too, could miraculously overcome death and decay.

It helped that when Shelley’s body was found, a copy of John Keats’s poem Lamia was found in his pocket. Shelley had written his own poem, Adonais, a year earlier to eulogize his fellow Romantic poet, and in this final act of myth-making, he united their legacies. Byron was soon to follow, carving out his own noble end fighting for Greek independence in 1824.

It may not have been Percy’s heart that made its way back to Mary. This is a suitably Gothic idea which overlooks the fact that, for his heart to survive cremation, he would have to have had some form of heart disease, and there is no evidence for this. Possibly, what Trelawny managed to preserve was Shelley’s liver, or some miscellaneous remains. Either way, Mary kept these, along with his ashes, in a silk parcel on her desk, wound round with a page from his poem Adonais.

More practically, she acted as guardian of Percy’s legacy by managing his estate, overseeing the editing and publication of his literary works, and raising their son, Percy. These are far more prosaic contributions to the story of the Shelleys than the tale of the calcified heart, but equally as important for sustaining the mythology which continues to intrigue us today.

What Else Did Mary Shelley Write?

Outliving her husband by 30 years, Mary Shelley had her own legacy to think of. Most know her as the teenage author of Frankenstein, but after Percy’s death, she resolved to make her living by writing and continued to publish novels.

Valperga (1823) and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830) were both historical novels, turning to real episodes from Italian and British history to explore questions about political systems and the power of the individual. Mary’s interests echoed those of her father, William Godwin, with whom she was now reconciled and who helped edit some of her works for publication. He refused, however, to help with the novel Mathilda, not published until 1959, in which a (possibly unreliable) heroine narrates the tale of her father’s incestuous desire for her.

Possibly her most impressive novel, The Last Man (1826), is a precursor to the disaster or apocalypse genre. With autobiographical nods to the late, great men of her life, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, the novel imagines a future world devastated by a pandemic. It is a striking, haunting piece of dystopian fiction, with ever more relevant reflections on how societies might respond to climate crises.

Along with Frankenstein, this novel demonstrates Mary Shelley’s great contribution to Romantic and Gothic literature, showcasing her extraordinary imagination—what she had called a passion for building castles in the air—as founder of two literary genres: science fiction and disaster fiction.

Mary Shelley never married again, though she kept up close friendships with many figures from the Romantic circles she and Percy had frequented. She lived out her mother’s feminist ideals by assisting downtrodden or cast-out women wherever she could.

When she became ill with a probable brain tumor in the 1840s, she made plans to be buried with her parents in the churchyard where it had all begun: St. Pancras. But when she died in 1851, her son Percy decided against this sombre resting-place and had her buried in Bournemouth, near where he was living.

To fulfill her last wish, he had Wollstonecraft’s and Godwin’s remains exhumed and reburied in Bournemouth. Percy Shelley’s heart—or whatever it was that had been saved from the fire—was buried there too.

Bibliography

Shelley, Mary (1831). Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Project Gutenberg edition.

Widely heralded as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, if not all time, James Joyce famously declared that, in writing his 1922 masterpiece Ulysses, he had “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”

While his densely allusive and stylistically experimental works have certainly kept “the professors busy for centuries,” his writing is relatively little read outside of academic circles. If you’re looking for James Joyce books to read, these four—Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake—give you the essential arc.

1. Dubliners (1914)

Dubliners is a (perhaps superficially, at least) realist short story collection published in 1914, during a peak in Irish nationalism. Though Joyce opposed British rule, he also distrusted nationalism, which he felt bred cultural stagnation—hence the collection’s pervading sense of paralysis, stagnation, and atrophy.

Focusing on the lives of Dublin’s middle classes, the book moves through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and public life, closing with the much-anthologized “The Dead.” Across episodes of childhood faith, adolescent desire, and adult failure, the characters are bound—sometimes trapped—by the city they call home.

Often dismissed as Joyce’s “most straightforward” work, Dubliners is hard to pigeonhole. It blends naturalistic surface with symbolic patterning and tonal variety. Its publication history underscores Joyce’s aims. Several printers refused it over libel concerns about real Dubliners, and when Grant Richards finally took it on, the printed text appeared with quotation marks—the only Joyce prose to do so—against Joyce’s stated preference to omit them, a choice he maintained in his later works.

Why Read Dubliners: Realist snapshots of Dublin mask a deeper map of paralysis and epiphany that seeds Joyce’s later innovations.

2. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

A modernist Künstlerroman, Joyce’s debut novel was first published serially in Ezra Pound’s literary magazine, The Egoist, from February 2, 1914, to September 1, 1915. After struggling to find a British publisher for a standalone edition, Pound helped arrange publication with the US publisher B. W. Huebsch.

The novel grew from an earlier work, Stephen Hero, which Joyce had been writing since 1904 but later abandoned in 1907 after 25 projected chapters. He adapted it into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, abandoning a traditional realist style in favor of radical free indirect discourse and distilling the material into five chapters.

Just as Joyce drew inspiration from the real people and places of Dublin for his short story collection, he modeled Stephen Daedalus (the novel’s protagonist) on himself. Like Daedalus, Joyce was born in Dublin to a middle-class Irish family and was sent to Jesuit schools before his father’s debts forced the family back into the city.

Both Joyce and Daedalus studied at University College Dublin and came to believe they must leave Ireland for continental Europe to fulfill their ambitions as writers. Joyce’s choice of the name Daedalus gains added resonance through the myth of Daedalus and Icarus as recorded in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, from which he also borrows the epigraph.

Why Read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Radical free indirect discourse tracks a mind forming itself, bridging Dubliners and Ulysses.

3. Ulysses (1922)

The year 1922 is often seen as the high-water mark of literary modernism, with the publication of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” and Joyce’s Ulysses. Critic Maurice Beebe hailed Ulysses as “a demonstration and summation” of the movement. It is widely considered one of the century’s greatest novels.

Ulysses had been partially serialized in The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920 before the magazine faced an obscenity trial in the US. The verdict effectively banned Ulysses in the US until Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate in Paris, published the full novel in 1922.

The novel centers on a single day—June 16, 1904—in the life of Leopold Bloom in Dublin, with its structure paralleling Homer’s Odyssey, from the Telemachia focused on Stephen Daedalus to the closing “Penelope” episode voiced by Molly Bloom. Across one Dublin day, Joyce layers multiple styles to mirror that journey and expand what the novel can hold.

Why Read Ulysses: One Dublin day expands to epic scope, proving modern life can bear Homeric depth and stylistic range.

4. Finnegans Wake (1939)

Published in 1939, Finnegans Wake is a monumental, deeply experimental work of literary modernism. It blends standard English with Hiberno-English, portmanteaux, and Joycean neologisms. Conceived as a cycle, its final line completes the opening sentence, reinforcing the dreamlike loop that governs the book.

The novel comprises four parts across seventeen chapters. It famously opens at the wake of Finnegan, a hod carrier who falls from a ladder; when whiskey splashes his corpse, he briefly rises and must be laid back to rest—an emblem of the book’s comic resurrection motif and cyclical time.

The narrative then follows HCE (Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker) and his family in Chapelizod as they sleep. Joyce renders their dreams to capture the liminal zone between waking and sleeping. In dialogue with Freudian psychoanalysis, those dreams let the book range across history (global, national, and personal), desire, shame, transgression, failure, and conflict—reimagining what the novel can do.

Joyce found writing Finnegans Wake incredibly taxing. Former supporters, including Ezra Pound and Joyce’s brother Stanislaus, doubted the new direction. Progress slowed amid the death of Joyce’s father (1931), concerns over his daughter Lucia’s mental health, and Joyce’s own poor health and eyesight. He died in Zürich twenty months after publication, following surgery for a perforated duodenal ulcer.

Why Read Finnegans Wake: A looping dream-language novel that fuses history and psyche, redrawing the limits of what fiction can do.

How James Joyce Rewrote the Modern Novel

Taken together, these four books chart Joyce’s leap from outward realism to radical interiority: from the stasis of a city’s everyday lives, to the formation of an artist’s mind, to a single day stretched to epic scope, and finally to a night where language itself dreams. Read in sequence, they show how Joyce built a new prose toolkit for the 20th century and beyond, inviting readers to meet the work halfway and discover more with every return.

Labeled by Virginia Woolf as “the greatest of all novelists,” Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina have long ago become parts of the global literary canon. However, Tolstoy’s body of several dozen literary works, ranging from novels to philosophical nonfiction, only makes sense when considered alongside his tumultuous life story. Born into a noble Russian family, Tolstoy shunned the life of a socialite early on in favor of the search for spirituality and the true meaning of Christianity.

Tolstoy’s Childhood and Kazan Years

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born on September 9, 1828, at his family estate of Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula (some 200 kilometers south of Moscow). His father, Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoy, was a count and a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars. His mother, Mariya Nikolayevna Tolstaya (née Volkonskaya), was a countess from an aristocratic lineage. The Tolstoys were a renowned family of noblemen who traced their origins all the way to the 14th century, when their ancestors came from either Germany or Lithuania.

Unfortunately, Tolstoy’s parents passed away when he was a young boy, so he and his four siblings were raised by the family’s relatives. Despite the tragedy, Yasnaya Polyana was an idyllic setting to grow up, surrounded by gardens, forests, and villages. The peasants who lived there were serfs, subjugated to Russia’s landed aristocrats, namely, the Tolstoys. Young Lev (translated as “lion” in English) experienced this social gap early on, which would influence his later writings.

Tolstoy was home-schooled, and from an early age, he displayed talent for languages and literature. However, after his aunt, Tatyana Ergolskaya, passed away, another relative became the children’s guardian and relocated the family to Kazan. “The Third Capital of Russia,” as it is known today (after Moscow and Saint Petersburg), Kazan was a cultural and industrial hub in Tolstoy’s time as well. He enrolled at Kazan University to study Oriental languages when he was just 16.

An Irresolute Nobleman Joins the Military

In the second year at Kazan University, Tolstoy switched to law and politics, but never got a university diploma. After a total of six years in Kazan (three at the local university), he returned to Yasnaya Polyana.

Around this time, he began keeping a diary, which reveals a man who sought to live a moral life but often struggled to do so. He made efforts to improve the lives of his serfs, at the same time living a debauched life when visiting Moscow’s high society. At 23, Tolstoy decided to join the Russian army, serving alongside his older brother, Nikolai, who was stationed in the Caucasus. The decision had a profound impact on him, as he was transforming from an irresolute young noble into a disciplined soldier, and more importantly, a writer.

At the time, the Caucasus was the frontier of the Russian Empire, so there were numerous clashes with local indigenous peoples, such as the Chechens. Tolstoy experienced the hardships of military life firsthand, as well as the injustices inflicted on the civilian population. In addition, he was constantly surrounded by nature. These experiences would later become key motifs in his literary output.

Childhood (1852) was his first published story, followed by Boyhood and Youth in the subsequent years. This series of autobiographical narratives was followed by Sevastopol Sketches, which documented Tolstoy’s experience during the Siege of Sevastopol, where his unit was deployed during the Crimean War (1853-1856). The work was a prelude to one of the greatest works of world literature: the novel War and Peace.

War and Peace (1869)

Having resigned from the military at the age of 27, Tolstoy spent the next decade of his life trying to further improve the lives of his serfs and traveling Europe. These must have been inspiring enough for him to start writing a novel (1863) that would become his magnum opus.

The sheer scope of the plot of War and Peace is enough to make it a classic: several hundred characters appear across four Parts that took Tolstoy some six years to write. The narrative is centered around four aristocratic families (the Bolkonskys, Kuragins, Rostovs, and Bezukhovs) and their destiny during the Napoleonic Wars from the beginning of the 19th century.

The novel opens in Saint Petersburg, where we are introduced to characters such as Pierre Bezukhov, a young noble who has recently inherited a fortune; Andrei Bolkonsky, a brave officer preparing for the impending war; and Natasha Rostova, a young and spirited noblewoman who ultimately becomes engaged to Andrei. The second part further develops these characters, revealing their inner psychology and social struggles.

The third part contains war scenes, most notably the Battle of Borodino, as Napoleon invades Russia in 1812. The burning of Moscow set the stage for ordinary people and soldiers to display courage, which is a recurring motif in Tolstoy’s work. In the end, Pierre is captured by the French, triggering a spiritual transformation in him, while Andrei dies with Natasha by his side. The epilogue reveals that Pierre married Natasha after returning to Moscow.

The Spiritual Search for the Meaning of Life

War and Peace has a whopping 361 chapters, 24 of which do not advance the narrative but rather present the author’s comments and philosophical views. For instance, the character of General Kutuzov reflects Tolstoy’s stance on history: it is shaped by the collective masses, rather than by great leaders.

The writer reached these worldviews after a profound search for the meaning of life. He had been reading the works of great philosophers, such as Schopenhauer and Rousseau, as well as studying the Gospel. Neither gave him definite answers, as he deemed philosophy and the practices of the Orthodox Church far too intricate.

The decades after the completion of War and Peace were marked by a somewhat idyllic family life for Tolstoy at the Yasnaya Polyana estate. He and his wife, Sofya, had a total of thirteen children. However, he observed how his serfs, who were mainly poor and uneducated, demonstrated an unwavering faith in God, indicating that “simplicity” was the keyword in his personal search for spirituality. Around 1873, Tolstoy set out to pen his next great novel, Anna Karenina. Much of his pondering about the meaning of life was about to get a literary form.

Anna Karenina (1878)

The novel initially appeared in serial installments in The Russian Messenger from 1875 to 1877. Tolstoy then published it as a book in 1878. Anna Karenina is foremost a psychological novel, but it is also a social critique; the war motif from earlier works takes a back seat in this one.

The main plot centers on Anna Arkadyevna Karenina, an aristocratic woman who meets Count Alexei Vronsky at a train station, which is an excellent example of foreshadowing in literature. He soon becomes her lover, but she is unable to legally leave her husband, Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin. The relationship turns scandalous as the Russian high society shuns Anna for her adulterous affair. With only Vronsky to confide in, Anna’s mental health rapidly deteriorates, leading to her throwing herself in front of a train, one of the most famous deaths in the history of literature.

The novel’s subplot is centered around Konstantin Levin’s attempts to court Kitty Shcherbatsky, who is initially infatuated with Count Vronsky. After he rejects her, Kitty matures as a person and eventually marries Levin. Their spiritual relationship is counterpoised to the main protagonists’ tumultuous affair.

Critics argue that Tolstoy modelled the character of Konstantin Levin, a landowner who is constantly on a moral and spiritual quest, after himself. His marriage at the end of the novel represents a philosophical closure that Tolstoy strived toward in real life.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)

The four-year period during which Tolstoy wrote The Death of Ivan Ilyich coincided with a profound spiritual crisis for the writer. Tolstoy drifted away from the Orthodox Church’s official doctrine and embraced a form of Christianity that preached non-violence and humility. These stances were reflected in the very format of his 1886 work. The Death of Ivan Ilyich was a novella, that is, a short novel, that lacked the greater social panorama and the multiverse of plotlines and characters that had marked his previous novels.

The plot opens after the death of the protagonist, Ivan Ilyich Golovin, a magistrate who led a socially acceptable but rather plain life. His issues began when he injured himself trying to hang some curtains. Benign at first, the illness slowly turns from physical pain into an existential crisis. The doctors fail to reveal the cause, but it becomes clear that Ivan Ilyich is terminally ill. His family regards Ivan Ilyich’s withering as a nuisance, forcing him to seriously ponder his life and pose the earnest question: “What if my whole life has been wrong?”

Up to that point, Ivan Ilyich firmly believed that his life story was a success. Impeding death makes him question everything he had believed in, as his God-fearing peasant servant, Gerasim, seems to be the only one who expresses genuine compassion toward him.

At his deathbed, Ivan Ilyich comes to terms with the terror of death and expresses compassion for his wife and son. The story’s ending makes it terrifyingly contemporary: Tolstoy makes the reader ponder whether their life would make sense if they were to die at that very moment.

Later Life and Death

The last two decades of Leo Tolstoy’s life were marked by a stark contrast. On the one hand, he was one of the most revered writers in the world, while on the other, he deemed himself not a novelist but a Christian preacher.

He endeavored to the best of his ability to live out the moral ideals put forward in The Death of Ivan Ilyich and in his last novel, Resurrection (1899), which brought him into conflict with his family, the Church, and society at large. In 1901, the Holy Synod finalized Tolstoy’s excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church. The writer was unfazed because he swore allegiance to Christ and not to organized religion, which he deemed had betrayed the very essence of Christianity.

Apart from the public image, his marriage suffered because of his ardent religious beliefs. His wife, Sofya Tolstaya, was concerned by Tolstoy’s desire to sell off his property and give up on literary rights. These would leave her and their eight children (who had survived to adulthood) destitute. Although her husband refused to accept royalties for his later works, he still cared about his family’s financial security.

Torn between domestic responsibilities and Christian ideals, Tolstoy left Yasnaya Polyana in secret in October 1910. His intent was to spend the remainder of his days in spiritual solitude, but his deteriorating health got in the way. While on the road, he fell ill with pneumonia and ended up at a small railway station in Astapovo, some 100 kilometers away from home. He passed away in the stationmaster’s house on November 20, 1910. He was 82 years old at the time of his death.

The Legacy of Leo Tolstoy

Eight years after Tolstoy’s death, the authorities renamed the village in Lipetsk Oblast where he died in honor of the great man of letters (“Lev Tolstoy”). Russians widely regard Tolstoy as a pillar of Russian literature, together with Pushkin and Dostoevsky. His works have become required reading in schools, and his home estate at Yasnaya Polyana is designated as a state memorial. Nearly every city in Russia has a “Tolstoy” street, and there are countless statues and busts of him across the country.

Tolstoy’s literary legacy far exceeds his homeland. His works have been translated into more than a hundred languages worldwide. His themes were universal, as Tolstoy redefined the format of the novel, narrating historical events from a multitude of individual perspectives.

His contemporaries, such as Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann, praised the psychological insight and the realism of his literary characters, although they often disagreed with his moral adamancy. In the 20th century, Tolstoy’s influence extended beyond literature, as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. drew inspiration from the Russian writer for their principles of non-violent resistance.

ETA Hoffmann was, like many Romantics, a polymath, excelling as an author, a composer, and an artist. His stories, often containing fairytale, supernatural, or uncanny elements, changed the landscape of literature in his native Germany and across the world. Although he lived in turbulent times and much of his writing describes how difficult it was to make it as a musician, he emerged as a representative figure of Romanticism’s ideals and its idiosyncrasies.

ETA Hoffmann: From Lawyer to Composer

On January 24, 1776, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm (E.T.W. for now—E.T.A. was to come later) Hoffmann was born in Königsberg, a medieval port city and university town situated in what was then Prussia. Today, as part of Russia, the city is known as Kaliningrad. Hoffmann was born into a family of lawyers, though his father dabbled in both poetry and music, and it was into the legal profession that the young Hoffmann initially went.

At school, he had already identified the three passions that would define his adult life—music, literature, and art—but Königsberg, despite being the home of Immanuel Kant (whom Hoffmann saw giving lectures in 1792), was generally removed from artistic developments in the German states as a whole, and the prospects for an artist were not promising.

While continuing to work on his piano playing,  composing, and artistic education, Hoffmann took on more reliable employment as a clerk. As he put it: “On weekdays, I am a jurist and somewhat of a musician at most; on Sundays I draw during the day and in the evening, I become a very witty author until late into the night.” His legal career took him to Glogau (now Głogów in Poland), Berlin, and Posen (now Poznań in Poland). Here, Hoffmann tried to establish himself as a composer, but his time in Posen was short-lived. After some caricatures he had drawn of military officers made the rounds, he was summarily moved elsewhere.

The Music Critic

In 1804, Hoffmann gained a post in Warsaw, where the cultural life was more stimulating than in his previous places of residence. As well as the author Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, whose story Undine Hoffmann would later adapt for the operatic stage, he met Julius Eduard Hitzig, who would publish the first biography of Hoffmann in 1822-23.

Hitzig (who had changed the spelling of his surname when he was baptized) was a member of the prominent Itzig family, which had married into the Mendelssohn family—Julius was great-uncle to the composers Felix and Fanny. His sister Lea would later contribute to the revival of J.S. Bach by giving Felix a manuscript of the St. Matthew Passion, which had its first Berlin performance under his baton in 1829.

Thus Hitzig, among other connections made in Warsaw, was an important figure in nurturing Hoffmann’s enthusiasm for Romantic literature and music. Around this time, E.T.W. Hoffmann changed his middle name, replacing Wilhelm with Amadeus in tribute to one of his favorite composers, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. As his passion for music and immersion in a rich and varied cultural life were brewing, Hoffmann was forced to move again when in 1806, Napoleon’s troops captured Warsaw, and all Prussian civil servants lost their jobs.

Eventually ending up in Berlin, Hoffmann was finally able to find work more closely related to his interests: writing music criticism for the newspaper Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. Hoffmann began to make his mark on contemporary music and pen certain pieces that would cement his place in music history. His 1810 review of Ludwig van Beethoven‘s Fifth Symphony is considered a foundational work of Romantic criticism, typifying the ways early-19th-century audiences celebrated music’s ineffable power and offering one of the earliest theorizations of the term “romantic” in relation to music.

For Hoffmann, musical Romanticism is best exemplified by Beethoven, whose music is absolute—it does not need to rely on words or comparisons to images from the real world but takes for its subject “the infinite.” While Joseph Haydn is “comprehensible for the common man,” and Mozart captures the “marvelous that dwells in the inner spirit,” Beethoven’s music embodies “that eternal longing that is the essence of the romantic.” Hoffmann’s review bestowed the ideas of absolute music, the omnipotent genius composer, and music’s awe-inspiring incomprehensibility to the 19th century, as writers on music across Europe overwhelmingly took up his language.

The Peripatetic Life of the Musician

From this point onwards, Hoffmann wore many hats. In Bamberg and Dresden, he was employed as a Kapellmeister (literally chapel-master), a musician who runs the day-to-day musical life of a church or court, including supplying his own compositions. He also worked in the theater as a set designer and architect and continued to draw (especially caricatures) and write. His first published story, Ritter Gluck, which tells the adventures of a man who believes he meets the opera composer Christoph Willibald Gluck, appeared in 1809.

Part of the reason Hoffmann moved around so much was his historical and geographical circumstances. He had already had to leave Warsaw because he would not swear allegiance to Napoleon, who occupied what was then the capital of South Prussia. His time in Dresden was also disrupted by the Napoleonic Wars, with he and his wife temporarily fleeing to Leipzig early in 1813, returning just in time to witness the Battle of Dresden, a major victory for the French.

There were other reasons for Hoffmann’s peripatetic lifestyle. Before meeting his wife, way back in Königsberg, when he was only 18, Hoffmann fell in love with a married woman ten years his senior. This was one of the reasons his family found employment for him in Glogau, and it was not the only time his romantic and professional life were to become entangled. In Bamberg, working as a singing teacher, he fell in love with his student, Julia, whose mother soon arranged for her to be taught by someone else.

Hoffmann’s experience of falling in love unsuitably, his awareness of how hard it was to maintain lasting employment as any kind of artist, and his feeling that musicians, in particular, were undervalued by society all found their way into his writings. He developed an alter ego, a composer called Johannes Kreisler, who appeared in much of his music criticism, and whose experiences and traits—he is often penniless, often falling in love, and often raging against society—mirror Hoffmann’s own. Though fictional, Kreisler was an immensely influential figure in both literary and musical circles, embodying all the prized values of Romanticism: genius, emotion, and a constant striving for something beyond what the ordinary world can offer.

Success as Composer and Author

Some stability and success finally came Hoffmann’s way when he moved to Berlin in 1814. There, he wrote an opera based on Fouqué’s Undine, which was staged in 1816. Hoffmann’s work was favorably reviewed by the composer Carl Maria von Weber, whose own opera Der Freischütz (1821) similarly featured dreamy glens and forest spirits.

Hoffmann’s literary output also gathered pace: Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier in 1814-15 gathered various stories first published elsewhere, several of them featuring the composer Johannes Kreisler. He wrote two novels, Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixirs, 1815) and Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, 1820). The latter novel also featured Kreisler, to whom Hoffmann attributed one of his own compositions: the Six Canticles for a cappella choir. For good measure, Kreisler also spends much of the novel in turmoil because he, like Hoffmann some years earlier, is desperately in love with a singer named Julia.

Although still obliged to support himself financially by taking on work as a jurist in 1816, he found time to write the stories that have made him an enduring name in literary history: the terrifying tale of the uncanny Der Sandmann (The Sandman, 1817), the early detective story Das Fräulein von Scuderi (Mademoiselle de Scuderi, 1819), and most famously, Nußknacker und Mausekönig (The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, 1816).

ETA Hoffmann’s Influence

Aged only 46 when he died of syphilis in 1822, Hoffmann was remembered on his tombstone as a true polymath: councilor of the Court of Justice, poet, musician, and painter. His friend Hitzig recorded: “his most striking feature was his extraordinary mannerisms, which would reach a climax whenever he told a story. When he greeted people and bid farewell, his neck would make short, fast, repetitive flexing movements, while his head would remain completely still, which could appear somewhat grotesque and could easily come across as ironic if the impression made by this strange gesture wasn’t offset by his very friendly nature on such occasions.”

This mixture of the comic and grotesque, with an underlying current of warm-heartedness, captures Hoffmann’s legacy, as can be seen in the various adaptations of his work. Only a few decades after his death, three of his short stories (The Sandman, Councilor Krespel or The Cremona Violin, and The Lost Reflection) were brought together as a stage play in Paris, Les contes fantastiques d’Hoffmann. 

Attending the play in 1851, the composer Jacques Offenbach deemed it ripe for operatic treatment, and it was finally premiered in 1881 (shortly after the death of Offenbach, who died with the manuscript in his hand). The most unusual feature of this opera is that it features Hoffmann himself as a character who is—true to the historical Hoffmann—prone to having his head turned by beautiful, musical women but who ultimately recognizes that each of the women in the play’s three acts is simply an idealized representation of his true love: the Muse of Poetry.

Composers and choreographers of ballet have also been inspired by Hoffmann’s writing. Léo Delibes’s Coppélia (1870) borrowed both names (Dr. Coppélius) and themes (an inventor creates a life-size doll with whom a swooning young man falls in love) from The Sandman. The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, meanwhile, was the inspiration for Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1892 ballet The Nutcracker, with its enchanting visions of toy soldiers coming to life and a dreamland made up of gingerbread and sweets.

Hoffmann’s influence on literature was similarly extensive and continues to the present day. He was a near contemporary of the Brothers Grimm, folklore collectors who popularized some of the most enduring fairytales, such as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Little Red Riding Hood. While Hoffmann’s stories contain folkloric and fairytale elements, they are combined with touches from his own imagination, an appetite for innovative narrative style, and especially a relish for blending the everyday and the supernatural.

Writers of short stories in the mid-19th century, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, were influenced by Hoffmann’s transposition of supernatural phenomena into the ordinary world. Towards the end of the century, writers continued to draw on Hoffmann’s work, examining the uncanny in relation to art and the psychological implications of being haunted by a revenant or double: examples include Vernon Lee in her collection Hauntings (1890) and Henry James in The Turn of the Screw (1898) and The Jolly Corner (1908).

Into the 20th century, Hoffmann’s work provided fertile ground for theorization by Sigmund Freud (who wrote about The Sandman in his essay The Uncanny, 1919), and his influence can be detected in the Surrealists, the anthropomorphic and anti-bureaucratic writing of Franz Kafka, and the everydayness of the supernatural in magical realism. Although he was in many ways an archetype of how we now view Romanticism, Hoffmann has transcended time and place.

Reference List:

Hoffmann, E.T.A. “Beethoven’s Instrumental-Musik,” in E. T. A. Hoffmanns sämtliche Werke, vol. 1, ed. C. G. Von Maassen (Munich and Leipzig: G. Müller, 1908), translated by Bryan R. Simms.

Before Disney introduced princesses to the pop culture zeitgeist, and before there were fairy godmothers and mice with atelier skills, there were ancient tales of girls in rags, wicked matriarchs, and special shoes scattered across history like breadcrumbs. You might think Cinderella is a European classic, but the seeds of her story were planted in a world more historical, stranger, and widespread than you’d expect.

From a Chinese cave-dwelling orphan with a magic fish to an Iraqi girl whose loveliness is so alarming that her stepmother poisons her to make her hair fall out, these early Cinderella-esque fables reveal just how much we’ve smoothed over the darkest parts of the story with time. With a focused eye on her history, let’s step into the glass slipper (or the golden clog, or the feathered cloak) and find Cinderella in her earliest iteration.

From the East

Before Cinderella lost her glass slippers at a royal ball, Ye Xian was sprinting down a mountainside in golden-threaded silk, trying to avoid her stepmother’s abuse. Her story, written in China around 850 CE, reads like the fairy tale’s blueprint: a kind but mistreated girl, a cruel stepmother, and a pair of magical shoes that lead to a royal marriage. And Ye Xian had something even Cinderella didn’t—a giant, talking fish with shimmering golden eyes.

That fish, a guardian sent by her late mother’s spirit, was her only friend… until her stepmother gutted it for dinner (yes, really). Fortunately, its magic lingered in its bones, granting Ye Xian the power to wish herself into a dazzling blue gown and out of the life of servitude she’d done nothing to deserve. If this sounds like a tale as old as time, it really should—this myth predates the Western world’s Cinderella by almost a thousand years.

Ye Xian got her happily ever after and rose above her station, but what would she have been signing up for when she married her royal spouse? Marriage in ancient China wasn’t just about romance—it was a social contract, a dynastic strategy, and, at its highest levels, a political power move.

By the time the Tang Dynasty rolled around (618–907 CE), marriage among royals followed the Three Letters and Six Etiquettes, a codified and complicated ritual process dating back centuries. This meant formal letters of proposal, acceptance, and dowry arrangements, followed by six ritual steps, including fortune-matching, betrothal gifts (often silk, jade, or livestock), and a grand wedding procession where the bride was carried in a red palanquin to her new husband’s home. Love matches, much like their European counterparts, were quite rare. Marriages were about securing alliances, producing heirs, and, in the case of the imperial court, ensuring the unabridged continuation of the dynasty.

Women—especially noblewomen—were expected to marry well, bear sons, and uphold Confucian values of obedience and propriety. Their power came not from personal ambition but from their ability to navigate palace intrigue, wield influence as mothers of heirs, or, in rare and extraordinary cases, take power themselves. After all, it was this culture that would produce Empress Wu Zetian, the only woman to rule China in her own right. While fairy tales like Ye Xian’s might suggest that a royal marriage was a ticket to a smooth and wondrous future, the reality was often much more complex. After all, if a woman didn’t bear those prescribed sons, her husband could take a concubine to do the job.

From the Sands of the Middle East

Move over, glass slippers—golden sandals were here first. Long before Charles Perrault gave Cinderella her pumpkin coach pulled by snowy white horses, The Golden Sandal was making the rounds in Iraq. This Middle Eastern Cinderella is believed to date back at least to the 9th or 10th century CE, though its oral origins are likely much older. In it, the daughter of a poor fisherman finds herself saddled with a wicked stepmother and a lazy stepsister. Instead of mice and fairy godmothers, the fisherman’s daughter’s magical helper comes in the form of a talking carmine-scaled fish, bringing to mind the golden sea creature of Ye Xian. When the girl’s stepmother forbids her from attending the henna party of a wealthy merchant’s daughter (the equivalent of a sort of pre-wedding bash), her scaled friend steps in, decking her out in dazzling attire.

The girl attends the party but, as she hurries home, she loses one of her golden sandals in the river. A wealthy merchant’s son ends up scooping it out of the water and decides he simply must marry the owner of this exquisite shoe. Here’s the twist—unlike the European versions where a prince takes charge, it is the young man’s mother who searches for the owner of the delicate shoe, reinforcing the cultural significance of women as the arrangers of marriage.

Like Ye Xian before her, this was no simple love or peaceful partnership, because the time it was told or written in wasn’t an era of love matches. Marriage was not a matter of attraction—it was a contract, an alliance, and a transaction all rolled into one. The family was the foundational building block of society, with the senior male ruling over his relatives as king.

Then there’s Mah Pishani—Persia’s own rags to riches story, and one of the oldest versions of the tale. This Cinderella telling likely dates back to at least the 7th century CE, though historians often suggest an even older oral tradition, possibly pre-Islamic. Like the fisherman’s daughter, Mah Pishani is mistreated by her stepmother, but she finds solace in the unconditional love of those who help her, even souls beyond the grave. This Persian take on the myth highlights deep cross-cultural roots within the fairy tale trope, no matter where it may be from: a virtuous heroine, a magical helper, and a well-earned escape from suffering.

In ancient Persia, marriage was a serious business. Family honor and social stability were everything, and a woman’s role was largely defined by her relationships—to her father, her husband, and, of course, those all important eventual sons. While it sounds relatively proscribed, Persian women weren’t without influence. While their primary duty was to uphold the domicile, noblewomen could wield significant power within that sphere. It was often the women of Persia—mothers, grandmothers, and aunts—who orchestrated marriages, ensuring that alliances were bilaterally beneficial.

At its core, the Cinderella myth in the Middle East isn’t just about a girl getting a glow-up and a rich husband. The focus here was more about survival, resilience, and the significance of female networks. Whether through a mother arranging a match, a magical red fish offering a helping fin, or the unwavering loyalty of a spirit beyond the grave, these tales remind us that in a world where women’s fates were often decided for them, they needed some magic to shape their own paths.

Tattercoats From England and Other Western Cinderellas

Despite the common image of Cinderella as a leggy blonde with a fantastically tiny waist, the West produced some of the most modern Cinderellas—and few that daintily traipsed through early history. The Cinderella that most of us would recognize today wasn’t written down until the end of the 17th century, in France. Before that, her Western counterparts were scrappier, less magical, and sometimes lacking in fairy godmothers entirely.

One of the most intriguing of these is Tattercoats, an English Cinderella variant first recorded in 1891. A girl in Lincolnshire named Sally Brown recounted the story to a folklorist, who then passed it along to Joseph Jacobs, the man responsible for many of the British Isles’ best-known fairy tales.

Unlike other Cinderellas, Tattercoats includes no enchanted pumpkin carriages or fairy intervention. Instead, it leans heavily into the King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid motif: a poor girl, scorned by her wealthy grandfather, catches the eye of a nobleman, not with an enchanted transformation, but with sheer presence (which may be more impressive). The only touch of the fantastic is a mysterious pipe-playing boy who seems to guide her fate—though whether he’s elven, a trickster, or just an enterprising urchin is left for the reader to decide.

The Western Cinderella most people know comes from Charles Perrault’s Cendrillon in 1697. His version is where we get those iconic glass slippers, the pumpkin turned carriage, and the grandmotherly fairy godmother. Before this, Cinderella stories had circulated Europe for centuries in various forms, but it was Perrault who gave her the literary debut that cemented her image and humble persona forever.

In 1812, more than a hundred years later, the Brothers Grimm entered the scene with their Germanic spin on the tale titled Aschenputtel. Less dreamy and more brutal, Aschenputtel omits the fairy godmother for a wishing tree grown from the main character’s mother’s grave. Instead of merely suffering passive-aggressive bullying, this version of the story doesn’t avoid bloodshed. It is here that the Cinderella character’s step sisters lop off their toes to force a fit into the slipper, only to be rejected by the prince and later blinded by birds. Bullying, the tale warns, can be a costly pastime.

Meanwhile, Italy brought La Cenerentola to the opera stage in 1817. The opera was composed by Rossini, but based on an earlier French opera. Unlike Perrault’s tale, this Cinderella is a victim of the behaviors of her blood relations (sisters, not stepsisters) with a plot that leans more on disguises and mistaken identity. Call it somewhat a comedy of errors with a fairytale flavor.

Western Cinderellas, then, have always been varied, shifting from folk tales to high literature, from magical fantasy to lessons in stark morality. She is written about, sung about, and has had her story turned into dance. This fictional lady, wearing rags but with a golden reputation, has staying power.

But the Eldest is…

For all the glass slippers and wand waving of Western lore, the oldest Cinderella-like stories are gates to the banks of the Nile. Long before Perrault or the Brothers Grimm put pen to paper, a Greek slave in Egypt and a Sumerian goddess had already lived out versions of the rags-to-riches and lost-and-found motifs that would become Cinderella’s trademark.

The story of Rhodopis, often controversially dubbed “history’s first Cinderella,” was recorded by the Greek geographer Strabo in the 1st century BCE. The story he recalls is about a courtesan named Rhodopis, bathing in the Nile, who has one of her sandals stolen by an eagle. This eagle (which probably wasn’t native to Egypt at this time in history, as detractors of the story may point out), clearly working as fate’s personal messenger, drops the shoe into the lap of the Pharaoh at home in his palace in Memphis. Intrigued by the beautiful shape of the sandal and the bizarre nature of its delivery, the king sends out men across the land to find its owner. Rhodopis is discovered in Naucratis and spirited away to the palace, where she becomes Egypt’s queen.

It is a far cry from wicked stepmothers and carriages of gourd, but the bones of the Cinderella story are there: the lost shoe, the improbable rise of a marginalized woman, and the intervention of fate (or, in this case, an invasive bird). Some oral traditions claim the third pyramid at Giza was built for her, though history offers no evidence of a real Cinderella. Rhodopis, it seems, is more legend than fact—yet her story endured, shifting and changing as the tale passed from storyteller to storyteller.

Even older, and arguably even closer in spirit to Cinderella’s trials, is the Descent of Ishtar, a myth from ancient Mesopotamia that tells of a powerful woman betrayed by a jealous and selfish sister. Ishtar, the goddess of love and beauty, descends into the underworld, where that sister, Ereshkigal, rules. Instead of welcoming her, Ereshkigal forces Ishtar to pass through seven gates, stripping her of her intricate garments and their implied power piece by piece until Ishtar is left vulnerable, humiliated, and ultimately cursed. She is abandoned and lost here, left to suffer while the world above slowly forgets her.

The echoes of Cinderella are unmistakable: a noblewoman is stripped of her finery, reduced to a base state by a cruel and envious female figure. Ishtar, like Cinderella, endures unjust suffering until her eventual restoration. And just as Cinderella’s lost slipper serves as proof of her identity and virtue, Ishtar’s garments are symbols of her divine power—her ability to wear them again marks her return to her rightful place in society.

From the sands of Egypt to the temples of Mesopotamia, the Cinderella archetype is far older than most people realize. Whether she’s a slave girl, a goddess, or a peasant with a pumpkin for transportation, her story has always been about more than just a prince—it is about survival, finding allies in unexpected places, and the triumph of the overlooked. Oh, and the occasional lost heel, sandal, slipper, or other form of footwear.

The Victorian era in the history of the British Empire was the period during the reign of Queen Victoria, spanning much of the 19th century, roughly from 1837 to 1901. These were the times of great social changes, which was a common motif for English novelists. This was the age of Charles Dickens, the Brontë Sisters, Oscar Wilde, and numerous other writers who are household names today. The following selection offers a (brief) overview of the Victorian novel and titles that are still relevant to modern readers.

Wuthering Heights, Emily Brönte (1847)

Cathy and Heathcliff are undoubtedly among the most popular literary figures of the Victorian age. They were penned by Emily Brontë, who used the pseudonym “Ellis Bell,” because female authors faced significant prejudice during the period. Wuthering Heights challenged these conservative views of Victorian society on morality, religion, and proper social conduct.

The novel follows an orphaned boy named Heathcliff, who is adopted by Mr. Earnshaw and brought to Wuthering Heights (hence the novel’s title). He falls in love with Catherine, Mr. Earnshaw’s daughter, but she marries Edgar Linton to secure her social standing. Enraged, Heathcliff leaves, amasses wealth, and returns to marry Edgar’s sister Isabella in an act of revenge. Their sickly son, Linton, is forced to marry Catherine’s daughter, Cathy, who gradually falls for her first cousin, Hareton Earnshaw. Heathcliff dies still obsessed with Catherine, while the younger generation brings hope for the future.

At the time of its publication, the novel received mixed reviews, only to become a classic of English literature in the following century. The protagonists have become part of pop culture, with countless references. In the popular sitcom Friends, Phebe and Rachel discuss the novel in literature classes. Jim Steinman, the songwriter of Céline Dion’s hit song “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” also found inspiration in the consuming love between Cathy and Heathcliff. The same motif is evident in The Twilight Saga, where Bella and Edward openly compare themselves to the protagonists of Brontë’s novel, caught in a similar love triangle.

Vanity Fair, William Thackeray (1847–1848)

It could be argued that what Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is for Russian literature, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is to the English written word. Although the latter is twice as short, both novels share the setting: the Napoleonic Wars. However, William Makepeace Thackeray did not hide the fact that his monthly serial novel was a satire of 19th-century England.

The storyline follows the ambitious Becky Sharp and the kindhearted Amelia Sedley as they leave Miss Pinkerton’s Academy, a school for girls. They both marry, but financial troubles and the aforementioned war force them into poverty, revealing the vanity of ambition to climb the social ladder.

The subtitle, Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society, is quite revealing, as is the fact that Thackeray published Vanity Fair in Punch, the leading magazine for humor and satire at the time. The subsequent subtitle of the first complete edition, Novel Without a Hero, can be misleading, as Reese Witherspoon definitely stole the show starring as Becky Sharp in the 2004 film adaptation. In fact, in 1913, Thackeray’s magnum opus influenced the naming of the eponymous American monthly that focuses on pop culture, fashion, and celebrity life.

In a sense, the editors of Vanity Fair did a metaparody, since they write in earnest about the things the English novelist satirized, such as glitzy glamour, ambition, and societal superficiality. Today, the collocation “vanity fair” is part of the English language, denoting “a vain and frivolous lifestyle especially in large cities.”

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brönte (1847)

The eldest of the Brontë sisters, Charlotte, also had to use a pen name to get her novel published and acclaimed. Indeed, “Currer Bell” was the author’s name on the first page of Jane Eyre when it was published in London and the following year (1848) in New York.

The novel is a typical example of a Bildungsroman, a literary genre that focuses on the protagonist’s coming of age, their transition from childhood into adulthood. Critics agree that the Bildungsroman reached its most polished form in England during the Victorian age.

Through masterfully executed first-person narration, the reader gets to know Jane Eyre as an orphan who grows up at Gateshead Hall. We then follow through her education at Lowood Institution, her first employment at Thornfield Hall, and after many peripeteias, the ultimate marriage to the novel’s male protagonist, Mr. Rochester.

“Reader, I married him,” Jane’s exclamation in the final chapter, is one of the most famous sentences in the history of literature, because it broke the fourth wall in art. The novel was so enticing that diary entries reveal that even Queen Victoria read it herself (and enjoyed it).

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde (1890)

The Picture of Dorian Gray first appeared in a magazine in 1890 as a novella. Essentially, this is what critics call any piece of prose fiction longer than a short story but too short to constitute a novel. The following year, Oscar Wilde revised and expanded his work by six chapters to form a novel. Its overall theme is a mixture of a Gothic novel and Decadentism.

The protagonist, Dorian Gray, is a handsome man who wishes to remain young and beautiful forever, like in the portrait painted by his friend, Basil Hallward. This is where the plot veers into fantasy, as Gray remains young and able, while his portrait ages rapidly, reflecting his decadent lifestyle.

The motif is similar to that of Goethe’s Faust, that is, making a deal with the devil. The trade-off ends up badly for the protagonist, as in similar folklore tales. Contemporary critics found certain elements of the novel scandalous and even used it as incriminating evidence in Wilde’s infamous trial related to his homosexuality.

However, The Picture of Dorian Gray is actually a warning to readers about how vanity can twist one’s moral compass. Critics now agree that this is one of Wilde’s best pieces, together with the comedy The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).

Dracula, Bram Stoker (1897)

Although Bram Stoker’s Dracula was not the first Gothic novel (that title belongs to Walpole’s Castle of Otranto), it is definitely the most popular one. There are so many film adaptations that many people know the plot well. The protagonist, Jonathan Harker, travels to Transylvania and discovers that his host is a blood-sucking vampire, who needs to be slain. Over the years, there have been countless movie spinoffs of Stoker’s core plot, most recently Dracula: A Love Tale (2025) starring Christoph Waltz and Caleb Landry Jones.

The true value of the Irish novelist’s work lies in the fact that he managed to bring folklore stories about vampires to wider audiences. Polidori’s short horror story The Vampyre (1819) and Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) are the most notable examples of vampire tales that did not catch on. Stoker gave himself the poetic license to set the story in present-day Romania, although the actual term “vampire” comes from the neighboring Balkan country of Serbia.

Some argue that his role model for the Transylvanian nobleman Count Dracula was Vlad the Impaler, a 15th-century Prince of Wallachia, who was particularly ruthless in punishing his opponents. His nickname, which he inherited from his father, was “The Dragon” or “Dracul” in Romanian, a term that gave rise to the theory that Bram Stoker used it as inspiration for his infamous literary hero.

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens (1860-1861)

Great Expectations is yet another Victorian Bildungsroman. Charles Dickens, who also wrote A Christmas Carol, completed it in just under a year and published it in a series from 1860 to 1861.

The story follows the orphan Pip and his “great expectations” of life, namely, an elevated social status and wealth. The author shortened the protagonist’s full name (Philip Pirrip) to sound like the small pip of a seed found in fruit like oranges and apples. As the pip develops into a seed, so does the literary Pip mature to realize that human affection is the true goal of life.

The story of realizing true values in life has been adapted numerous times, both on stage and film. One of the stranger ones is the episode “Pip” in the fourth season of South Park. Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the writers of the American animated sitcom, took it upon themselves to voice Dickens’ characters. The episode is unique because it is one of the few instances where the show did not feature any of the four main protagonists (Eric, Kenny, Kyle, and Stan). This can be interpreted as the authors’ homage to the great English novelist.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (1865)

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was an instant classic when Lewis Carroll (his real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) penned it in the mid-19th century. Sir John Tenniel, who illustrated the first edition, contributed to the book becoming a cornerstone of children’s literature.

The story of a girl, Alice, who goes down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world, has been remade countless times since. Walt Disney held it in high esteem, which was reflected in the 1951 animated musical movie that incorporated plot segments from Carroll’s sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Tim Burton directed a modern version in 2010, starring Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, and Helena Bonham Carter in the role of the stern Red Queen (Queen of Hearts).

The storyline features memorable characters, such as the Cheshire Cat, the March Hare, and the (Mad) Hatter. The latter character has grounding in real life, as hatmakers in the Victorian era often suffered from mercury poisoning, due to the metal’s use in treating felt. These are the origins of the phrase “mad as a hatter.”

Since its publication, Alice in Wonderland, as it is colloquially referred to, has never been out of print. It has been translated into at least 175 languages, most notably Japanese. It was among the first major Western works for children to appear in translation in Japanese, so nowadays, Alice is somewhat of a pop-culture icon in the Land of the Rising Sun.

The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling (1894)

Another children’s classic is The Jungle Book, a collection of short stories published in the novel format near the end of the Victorian era. The author, English Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling, was born in India but spent most of his childhood in a foster home and a boarding school in England.

This unhappy period of his life served as inspiration for the main character, Mowgli, an Indian boy who was raised by wolves after his parents lost him in a tiger attack. Today, our image of the feral child has mostly been shaped by Disney’s 1967 animated film of the same name. The catchy jazz tune “The Bare Necessities” was even nominated for the Academy Award the following year.

The group of animal characters includes Baloo (bear), Bagheera (black panther), Kaa (python), and the novel’s villain, a Bengal tiger by the name of Shere Khan. They all adhere to a code of conduct known as the Jungle Law, which critics say is an allegory for the British colonial rule over the Indian subcontinent. Regardless, these fables, together with The Second Jungle Book (1895), still have the power to teach children moral lessons in a form they can relate to.

While a cohort of 19th-century European writers were instrumental in fashioning and figuring out the detective story on paper, Edgar Allan Poe is invariably attributed as its first great mastermind. Poe’s 1841 “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was the first of his tales of “mystery and imagination” that featured his brilliant amateur sleuth, Paris’ C. Auguste Dupin. Fifty-odd years later, Arthur Conan Doyle himself revealed and duly saluted Dupin as the leading literary inspiration for his own ratiocinating, crime-solving gentleman genius, London’s Sherlock Holmes.

From Edgar Allan Poe to Poirot: Tracing the Roots

As is typical with most inventions or innovations, they are rarely the product of any one person or intellect. Instead, they just as frequently evolve out of the zeitgeist or spirit of the times. In the case of detective (or police) fiction, many authors in both France and England aided and abetted the entrance of cerebral, crime-crushing gumshoes, from Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot (with his “little gray cells”) to U.S. TV’s Colombo, the rumpled police investigator memorably played by Peter Falk.

A scrupulous literary historian would back-track millennia and investigate Sophocles’ classic Greek play Oedipus Rex to find an ancient footprint of detective fiction. After all, it’s the doomed King Oedipus who methodically solves the mystery of who slayed his father—summoning and questioning witnesses, searching for clues, uncovering secrets—before tracing this timeless “cold case” right back to his own palace. Likewise, in an Elizabethan sequel of sorts, Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet is tasked to search out and take revenge on the assailant who killed his father. If there is a working motto to the detective-hero, it might be Hamlet’s “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.”

Cops, Flics & Bobbies

However, historians tend to argue that the emergence of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s set the stage for what would become detective fiction. With textile and mill workers, among others, flocking to cities from small towns and rural areas, conditions were being created not just for dense overcrowding but also for impersonal crimes among the hordes of strangers. Or take the simple issue of street lighting—typically a discouragement against crime and mischief.

Until these bustling cities in Europe and America were lit up at night (first by gas, then via electricity), entire blocks would sit in darkness away from the main thoroughfares, thus inducing a milieu for victims, especially women (the notorious example here, of course, being the horrific “Jack the Ripper” slayings in 1888-91 London). Compounding the problem, well into the 1800s, most cities had no organized or professional police forces; the streets were “policed” only in insular local areas surrounding church parishes, typically by volunteers, and seldom at night.

“Crime waves,” especially in poor and immigrant areas, were rising, if not crashing into these teeming metropolises. While London was one of the first large Western capitals to create its own police force (1829), followed by Boston (1838) and New York City (1845), Paris had a form of municipal policing much earlier. During Louis XIV’s reign, the office of the Lieutenant General of Police (established in 1667) managed public order, markets, and regulations, but it was largely administrative rather than a uniformed, street-patrolling force. However, it wasn’t until the early 1800s that Paris had the semblance of a lasting police unit, complete with both uniformed and plainclothes officers. And with that, The Collector’s trail leads to the West’s first true-crime detective-hero, France’s Eugène-Françoise Vidocq (1775–1857).

After a crooked life in and out of prison, in 1809 Vidocq “went straight”—that is, right into the offices of the Paris gendarmes, who, in the “it takes a thief to catch a thief” mold, would eventually hire him to head up a new plainclothes investigative unit. While his methods and ethics would attract scrutiny, there’s no question his record of front-page arrests made him a legend, further enhanced by his ingenious development of modern policing methods such as forensics, criminal “rap sheets,” and fingerprinting. He is also credited with opening the first private detective agency in Paris in 1832.

The Detective Detected

Not only was Edgar Allan Poe an avid reader of Vidocq’s three volumes of memoirs (1828-29), but he even gives him a shout-out in “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Vidocq would provide a thick dossier of story fodder for a number of celebrated French novelists, from Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas pere to Honoré de Balzac. One only needs to eyeball the relentless, merciless Inspector Javert from Hugo’s timeless crime-manhunt epic Les Misérables (1862) to find evidence of policier twists and turns in 19th-century Continental fiction. At the same time, across the English (or is it French?) Channel, Charles Dickens was also exploring these budding narrative archetypes, for instance in his novel Bleak House (1853), which traced the exploits of Scotland Yard’s extraordinary Inspector Bucket.

It’s normally dicey business to retrospectively claim historic “firsts,” literary or otherwise, but Poe’s “Rue Morgue” is invariably credited as the first published short story with a plot almost exclusively constructed around a sleuthing protagonist. Furthermore, the adventures of M. Dupin (also followed up in several sequels, including “The Mystery of Marie Roget”) would provide plot and characterization modus operandi for scores of worthy imitators, perhaps most impeccably Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his phenomenal and still popular Sherlock Holmes cloak-and-dagger mystery novels and stories. How, precisely? In “Rue Morgue,” from the moment “the game is afoot,” readers can’t help but spy uncanny similarities between its two central characters and their virtual doppelgangers from the pen of—and according to—Doyle.

Partners in Crime … Solving

So, in the famous words of Sgt. Joe Friday from the old Dragnet TV series, let’s do a rundown of “just the facts, ma’am” to outline Poe’s long shadow over this popular literary genre. It’s perhaps most obvious and elementary in Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, his 1887 novel that quietly introduced the world to the remarkable Mr. Holmes.

• Much like Holmes’s incipient sidekick Dr. John Watson, Poe’s (unnamed) narrator relates the story and introduces the reader to Dupin, his nouveau compatriot, a brilliantly eccentric and reclusive “young gentleman” of Paris. Moreover, just as Holmes and Watson agree to room together, famously, in their 221B Baker Street London flat, Dupin and his chronicler do the same, sharing a (“time-eaten and grotesque”) mansion in the Faubourg St-Germain district.

• Both narrators are flabbergasted when their respective counterparts seemingly “read” their minds, or at the very least display a preternatural knowledge about them. In Poe, Dupin and his new chum are out strolling one night, mute for minutes on end, when Dupin suddenly and strangely announces that “He is a very little fellow, that’s true …” How is it possible, the other asks, that Dupin knew such same words (or thereabouts) were on his mind? Dupin proceeds to methodically reconstruct each of his companions’ tell-tale actions since their prior remarks, which only leads to the conclusion that his friend was indeed pondering this “little fellow” in question.

• Ditto, on their premier meeting, Holmes tells Watson, “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” to which the astonished doctor replies, “How on earth did you know that?” A few days later, Holmes reveals the cogitation that led him to this truth. Knowing but Watson’s occupation, Holmes’ deft powers of observation deduced his conclusion, ala the “links in a chain” that Dupin logically built out of his companion’s actions. Holmes noted Watson’s military posture and bearing (British army), tanned skin (from the sunny tropics?), haggard face (hardship), and lame arm (battle injury?). Where could the good doctor have been? Since British and Indian troops had recently been at war there to counter Russian influence, ergo, Watson must have served in Afghanistan.

• Apart from plot parallels, Dupin is keenly described as a person of “peculiar analytic ability,” one who makes, in silence, “a host of observations and inferences.” Rather than a man of raw physical prowess, Poe’s protagonist delights in the intellect, in disentangling “enigmas, conundrums, and hieroglyphics,” relying on both his intuitive talents as well as a vast reservoir of knowledge tapped from reliable sources, especially scientific observation and reference. For Dupin to crack the case of the Rue Morgue slayings, he will notably draw on his familiarity with the pioneering French zoologist Georges Cuvier’s illustrated The Animal Kingdom (1816). Symmetrically, Holmes hunts for potential clues to solve the “Brixton Mystery” armed with a magnifying glass and, crucially, the seemingly innocuous discovery of a small box of pills at the murder scene.

• For Dupin, Holmes, and a legion of gumshoes to follow, the detective-hero principally acts alone or in concert with a benign second fiddle; our hero (or heroine) invariably cracks the case despite interference or ineptitude on the part of the authorities. Not only do the blundering lawmen often arrest and jail the wrong man, but they also have few kind things to say about the know-it-all amateur sleuth mucking around their crime scenes. In Dupin’s case, the investigating gendarme sarcastically remarks that he should “mind his own business”; as for Holmes, his Scotland Yard counterpart is the “rat-faced” Legarde, utterly conventional but “the pick of a bad lot.”

• Both mysteries are anchored in a singular setting that will, in time, become foundational in the genre: the “sealed room” crime conundrum. On the Rue Morgue, a young woman is discovered brutally slain in her locked-from-inside fourth-floor bedroom, while her mother’s ghastly mutilated remains are found on the grounds below, apparently flung out the window. Yet that window is also found locked—and evidently from the inside. “An insoluble mystery” is the public verdict. But that was before Dupin arrived to “scrutinize everything,” including the victims and that supposedly latched window. In any case, whoever killed the two women was truly a beast.

• Similarly, Holmes and Watson are beckoned to a south London home where a murdered man, an American, lay inside on the dining-room floor. While Legarde and his partner are proven dead wrong in their glib presumptions about the homicide—thrown off by a “red herring” planted by the killer—Holmes methodically examines the entire scene for 20 minutes, irresistibly reminding Watson of a “well-trained foxhound” on the scent. Armed with his own “peculiar analytic ability,” tape measure, and that magnifying glass, Holmes nonchalantly announces his logically deduced findings (“child’s play”), which will undoubtedly lead him to the culprit. And so, as Holmes remarks, “the plot thickens.”

In Edgar Allan Poe’s Footsteps

A Study in Scarlet attracted only pale notices on its release, perhaps unsurprisingly in light of its peculiar 100-page digression that tells the rambling “back-story” of the blood feud between the murderer and his victim that began years before in Mormon Utah, of all places. By the early 1890s, Doyle had ironed out and streamlined his plots, snugly folding most into compact short stories like “The Speckled Band” that would translate the adventures of Holmes and Watson into a best-selling literary phenomenon at home and abroad (though largely to Doyle’s dismay).

In tandem with Poe and other predecessors, Doyle’s legacy in detective fiction looms large even today, whether in plotting or characterization, in books or in film and television. Be it Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled Philip Marlowe, Hollywood’s comical Inspector Clouseau, or Jessica Fletcher in TV’s Murder, She Wrote, all more or less followed the trail staked out by Edgar Allan Poe, with Arthur Conan Doyle right on his heels.

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) was not the first philosopher to be huddled under the trendy umbrella term of “postmodernism,” but he is, with other sages like the American Fredric Jameson, among the most prominent. His voluminous writings on everything from consumerism to the US-led Gulf War may have ranged from the caustically brilliant to the impishly obscure, but there is no question his legacy shines on, arguably even brighter in the infinitely digitized hall-of-mirrors Internet age. Without further ado, let’s review the highlights.

Jean Baudrillard: Changing Channels

Born in Rheims, Jean escaped his family’s rustic life, leaving to attend Paris’ prestigious Sorbonne in the early 1950s to study German. He then taught it at the secondary level for much of the decade before returning to the Sorbonne for his doctorate, switching métiers as a protégé of the noted postwar sociologist Henri Lefebvre. In the mid-1960s, Baudrillard in turn would become a professor of sociology at the Sorbonne’s Nanterre University, then a hotbed of neo-Marxist political and cultural thought.

Like many leftist French (and European) intellectuals of that era, the near-revolutionary “events” of May 1968 would dim their worldview. Just as De Gaulle’s national government was teetering, crippled by escalating student-led protests and worker strikes, the French Communist Party retreated, and the movement (and moment) collapsed. Many on the liberal and socialist left were left disillusioned, if not roundly defeated. How could the Marxist prediction of the inevitable—and righteous—victory of the working-class proletariat over the bourgeois power structure be so wrong?

While the prevailing answer would blame an entrenched, self-justifying capitalist ideology allied with the pacifying fruits of middle-class prosperity, Baudrillard thought that the Marxist model itself was fatally flawed. By its simplistic, materialist concentration on the proletariat as an agent of production, thus mirroring the ruling class, Marxist thought was reductive, leaving no space for the symbolic desires and rewards inherent in society.

Missing the Marx

Just as Karl Marx (with his collaborator Friedrich Engels) failed to predict the victory of the 1930s Western welfare state, buffering the Depression, he also didn’t foresee that owners and workers alike would be seduced by the allure of what the prescient U.S. economist Thorstein Veblen famously called “conspicuous consumption.” Marx confined his thoughts on mass-produced or man-made capitalist goods to their basic “use value” (or “exchange” value). Baudrillard and others (for instance, the German “Frankfurt School” of the 1920s) expanded the concept, arguing that the “symbolic value” of goods is at least as important to a growing consumer class.

To take one contemporary example, consider the American SUV (sport utility vehicle). To a large extent, these super-sized, uneconomical (some say conspicuously vulgar) hybrid passenger automobiles ran circles over and around the U.S. car market starting in the 1980s and 1990s. While some owners surely benefit from the extra storage and tank-like safety features, in fact, their symbolic value outweighs their use value. Were it not so, a majority of Americans would be driving (and affording) cheaper, smaller, gas-saving compacts. These big, brawny, macho autos—monster passenger trucks too—are every bit about status, as they not only lend alpha-heft and gravitas to the passengers secured within, but allow them to sit literally “above” the puny vehicles in traffic beside them.

In a sense, then, one can argue that the average consumer, even a member of Marx’s lowly proletariat, has essentially been “bought off” by the materialist juggernaut that is modern global corporate capitalism. This is true despite the fact that the modern bourgeoisie are wealthier and more powerful than ever in the 21st-century gilded age, albeit usually covertly. Marx’s predicted revolutionary crisis of overproduction (combined with penurious worker wages) was averted, both through the twin miracles of cheap mass production and a century of usurious consumer borrowing. A great swath of blue-collar and professional workers, the vast middle class, now enjoys the comforts that their not-so-distant ancestors could only dream of, and not only “two cars in every garage.”

The Future of an Illusion

But Baudrillard’s philosophic and sociological revisionism even leaves these relatively simple critiques behind in the rear-view mirror. In such books as The System of Objects (1968) and The Consumer Society (1970), his overarching project was to cast a cold, unblinking eye on how the modern world has migrated into an illusionary realm of the symbolic while keeping materialist commodification at its tethered core. More precisely, he seizes on the watershed ascendancy of the simulacrum and hyper-reality.

Shunning the tactile, truthful reality of the object-world, the deceived viewer instead turns his or her attention to the reflected or reproduced images of things, frequently to the point of a Freudian fetish. Rather than the classic Marxist concept of worker alienation (exploited man estranged from the goods or services he produces), Baudrillard argues that modernity’s defining alienation arises from the masked schism between the onslaught of images produced, sold, and consumed vis-à-vis the unique “real thing” standing behind them, that is, the subject or referent.

Again, such examples abound in contemporary society, and have since the “age of mechanical reproduction” began in earnest with the invention of photography in the mid-1800s. Not only could a subject be photographed to create an iconic, timeless, yet malleable two-dimensional image, but that image could be reproduced over and over again. With electronic digitization largely replacing analog photography, the duplication potential is practically infinite. When still photography gained another dimension—time—the image became even more lifelike and subject to further confusion between image and referent. Enter the age of the god-like Hollywood movie star, attracting not just spectators but hardcore devotees who are doubly deceived: They are not only seduced by an image (it is not real but an uncanny shadow of sorts) but the image itself is based on a conceit (that “star” is playing a role).

The Medium Is the Message?

This process toward what Baudrillard’s contemporary Guy Debord called the “society of the spectacle” sped into overdrive when television made its way into the hearts (and hearths) of modern man. True, its boxy images paled next to those of the “big screen,” but they were more intimate, portable, and could be conjured up at all hours of the day in one’s own home. Now, says Baudrillard et al., the avid TV watcher could enter into a virtual relationship with any number of TV stars through their characters, indeed so much so that “Jerry Seinfeld” or all those cool, funny New York City Friends could become the viewer’s bosom buddies too. This, of course, comes at the same time that the average viewer might be tuning out his real but unfriendly next-door neighbor.

This pervasive social phenomenon is also associated with the concept of the hyper-real. While the simulacrum ostensibly is indicted as a “cheap copy” of the original (like a knock-off Gucci purse or Rolex watch), a relative degradation, typically, the copy can exceed the original in appeal. How so? Again, consider the modern screen image, whether in cinemas, on TV, or via internet “streaming.” While it is an electronic transformation of the subject/referent, displaced and without substance, the resulting illuminated image is nonetheless charged and “glowing” via the projection and transmission process.

These alluring photogenic values can be further enhanced by the various tricks of lighting and cinematography, like the voyeuristic “close-up” impossible in theater. The viewer can possess the image, even if the original is far beyond reach, in another world. Unmasked of star persona and downsized into a mortal being, more than one screen idol has been met with a fan’s disappointment upon meeting face to face.

By almost any yardstick, the later Baudrillard was a pessimist, if a droll one, with regard to the present human potential for transcendence and Platonic transformation. In books such as his acerbic travel treatise, America (1986), he seems almost gleefully resigned that materialistic, banal, fast-and-furious (and “Disneyfied”) U.S. way of life has triumphed over any romantic or communal idealism that once-upon-a-time budded in late 19th century Europe and America.

Reality Check

Another key facet of the postmodern condition is the sense that, with the fall of the Soviet Union (and Russia’s subsequent regression into an oligarchic, neo-tsarist dictatorship), there is now no meaningful ideological alternative to the global hegemony of mass consumerism and “reification”; the latter meaning the relentless commercial pull that seeks to digest and transform the world into objects to be (mass-)produced, packaged, and sold for a profit. And this process extends far beyond mere manufactured goods or services. From film stars, pop singers, political campaigns, spectator sports, and reality-TV shows to today’s internet “influencers” and web-centered pornography, what’s for sale, what’s infinitely reproducible, is the image, a visual trope or tropes, not the object itself; it is this omnipresent image, all wrapped up and delivered, in one critic’s words, in a “frenzy of the visible.”

One only has to look back into the notorious O.J. Simpson murder case, specifically the 90-minute nationally televised, helicopter-enabled 1994 Los Angeles chase that shadowed Simpson in his white Ford Bronco as he fled his arrest for two brutal slayings, including that of his own wife. Record-breaking numbers of viewers across the nation were rapt, glued to their sets, all watching in real time at a serendipitous, made-for-TV reality show playing out before their them, one only made possible through an omniscient, all-seeing “eye in the sky,” and made lucrative with regular commercial breaks, as if it were a football match.

Two decades ago, on the future of global democracy, Baudrillard glumly wrote that the “idea of freedom, a new and recent idea, is already fading.” Prophetically, this idea is mirrored in many current events. In what no doubt sounds dystopian, Baudrillard underlines such alarming developments by announcing that “reality itself has disappeared,” and as such amounts to a “perfect crime.” In what seems to devolve into a “post-truth,” “deep fake,” “fake news,” artificial intelligence-synthesized era, one can only wonder whether Baudrillard would conclude that mankind itself has simulated itself into a “post-human” era.

Look Harder, Says Jean Baudrillard

Keenly influenced by the seminal French “semiologist” Roland Barthes, Baudrillard’s rogue philosophy boldly grew out of the study of the central importance of signs in society, e.g., the latent yet critical differences between an object’s or image’s denotative (literal, fixed) meanings and their connotative (implied, secondary) meanings. It is here that Baudrillard might start a conversation on how best to defend oneself from this sci-fi-worthy, Orwellian “Invasion of the Images.” In today’s grossly mediated, meme-and-trope-heavy onscreen world, one must always be willing to step back and ruminate, especially on the panoply of visual rhetoric (or deceit) at work in any image, still or moving.

At the very least, one should always bear in mind French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s eye-opening caveat inherent in his famous anecdote when he and a friend were looking out on a river and spied a can floating in the distance. The friend asked, “Do you see that can?” “Yes,” answered Lacan. “Well,” the friend continued, “it doesn’t see you.” Of course, cans can’t “see,” but the point is that just because one gazes at an image or object, in no way does it mean that the image/object is “intended” for the viewer personally—or even that the image/object is aware the viewer exists. Furthermore, via the ability to both record and playback images, allowing “time-shifting,” the viewer stands (or sits) further removed from the new perceptual apparatus. Thus, the postmodern, gaze-gobbling image machine is one gigantic illusion, a sham (if compelling) simulacrum with alienation at its core. Look harder, says Baudrillard, and it will come into focus as a solipsistic, even pathological, delusion.

Alongside her sisters Emily and Anne, Charlotte Brontë—one of the famed (and tragically short-lived) Brontës—penned a groundbreaking novel featuring a headstrong, “plain Jane” heroine, with its first third notably narrating Dickensian hardships through a child’s eyes. Not that the book’s initial generation of readers were privy to the author’s true identity; like other early female novelists, Brontë endeavored to skirt the prospect of prejudicial reviews and reception while cloaked in an androgynous nom-de-plum, “Currer Bell.” Here’s what you need to know about Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

Coming of Age: Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre”

In another literary red herring, those scanning the original 1847 title page [above] will note that the book purports to be an “autobiography” edited by one Currer Bell. While hardly the case, the exemplary coming-of-age saga in Jane Eyre does incorporate at least some of the details from Charlotte’s life up to then, particularly her dismal childhood experiences while attending a small girls’ school. As the new rector in the small Yorkshire village of Haworth, father Patrick Brontë (born “Brunty” or “Prunty”) had moved his family into the village’s parsonage in 1820, including his wife Maria and their six children. In what would become a string of untimely, unfathomable losses scarring the family over the decades, in 1821, Maria died of cancer, soon followed by the two eldest children, Maria and Elizabeth, both of what was likely consumption (called tuberculosis today).

Over its vivid 500-plus pages that are resonant of an entirely different era of the British novel—and perhaps its formal apex—Jane Eyre brings the reader into the private confidences of its titular narrator. Indeed, frequently this “Jane” will employ a direct address (“dear reader”), further involving her audience in her tumultuous and trying adventures stretching from age ten to approximately 19. Acute readers will realize that the “autobiographical” events occurred sometime in the not-too-distant past, and that the heroine is writing from the perspective of her late twenties.

Audiences should also note a progression in Jane, not simply from childhood to adulthood, but also from an impulsively defiant, indignant, and judgmental girl to a young lady measurably more sympathetic to the plight and trials of others, even those who mistreated her. Befitting the times and Austen’s own religious beliefs, this arc is backed by a veiled, never overstated, Christian template that foretells a dawning of redemption and grace, especially for those suffering the lonely agonies of the “dark night of the soul.”

Jane Strikes Back

That’s not to say that a young, bloodied Jane didn’t have right on her side when she hauled back and struck her bullying cousin John (“Wicked and cruel boy!” she shouts) after he had first felled her with a book, then crashed headlong into her and pulled her hair. But seeing how orphan Jane is the poor, unwanted relation in her Aunt Reed’s household, she is immediately thrown and locked into Gateshead Hall’s gloomy “red room” as punishment.

This is only the latest unruly, ungodly behavior that incites Mrs. Reed to ship Jane off to Lowood school for orphans. But not before Jane gives her aunt a piece of her mind, which obviously had been simmering for years. “People think you are a good woman; but you are bad—hard-hearted. You are deceitful!” With this, Jane is proud of herself, for perhaps the first time. She writes that “my soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph that I have ever felt.”

Obviously, such rash and ill-tempered words (and thoughts) from a ten-year-old girl were hardly encouraged during a century when family elders were to be respected at all times, and proper children were indeed to be “seen, not heard,” or risk the lash. Throughout the novel, in ways rarely seen as authored by women or men during the era, Jane rarely holds back on matters near and dear to her and acts the shy, retiring “weaker sex.” It’s exactly this type of challenging, unorthodox (and prophetically pre-feminist) dialogue that gave some of the early critics fits. London’s Quarterly Review called Jane “the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit … a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself. No Christian grace is perceptible upon her.”

Yet most critics and even more readers saw Jane as a personification of a remarkable human spirit, set in an uncommonly introspective and involving story, including the great authors of the day, such as William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair). For those familiar with Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1838), Jane’s hardscrabble journey from outcast orphan to finding her place in the world would have strong resonance, especially as an indictment of the oppressive and cruel social institutions set up to care for impoverished children.

In her preface to the book’s second edition, Brontë pointedly states that “conventionality is not morality” and “self-righteousness is not religion.” While in her sadly short life (she died in 1855) Brontë proved to be no social radical, feminist or otherwise, her Jane Eyre nevertheless is an unequivocal assertion of individual freedom to follow one’s passion and conscience, even in the face of social roles and expectations based on prevailing systems of power and “morality.”

The Lowood Years

Yet, along with Brontë’s plea for egalitarian freedom and fairness, her novel is equally audacious in depicting an unconventional heroine who is not only poor but admittedly “plain” too, thus a cardinal sin vis-à-vis the middle-class English marriage lottery. Gaunt and diminutive like Jane, with no stirring features except her “great honest eyes,” Charlotte often described herself as “doomed to be an old maid.” But in Jane, the author is determined to prove that such superficialities are indeed only skin deep and mask a resilient, fiery intellect that the right man will find attractive, if not irresistible. Alternatively, an 18-year-old Jane is unsparing in her unspoken judgment of the classically beautiful Miss Ingram, a potential rival: “She was very showy, but she was not genuine … her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature—nothing bloomed spontaneously on that soil …”

Jane’s eight years at Lowood include one of the novel’s most poignant passages. She is befriended by Helen Burns, a kindly, bookish girl who is unjustly singled out for punishment by Mr. Brocklehurst, the school’s fire-and-brimstone-preaching clergyman. He also berates a teacher when he notices that one of the students is wearing her hair in long curls. “My mission is to mortify in these girls the lusts of the flesh!” he fumes.

Due to what Jane blames on the school’s abysmal conditions (and rancid food), a terrible outbreak of typhus begins stalking the young lives. When Jane learns Helen is among the afflicted, she races to her room, only to discover she is mortally ill. Yet even at death’s door, Helen is serene. “I believe; I have faith; I am going to God,” she tells Jane, who lovingly embraces her friend in her bed for the night. It’s only later that Jane is told that Helen died in her arms.

Jane Eyre poses profound and timeless questions, some unanswerable. When Helen talks of the certainty of God and heaven, Jane asks her, “Shall I see you again, Helen, when I die?” But she also ponders silently, “Where is that region? Does it exist?”

Meeting Master Rochester

As for questions of Earthly concern, principally love and labor, Jane’s journey next takes her to the central part of the novel (and the one usually favored in the various film versions). Here is where Jane Eyre wades into distinctly 19th century Gothic and Romantic territory, of desolate moors, forbidden love, and ghostly visions—not so unlike sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights, which was also published in 1847, though to far less acclaim than garnered for Charlotte’s sensational breakthrough.

From Lowood, Jane is off to accept a post as governess at Thornfield Hall, the baronial if tattered manor of its absentee owner, Mr. Edward Rochester. Her charge is young Adele, a French-born girl who may or may not be Rochester’s illegitimate fille and whose mother has long since left her. Jane and Rochester’s first meeting is not only memorable but serves to obliquely foreshadow how the “master” will be humbled and brought low through the course of the story, with Jane as both witness and earthbound guardian angel. Preceded by his dog Pilot and astride his black steed Mesrour, Rochester races past Jane on a country road, only to tumble to the ground in a heap, his horse slipping on a sheet of ice. Escaping serious injury, Rochester picks himself up with a little help from the bystander, though not before she hears a variation or two on the master’s favorite (“What the deuce?”) swear words.

She is struck by the middle-aged (“he might be 35”) stranger with a dark face and stern features in a fur-collared riding coat, yet is not shy about speaking to him since he wasn’t a “handsome heroic-looking young gentleman.” While Jane doesn’t know it then, Edward similarly was struck by her, if not smitten, despite those stern features, heavy brow, and persistent scowl. In one of several allusions to Jane’s almost supernatural effect on Edward, he later jokingly accuses her of “bewitching” his horse just so he would fall, so conjuring up their fateful rendezvous.

Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and the Secret of Thornfield Hall

But any hint of romance in Jane Eyre is many chapters away, not the least because of the fair Blanche Ingram, whom Rochester appears to court at many of the soirees at Thornfield Hall. More insidiously, there’s the matter of the mysterious phenomena that begin occurring late at night, seeming to originate from the manor’s third floor, and—horrors!—directly above Jane’s bedroom. At first, Jane hears a kind of “curious … demonic laugh.” Another night, there is a strange knocking on her door. Everyone at the hall, including Mr. Rochester, tells Jane that the source of those unnerving sounds is surely Grace Poole, a rather eccentric maid assigned to the third floor. No worries, they say, she’s harmless.

Explanations aside, there’s nothing harmless in the fire that nearly consumes Mr. Rochester’s bed, with him asleep in it. Once again, Jane is there in the nick of time, lured by that demonic laugh to the master’s chambers, where she speedily douses the blaze with a basin of water. Once he realizes Jane has been the rescuer, not the assailant (“Have you plotted to drown me?” he jokes), he takes her hand in thanks—only for Jane to notice he continues to hold it until she finds an excuse to leave.

The faux “autobiography” of one Jane Eyre has too many twists, turns, and pressing moments to highlight in our summary, but, over its 38 imaginatively written and “intensely interesting” chapters, patient modern readers will find one of the greatest classic novels written by and about a woman, rich in human drama, reflection, social comment, conscience, and hope. As to any qualifying statements regarding how Charlotte Brontë’s gender affects her legacy, if at all, she merits the last words. In 1849, she responded to a critic thusly: “To you I am neither Man or Woman—I come before you as an Author only—it is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me—the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.”

Through poetry, fiction, essays, and journalism, Black women writers have challenged racism, sexism, and social injustice while reclaiming narratives historically ignored or distorted. Their voices have preserved cultural traditions, documented resistance, and inspired movements for civil rights, gender equality, and liberation. Writers like Phillis Wheatley, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, and Yaa Gyasi have expanded the literary canon and deepened our understanding of identity, power, and resilience.

1. Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-1784)

“Wisdom is higher than a fool can reach,” Phillis Wheatley, On Virtue in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, 1773.

Phillis Wheatley was a West African-born writer and activist, known as the first Black American to publish a book of poetry. Kidnapped at a young age, she was brought to North America and enslaved by the Wheatley family in Boston. The Wheatleys taught her to read and write, recognizing her talent early and encouraging her to write poetry. Phillis studied the Bible, geography, British literature, Greek and Latin classics, and astronomy—subjects that profoundly shaped her writing.

In 1770, Wheatley gained international attention with her An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of that Celebrated Divine, and Eminent Servant of Jesus Christ, the Reverend and Learned George Whitefield. The poem was published in several cities, including London. Though she had written 28 poems by the age of 18, American colonists were reluctant to publish her work, so Wheatley sought support in London. In 1771, she traveled there, meeting abolitionists, poets, and political figures and connecting with bookseller Archibald Bell, who agreed to publish her work.

Wheatley’s book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, appeared in 1773. Her writing reflected on biblical themes, anti-slavery sentiment, religious devotion, classical references, and thoughts on American independence. She often used the couplet form in her poetry, combining classical and neoclassical styles.

In 1778, Wheatley married John Peters, a freed Black man, and continued to write throughout her life. Scholars estimate she wrote at least 145 poems and many letters to political and religious leaders in America and abroad. Wheatley used poetry to criticize slavery and comment on events like the Great Awakening, demonstrating not only her intellect but also the capabilities of enslaved Black women. Her legacy paved the way for abolitionists and women’s rights activists to use writing to advance the causes of freedom and equality.

2. Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823-1893)

“In anything relating to our people, I am insensible of boundaries,” Mary Ann Shadd Cary in a letter to abolitionist Frederick Douglass, 1849.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary, born to a free, middle-class Black family in Delaware, was a writer, anti-slavery activist, educator, and the first Black woman to edit and publish a newspaper in North America.

Her family helped enslaved people escape through the Underground Railroad, and her father wrote for The Liberator, an abolitionist paper. Inspired by her parents’ actions, Cary spoke out against slavery and educated others on the Black American experience. She attended a Quaker school as a child and, after the Fugitive Slave Act passed, moved to Canada, where she opened an integrated school.

In 1852, Cary began publishing essays promoting emigration to Canada as resistance to oppression. Her pamphlet, A Plea for Emigration; or, Notes of Canada West, informed Black Americans about settling in Canada and included testimonials from those who had successfully relocated.

In 1853, she founded The Provincial Freeman, Canada’s first anti-slavery newspaper. Through it, Cary advocated for education, racial equality, and self-reliance, while condemning prejudice. In an effort to reach more Black readers, she even smuggled the paper into the US. Once The Provincial Freeman gained a steady audience, she put her name on the masthead, but backlash forced her to resign in 1855.

Undeterred, Cary toured the US, giving speeches in support of abolition and civil rights. That same year, she became the first woman to speak at a national Black civil rights convention. After her husband passed away, Cary returned to the US with her children, believing she would make more of a difference supporting Black Americans across the border.

During the American Civil War, she accepted a commission from the US government and ran a recruiting office for Black soldiers to join the Union Army. After the war, she supported emancipated Black Americans and resumed teaching.

In 1880, Cary founded the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise and, in 1883, became one of the first Black women to earn a law degree, graduating from Howard University. Cary’s voice uplifted other Black voices and exemplified Black women’s influence in the 19th century.

3. Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

“I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions,” Zora Neale Hurston in a letter to fellow writer Countee Cullen.

Zora Neale Hurston was an American writer, professor, folklorist, and anthropologist whose work illustrated the lives of Black Americans in the South. Born in Alabama to formerly enslaved parents, she became one of the most influential female writers of the 20th century, producing over 50 short stories, plays, essays, ethnographies, and an autobiography.

After high school, she earned an associate’s degree and a BA in anthropology from Barnard College in 1928. As a student, she conducted fieldwork on Black folklore in the American South. In the 1920s, she became involved in the Harlem Renaissance, writing alongside such talents as Langston Hughes.

In 1930, Hurston and Hughes collaborated on Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts, a play rooted in Southern folklore and oral traditions, though it was never fully completed. In 1934, she published her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, which offers a raw, authentic portrayal of the Black Southern experience—examining dysfunctional relationships, religion, and post-Reconstruction Era migration among other themes.

In 1935, Mules and Men was published, documenting folk traditions of Black Americans in Florida specifically. Her acclaimed 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, explores racial identity, gender dynamics, and self-reliance in a South still shaped by the aftermath of the American Civil War. In 1938, she published Tell My Horse, a blend of travel writing and anthropology focused on Voodoo practices, followed by Moses, Man of the Mountain in 1939. Her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, appeared in 1942, and her final novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, was published in 1948.

Hurston’s work highlights the often overlooked experience of Black rural life in the South. Interest in her writing surged in the late 20th century, with posthumous collections released. In 2025, The Life of Herod the Great—a continuation of Moses, Man of the Mountain with research based on Hurston’s letters—was completed by scholar Deborah G. Plant.

4. Audre Lorde (1934-1992)

“My sexuality is part and parcel of who I am, and my poetry comes from the intersection of me and my worlds…” Audre Lorde in an interview with Dr. Charles H. Rowell, 1990.

Born to West Indian parents, Audre Lorde was a Black American writer, poet, intersectional feminist, and civil rights activist who supported gender equality and spoke out against racism, sexism, and homophobia. She identified as a lesbian and spoke in favor of sexual freedom. Lorde achieved a BA from Hunter College and an MLS from Columbia University, going on to work as a librarian before teaching as the poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, a historically Black college. Later, Lorde served as poet laureate in New York City.

Lorde published several poems in the 1960s and 1970s, with her most famous collections being Cables to Rage (1970), which explores her anger at the personal and societal injustices she faced as a lesbian and feminist, and The Black Unicorn (1978), which represents the marginalization and oppression Black women face in society. Written after a trip with her children to Benin, the text calls on the strength of goddesses in African mythology.

Lorde’s works discuss identity, societal expectations, oppressive forces, liberation, and self-acceptance. Lorde also often alludes to the American Civil Rights Movement in her writings, commenting on murders of innocent Black victims at the hands of authority figures and illustrating the dark realities of being Black in a racist country.

Lorde also wrote essays, including Burst of Light (1988), a collection of essays that explores racism, Black identity, and lesbian sexuality, calling for resistance against oppression and attitudinal changes in society. Within the collection, Lorde challenges societal norms and reflects on the human experience, including her own struggles with her cancer diagnosis. The theme of vulnerability is present throughout the collection.

Lorde’s work is significant as Lorde speaks for the marginalized in society. She raised awareness of the injustices women, especially Black women, face, and she shed light on the experience of the LGBTQ+ community, providing a raw portrayal of the struggles of those on the fringes of society.

5. Yaa Gyasi (1989-Present)

“I started imagining the idea of the Gold Coast women walking above these dungeons and I was wondering what they knew of what was going on below,” Yaa Gyasi said in an interview with the Vilcek Foundation about her debut novel, Homegoing, 2020.

Born in Mampong, Ghana, Yaa Gyasi is a Ghanaian-American novelist whose work reflects on the immigrant experience and Black life in the United States and abroad. In 1991, Gyasi moved with her family to the United States as her father pursued a PhD, and the Gyasi family eventually settled in Huntsville, Alabama. Gyasi achieved a BA in English from Stanford University as well as an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a prestigious creative program at the University of Iowa.

In 2012, Gyasi resigned from her job at a tech startup to focus on her first novel, Homegoing, published in 2016. The book was inspired by a trip to Ghana, where Gyasi explored her mother’s ancestral home and visited with family. She also toured the Cape Coast Castle, a colonial fort that once housed enslaved people who were held captive there before being forced onto ships headed for the Americas.

The novel follows sisters as they navigate life in 18th-century Ghana, with one sister marrying a British commander and the other being enslaved. The book explores colonialism, generational trauma, and the effects of history through the eyes of the sisters’ descendants, commenting on such historical events as plantation life in the American South and the American Civil Rights Movement.

Gyasi’s second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, was published in 2020. It explores the protagonist’s immigration story by illustrating the struggles the family faces moving to Alabama from Ghana, including addiction struggles, mental health issues, and racism.

Gyasi has contributed to a number of publications and, in 2021, wrote a short story, Bad Blood, which appeared in The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. The story follows a woman who suffers from hypochondria as a result of the discrimination Black people have faced in the healthcare system in the US, referencing the 1932 Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

Gyasi’s work sheds light on the Black experience in America, specifically the difficulties Black immigrants face and generational traumas that Black people endure due to racism, slavery, and conflict.