Extracts from Fiction
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Fiction’
In Erewhon, apologise by saying you have the socks and everyone will understand.
You would be forgiven for thinking that our politicians today seem more sympathetic towards criminals than they do towards the sick and unemployed. In Erewhon, Samuel Butler’s dystopian Utopia, this had been enshrined as policy — which involved the Erewhonians in some ingenious evasions in order to avoid prosecution for a cold.
Charles Dickens set his historical novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859) in the French Revolution seventy years before, but it was far from the dead past to him.
The opening lines of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities are among his most famous. He creates a sense of breathless and surging emotion; he encourages the reader to think of the past as a living, throbbing present; and he reminds us that the present too may stand on the brink of sudden and violent change. The chapter is quite long, but cleverly written and, especially with a few notes, very enlightening.
When she was ten, Catherine Morland showed none of the qualities needed to impress the ladies who read romantic fiction.
Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, published after her death in 1817, is a playful swipe at contemporary women’s fiction. She begins by warning us that Catherine Morland had not experienced the kind of childhood — marked by fragile beauty, precocious accomplishments, and sentimental attachments — that fans of romantic fiction expected in their heroines. She was, in fact, perfectly normal.
Sir Edward Leithen finds himself revising his opinion of the ‘detestable’ Koré Arabin.
Sir Edward Leithen, a forty-something lawyer of great distinction, ran across Corrie Arabin at a dance party given by his cousin-of-sorts, Mollie Nantley. ‘The girl is detestable’ was his first thought. But after Corrie — or more rightly Koré, a Greek name — turned to him for help in resolving a legal dispute with Athens, Ned’s feelings for the young woman began to change.
Hours after running away to sea, Robinson Crusoe was sorry he ever left home.
Against the advice of his affectionate father and the pleadings of his distraught mother, Robinson Crusoe, then eighteen, refused to study for the law and announced he would go to sea. This remained little more than a shapeless gesture of teenage rebellion for a year. Then one day a friend went to Hull for a trip up the coast to London in his father’s ship, and invited Robinson to come along for the ride.
Silas Marner, the weaver, plans to take a comforting look at his savings while he eats his dinner.
Silas Marner, the weaver, lives a reclusive life now, following an unhappy episode when he was framed for stealing. One night, while waiting for his supper to cook (a nice bit of pork, a gift or he would not have indulged himself) he decides to fetch his savings from their secret place beneath the floor, and enjoy the sight of them as he eats.