Lisa's Blog

“Is there a wrong way to read a novel?” Two different people asked me this last week while I was carrying around John Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel. Even though the author doesn’t exactly write about a correct way to read, he does give some ideas about how to approach a novel. To grasp and understand the meaning of a piece, we don’t only need to look at what the author writes, but we need to look at what the author doesn’t write.

We can have a deeper understanding of the author’s points when we consider the time period, lifestyle, or inventions at that time. It also helps to place the author with other famous people, or imagine who was president at the time. Was there a war or other catastrophe the author just experienced. By looking at what the author does not write about, we can see his intentions more clearly.

Sutherland states that without a sense of the time period, we cannot grasp the full meaning of what the author was trying to say. Sutherland writes, 

“Framing fiction within the necessary time and culture setting is tricky and requires practice. But without that framework, something will be seriously missing.” 

A perfect example is Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. We know it was first published in 1925. Of course, she had the idea and began writing maybe a few years earlier. We can only imagine England recovering from the loss of millions of lives during the Great War of 1914-1918 and the Spanish Flu pandemic. 

Why is this important?

Southerland points out that the film version of Mrs. Dalloway, released in 1997, had a romanticized, misleading cover that doesn’t remain true to the original story.

“The film version of Mrs. Dalloway (1997) inspired a tie-in paperback whose romanticized cover is as remote from Spanish Flu and the Great War, as it is from Mars.” 

John Sutherland’s book has some dull moments, but in all he reinforces theories from any college literature class: look at the time period. There’s no wrong way to read a novel, just a better way.