Lady Susan – Jane AustenLady Susan is an epistolary novel written by Jane Austen that was published in 1871 but was believed to have been completed by Austen sometime during 1794. The novel is written using diary entries, news clippings, letters etc. Lady Susan is unlike any other female protagonist that was created by Jane Austen as she is a very selfish and conniving woman. She is a married woman who is also trying to have a relationship with another man. Lady Susan not only walks a different path for a protagonist but as a fictional character she also managed to stay away from the principles of a romance novel making her a very interesting character to study.
I really like Tom Sharpe. But after reading the South African novels and then jumping ahead to Blott on the Landscape (a classic), I was disappointed in this one. I have a difficult time with novels wherein the protagonist an unlikeable jerk. I had no empathy for him whatsoever. The book had a contrived setup for the main plot device (the hostage situation), which took up half the book. The foreign student was poorly developed and her mid-narrative personality shift was quite hard to swallow. The only saving grace in the book was Wilt's wife, who has a force of character that stole the show. She should have been the protagonist.
Heinlein's 1951 novel offers a ship drifting through the currents of space as a microcosm of society, complete with class struggles, politics (including war between inhabitants of different decks), and love and family. Protagonist Hugh Hoyland fights to understand it all and to bring unity to the crew.
Isherwood's resurrected classic—now a feature film—takes us to Southern California in the 1960s and into one day in the life of George, a gay, middle-aged English professor, struggling to cope with his young lover's tragic death. Simon Prebble's voice is a perfect conduit for Isherwood's lyricism, and he assumes the role of George so naturally and with such raw feeling that listeners will feel as if they are hearing the words straight from the protagonist himself, so beautifully does Prebble create George's reserve behind which surge tides of grief, rage, and bitter loneliness.
During the last two decades of her life, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis worked on nearly 100 books with varying degrees of responsibility as an editor, first at Viking--she resigned after being castigated by the New York Times about a Viking thriller with a Ted Kennedy–like protagonist as an assassination target--and then at Doubleday, which promised to avoid any similar embarrassments.
