On 3/6/11, I wrote about memorable characters in novels; today I write of memorable settings, whether fictional or real, in novels. Some are houses or estates; some are cities. Most have positive connotations, some do not. But all linger in my mind even many years after reading the novels in which the settings are portrayed. Below are some examples:
-Barton Cottage (in Sense and Sensibility)
-Longbourn, Netherfield Park, Pemberley (in Pride and Prejudice)
-Mansfield Park (in Mansfield Park)
-Hartfield, Donwell Abbey, Highbury (in Emma)
-Bath, Northanger Abbey (in Northanger Abbey)
-Lyme, Bath (in Persuasion)
-Lowood School, Thornfield, the moors (in Jane Eyre)
-Wuthering Heights, Thrushcross Grange, the moors in Yorkshire (in Wuthering Heights)
-Cranford (in Cranford)
-Wessex (in Hardy's novels)
-Dublin (in Ulysses, The Dubliners)
-New York City (in Wharton's novels)
-Long Island (in The Great Gatsby)
-Nebraska (in My Antonia)
-The Dakotas (in Giants in the Earth)
-Prince Edward Island (in Anne of Green Gables)
-The March family house, the Lawrence family house next door (in Little Women)
-London (in Mrs. Dalloway)
-Howards End (in Howards End)
-the Marabar Caves (in A Passage to India)
-Paris cafes and bars (in The Sun Also Rises)
-Yoknapatawpha County (in Faulkner's novels)
-Malgudi (in R. K. Narayan's novels)
-Los Angeles (in The Day of the Locust)
-Los Angeles (in Joan Didion's work)
-Salinas, Monterey (in Steinbeck's novels)
-San Francisco (in Alice Adams' novels and stories)
-San Francisco (in Armistead Maupin's novels)
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Great topic! I love Colm Toibin's description of downtown Brooklyn in the 1950s in his novel Brooklyn. I especially like his portrait of department store life in that setting at that time. Andrea Levy's description of London during WWII in Small World and Irene Nemirovsky's of Paris and the provinces during the German occupation in Suite Francaise are also amazing.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Sarah, for those examples of memorable settings. I have read and posted about the novel Brooklyn, and completely agree with you. Of course you have a far better knowledge of Brooklyn than I do, and that novel must have especially "spoken" to you. I'll put the other two books on my reading list.
ReplyDeleteI think you'll like them both. Small World is about Jamaicans recruited by the RAF to be trained as pilots during WWII. Of course once they got to England they were only allowed to clean and drive. It's a beautiful novel about the intersecting lives of a young Jamaican man, his wife and a working class English family.
ReplyDeleteSuite Francaise was written during WWII by a Jewish writer who was killed during the Holocaust, but whose ms. survived, carted around by her daughters and published just a few years ago.