Modern literature and education Literary modernism Postmodernism Feminist literature

1 Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
The world of Dickens is superbly evoked in this vivid excursion into thieves’ kitchens, grand houses, and lunatic asylums, but the great achievement is the brilliant plot twist that is much more like the sort of trick played on the reader by Wilkie Collins at his cleverest than Dickens’s generally clumsy plotting. (Great Expectations excepted!) We’re encouraged to make assumptions about the characters that are suddenly revealed as unfounded and we have to re-interpret everything we’ve read up to that point. The treatment of class and sex is far more realistic than anything that either of those writers would have dared.
2 Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin
This takes the form of a journal kept by a young servant-girl working for a kindly doctor in late 19th-century London. The girl is naive and trusting and only gradually does the reader start to work out who the doctor is, and what is really going on. Without giving too much away, I can say that this is a sly and thoughtful “revisiting” of a classic text of the period that succeeds in generating new insights into a story that has become iconic. It brings a fresh psychoanalytical perspective to a text which has inspired many post-Freudian narratives in literature and film.
3 The Music of the Spheres by Elizabeth Redfern
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This fiendishly clever novel (astonishingly underrated) features a Home Office official in the London of the 1790s who investigates, for a deeply personal reason, a series of linked murders carried out by a monster who in our age would be called a serial killer. The author constructs a complex narrative that keeps the reader guessing right to the end with some ingenious surprises along the way. That’s more than enough to make an absorbing read, but the novel also evokes the slippery and ambiguous game of espionage and counter-espionage played between the British government and French anti-revolutionary exiles. The interplay between the political complexities of the time and the interests of the protagonist is gripping.