Michael Cunningham’s 1998 Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, The Hours, tells the intertwined stories of three 20th-century women: the modernist author Virginia Woolf, in London; the midcentury housewife Laura Brown, in Los Angeles; and the late-90s literary editor and hostess Clarissa Vaughan, in New York City. Although Clarissa imagines an alternate “life as potent and dangerous as literature itself,” ultimately she reconciles herself to “an hour here or there when our lives … burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined.”

Like a cubist painting, Virginia Woolf’s narrative style offers multiple simultaneous perspectives on simple objects: dogs, trees, a day in June 1923. Were Woolf a realist writer, Mrs Dalloway would be far more straightforward: a middle-aged woman reflects on her life and reunites with friends as she prepares to host a party; a war veteran, meanwhile, dies by suicide after unsympathetic medical treatment of his PTSD. By using stream-of-consciousness methods for multiple characters in this novel, Woolf grants us access to their minds — excavating insight and beauty from the very ordinariness of life. If you like this episode, you’ll also enjoy S02E07, “How to Read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.”

Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker-Prize-winning novel, Girl, Woman, Other, is a perfect illustration of the novel’s power to make you empathize with characters unlike yourself. It’s about black womanhood, but it’s also about being unconfined to your identity.  Correction: The character married to Giles, who reads Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, is not Shirley but Penelope.

“I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,” Jane Austen declared about Emma Woodhouse, the only heroine of her six novels to earn its title. The first novel in English written in a free indirect style, Emma has the lasting effect of making novels the standard form for readers to empathize with characters who may be very unlike ourselves.

An introduction to the second book of Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.