Published in 2015
288 pages
Wendy W. Fairey holds a doctorate from Columbia University and teaches English literature and creative writing at Brooklyn College, where she was also formerly a dean. She is the author of One of the Family (1992), a family memoir, and Full House (2002), a collection of linked stories.
What is this book about?
Wendy Fairey grew up among books. Her mother, the famous Hollywood columnist Sheila Graham, was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last love—he died in their living room in 1940. Fitzgerald would bring home literary classics from Charles Dickens to George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. Their protagonists became her intimates. Leaving her glamorous Hollywood world as a young girl, Fairey entered the English landscape of David Copperfield, whose sensibility and aspirations she intimately shared, not least because both suffered a terrible stepfather. Her many affinities with David squired her to adulthood, when she became an English professor and eventually a college dean.
This memoir is the author’s literary journey through the classic British novels of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Besides David Copperfield, her traveling companions include Daniel Deronda, the hero of George Eliot’s last novel, as well as Deronda’s wife, Gwendolyn Harleth, whose suffering resembled the author’s own in her stressed marriage. Both characters become important presences, and like Daniel, Fairey learned late in life of her Jewish ancestry. Other fictional companions, including Jane Eyre, Mrs. Ramsey (Virginia Woolf), Tess (Thomas Hardy), and Isabel (Henry James), weave in and out, helping her understand her own identity and trajectory. In this inspiring book, Fairey shows how great literature is and can be forever an inspiration, a companion, and a guide to living.
