{"title":"Books by Jolyon Connell","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781907776038","title":"The Connell Guide To Charles Dickens's Great Expectations","description":"\u003cp\u003eGreat Expectations is one of the best-selling Victorian novels of our time. No Dickens work, with the exception of A Christmas Carol, has been adapted more for both film and television. It has been as popular with critics as it has with the public. In 1937, George Bernard Shaw called the novel Dickens’s “most compactly perfect book”. John Lucas describes it as “the most perfect and the most beautiful of all Dickens’s novels”, Angus Wilson as “the most completely unified work of art that Dickens ever produced”.                                                                                  \u003cbr\u003e Great Expectations has been so successful partly because it’s an exciting story. Dickens always had a keen eye on the market and subscribed to Wilkie Collins’s advice: “make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, above all make ‘em wait.” From the violent opening scene on the marshes to the climax of Magwitch’s attempted escape on the Thames, the story is full of suspense, mystery and drama. But while these elements of Great Expectations have ensured its popularity, it is also a novel which, as this guide will seek to show, raises profound questions not just about the nature of Victorian society but about the way human relationships work and the extent to which people are shaped by their childhoods and the circumstances in which they grow up.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308345143669,"sku":"9781907776038","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781907776038_b65cf151-0391-4629-aa8d-75267e861ab0.jpg?v=1786029003"},{"product_id":"9781907776137","title":"The Connell Guide To Jane Austen's Emma","description":"\u003cp\u003e“A heroine whom no-one but myself will much like,” the author famously proclaimed. In fact, in any league of likeability Miss Woodhouse is streets ahead of Miss Fanny – the ostentatiously “meek” heroine of Mansfield Park. Meek Emma is not. Indeed it is her sense of absolute sovereignty over her little world of Highbury – her right, as she presumes, to dispose of the marriage choices of those in her circle – which brings her to grief. And that grief, by the familiar course of the heroine’s moral education in Austen’s fiction, makes her, through remorse and repentance, a mature woman capable of forming correct judgements. Not least about whom Miss Woodhouse herself will marry.                         \u003cbr\u003e                                                      \u003cbr\u003e Emma, of all the six great novels, is the one which conforms most closely to Austen’s famous formula that “three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on”.  Emma is, by general agreement, the “quietest” of the novels.  Some have complained that there is not enough of a story in it, but others, as this guide shows, have found the plot in Emma the most successful Austen achieved. It is, for example, unusual among the sextet in playing a cunning trick on the reader who – unless they are sharp (sharper certainly than Miss Woodhouse) – may well be deluded as to which eligible young (or less than young) man the heroine will end up spending the rest of her life with. Or whether, given her frequently uttered distaste for marriage, she will end up the only unwed of the six heroines at the end of it all.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56308936442229,"sku":"9781907776137","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781907776137_f6ce6169-6f0d-4d8a-81d8-2d79451951dc.jpg?v=1786029011"},{"product_id":"9781907776090","title":"The Connell Guide To Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Ubervilles","description":"\u003cbr\u003eBinding: Paperback \/ softback","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309050835317,"sku":"9781907776090","price":8.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781907776090_89a3475d-f189-477e-bbdf-16b2d8878a9d.jpg?v=1786029008"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-jolyon-connell.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}