num_pages: 288
description: Wendy Fairey grew up among books. Her mother the famous Hollywood columnist Sheila Graham was F. Scott Fitzgerald's last lovehe 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 authors 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.
language: English
title: Bookmarked: Reading My Way from Hollywood to Brooklyn
publisher: Arcade