Photo: Stuart Simpson / Penguin
In 2015, for the 80th birthday of Penguin Books, the Little Black Classics series was born: a selection of bite-sized gems from the Penguin Classics list guaranteed to delight, enlighten and provoke the reader. The LBCs contained stories from almost three thousand years ago through to the 20th Century, poetry from all around the world, and politics from the Constitution of the United States to the Communist Manifesto .
Aphra Behn – spy, traveller and woman of mystery who deliberately obscured details of her early life – was the first woman in England to earn a living by her pen. Oroonoko , published in 1688 and one of the earliest English novels, is about a “great and just” African prince “adorned with a native beauty” who is enslaved by “civilised” white Christians. Behn’s presentation of the moral superiority of the Africans to the Europeans was considered to be an anti-slavery stance, at a time when abolitionism was a fringe belief. Oroonoko ’s narrator ends by hoping the story would be “enough to make his glorious name survive all the ages.” Over 300 years later, it’s still going strong.
If you liked this, try: Oulaudah Equiano, Kidnapped
The Greek-Egyptian poet Constantine Cavafy lived a quiet life: when E.M. Forster visited him in Alexandria in 1916, he said he only ever saw him “going either from his flat to the office or from his office to the flat.” But his poetry travelled far in human experience and emotion, and is notable for its homosexual and erotic aspects. In ‘He Vows’, Cavafy writes: “Every now and then / he vows to live a better life. / But when night comes / … / he returns, lost, / to the same fatal pleasures.” His poems are evocative, regretful and suffused with longing, as titles like ‘Desires’, ‘Dangerous Things’, and ‘I Have Gazed So Much’ suggest. Cavafy died on his 70th birthday, in 1933; his poetry collections were published posthumously.
The Yellow Wall-Paper was written in 1892, long before the word “gaslighting” was invented – but that’s just what it depicts. It’s a feverish narrative by a woman imprisoned in her bedroom by her doctor husband, who tells her she has a “slight hysterical tendency” – in reality post-natal depression. All she has to keep her company are the “great slanting waves of optic horror” on her bedroom wallpaper, which drives her further and further into madness. Gilman was a leading voice in feminist fiction, with her other works including Herland
Wharton is best known for her novels of New York’s rich and terrible, but her stories are a perfect distillation of her social themes. The Reckoning was written in 1902 in response to the liberalisation of America’s divorce laws. In it, lawyer Clement Westall attracts “an eager following of the mentally unemployed” with his speeches in favour of freedom within marriage – but his wife Julia fears it’s just a cover for him seeing a younger woman. But the story moves from sardonic (“It was so delicious to cry over imaginary troubles!”) to sadness, as it makes Julia reflect on her previous marriage, until past meets present – and she finds herself “outside in the darkness.”
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head was taken off, I know that is poetry.” Emily Dickinson wrote as she read, and her brief, powerful poems capture worlds of emotion in a single page. Her work is timeless, addressing issues of race and identity (“Color – caste – denomination – / These are Time’s affair – / Death’s diviner Classifying / Does not know they are”), and she could be both excitable (“Good morning, Midnight! / I’m coming home / Day – got tired of me – / How could I – of Him?”) and frightening (on death: “It’s coming – the postponeless Creature”). The dashes she used as punctuation are fresh and bold even today, and add to what Ted Hughes called “the wonderfully naked voltage of the poems.”
The great critic of architecture John Ruskin is rescued from scurrilous rumours about his wedding night by this Little Black Classic, which shows him in fighting form. Invited by Yorkshire businessmen in 1864 to advise them on the best style for the Bradford Exchange they want to build, instead he gives it to them – politely – with both barrels. He attacks their world of capitalist enterprise, which prizes competition over co-operation – they worship “the Goddess of Getting-on”, he says, but not everybody is “getting on”: many are struggling. “What we like,” he warns them, “determines what we are ,” and he leaves us in no doubt about what he thinks they are. They must have been sorry they asked him in the first place.
“Even on the highest throne in the world, we are still sitting on our ass.” Montaigne’s wisdom has never led us astray in the 450 years since he put pen to paper and invented the modern essay. He wrote to combat his depression at the death of his father, and explored everything about himself: how we have mixed feelings (“It is not strange to lament a person dead whom one would not in the least want to have alive”), how our conscience “makes us betray, accuse, and fight ourselves,” or how self-important people like to go “puffing themselves out with big words.” Montaigne himself would never stoop so low.
Akutagawa’s feverishly intense stories are exciting, cynical, and funny, and his combination of stylish modernity and traditional themes made him famous before his death in 1927 at the age of 35. His most famous story is included here: ‘In a Bamboo Grove’, where a rape and murder are described from different viewpoints by different witnesses, all clashing and inconsistent. Akutagawa’s influence is immense, but his stories are beautifully readable, and Haruki Murakami calls him one of the ten greatest “national writers” of Japan: “He might even squeeze into the top five.”
If you liked this, try: Nikolai Gogol, The Nose
This Little Black Classic takes a different approach: it’s a selection of newspaper articles, posters, pamphlets and legal documents from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, showing the course of the campaign for women in England to be allowed to vote. A vivid poster from 1909 shows a suffragette being force-fed under the heading TORTURING WOMEN IN PRISON; Emmeline Pankhurst’s ‘Freedom or Death’ speech declares that “nothing on earth and nothing in heaven will make women give way.” But there was an anti-suffrage case too, made with equal force: a poster shows a baby crying (“Mummy’s a Suffragette”), and a leaflet argues the case against: addressed, inevitably, to “Men of England.”
If you liked this, try: Mary Shelley, Matilda
