Dear readers,
We’re in the midst of a cold snap on the East Coast. I’m writing from under a stack of blankets, hot-water bottle at my twice-socked feet, wrapped in sweaters, a scarf and hat. Oh, well: As John Steinbeck wrote in “Travels With Charley,” “What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness?”
I’m sure there are people who retreat to sunnier literary places in the face of Arctic blasts and snow too icy to shape. But I double down.
—Sadie
“It was dusk — winter dusk. Snow lay white and shining over the pleated hills, and icicles hung from the forest trees. Snow lay piled on the dark road across Willoughby Wold, but from dawn men had been clearing it with brooms and shovels. There were hundreds of them at work, wrapped in sacking because of the bitter cold, and keeping together in groups for fear of the wolves, grown savage and reckless from hunger.”
I ordered a copy of this childhood favorite with the thought that I might read it to my son, if it wasn’t too old for him. It was — Aiken’s language is steeped in Brontë and Dickens and the few pages we read aloud required frequent stops to explain “portico,” “oubliette,” “hoydenish,” “pelisse” and “goffering” petticoat frills. (I resorted to Google.) But that night, I picked it up again and found myself as swept away as I was when I first read the book, at 9 or 10 years old.
Aiken’s first novel was my introduction to the Gothic, a lush pastiche that follows the cousins Bonnie and Sylvia from the grandeur of Willoughby Chase to the workhouses of a proto-Steampunk London, pursued by thrillingly villainous adults and befriended by Simon, who lives in an underground cavern and communes with animals. (He returns in the sequel alongside the plucky cockney Dido Twite, a heroine of Aiken’s later books.)
I remember the hardcover copy I first owned had blurbs on the cover, and my feeling of indignation that one reviewer had described this as “a very funny book.” It wasn’t funny! It was terrifying and dramatic — I felt the orphans’ fear, held my breath as I read about the ravening wolves throwing themselves at train windows, and truly grieved when the evil governess Miss Slighcarp seemed poised to triumph.
As an adult, I can see that the book is knowingly florid, skillfully incorporating all the conventions of the genre to exaggerated effect — the Edward Gorey cover is a perfect match for the text, equal parts homage and riff. But the emotion is real, too, and my edition contains a brief introduction by the author’s daughter that speaks to this. What started as an arch parody, Lizza Aiken writes, was put aside when her father died and her mother had to support the young family and send her children away. “She had certainly reveled in the melodramas she had read as a child, but now that she had experienced tragedy and poverty herself, she could write about them with authority.”
Another contemporary review, I do agree with: As Time put it, this book is “a small masterpiece.”
Read if you like: “Jane Eyre,” “Oliver Twist,” “A Little Princess,” “Hugo Cabret.”
Available from: It’s never been out of print, so while it’s easy to find — most bookstores can order it for you from the publisher — there are many affordable used hardcovers, and I do think it’s a book you’ll want to hand down.
“The Radetzky March,” by Joseph Roth
Fiction, 1932
Some months ago, a friend and I came across this book at a museum shop. Upon learning I had never read it (or only in that unabsorbing, too-young, check-it-off-my-list way I read too many things in college, when Michael Hofmann’s translation came out), she insisted on buying me a copy on the spot. It was one of the great gifts.
The most acclaimed of Roth’s works, “The Radetzky March” (named for the Johann Strauss piece) is a multigenerational saga in which one family’s story becomes a metonymy for the fate of the often snowy Austro-Hungarian empire. In 1859, the humbly born Lieutenant Trotta is made a baron after saving the life of Emperor Franz Joseph in battle, thus dragging him into high society. Much to his discomfort, his bravery is distorted and mythologized, obscuring the truth of the incident and setting his family on a perilous course.
“Every night before retiring and every morning upon awakening, as if his own life had been traded for a new and alien life manufactured in a workshop, he would repeat his new rank and his new status to himself and walk up to the mirror to confirm that his face was the same. Despite the awkward heartiness of army brethren trying to bridge the gulf left by a sudden and incomprehensible destiny, and in spite of his own vain efforts to encounter everyone as unabashedly as ever, the ennobled Captain Trotta seemed to be losing his equilibrium; he felt he had been sentenced to wear another man’s boots for life and walk across a slippery ground, pursued by secret talking and awaited by shy glances.”
Later generations — now calling themselves the von Trottas — share none of the baron’s ambivalence or social anxieties, easily inheriting the privileges and entitlements of aristocrats as the empire heaves and shifts. Even as each generation falls further into aimless dissipation, they feel themselves part of a great military dynasty.
While “The Radetzky March” (along with its superb sequel, “The Emperor’s Tomb”) is, to say the least, ambitious in scope — and masterfully so — Roth’s genius lies in his mordant, skeptical but not inhumane understanding of character, and in his evocation of the rich details of meals, of textiles, of costume that mark his world’s evolution. That Roth — who would flee Nazism and die in Paris in 1939 — was commenting on his own moment is understood. That his work, a deft dissection of the dangers of power and the mutability of empire, remains as relevant as ever would have seemed so obvious to him as to not bear mentioning. In the book’s epilogue, a canary is given a piece of sugar after a funeral. “‘It will outlive us all,’ said Trotta. ‘Thank goodness!’”
Read if you like: “War and Peace,” “The Leopard,” “Buddenbrooks,” Austrian Expressionism.
Available from: A good indie bookstore can order it from Overlook; mine is from here.
Why don’t you …
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Make it a family affair? Rereading “Willoughby Chase” sent me down a bit of a Joan Aiken rabbit hole. I read several of her adult books (I highly recommend “A Touch of Chill: Tales for Sleepless Nights,” although it will take me the rest of my life to read her entire body of work) and then, because it was also on the library shelf, her American father Conrad Aiken’s autobiographical novel “Ushant,” which recounts (among other true things), his parents’ murder-suicide, his three marriages and his friendships with T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (rather ironically disguised as “Rabbi Ben Ezra”). More a period piece heavy on the Symbolism than a 2025 must-read, but fascinating nonetheless.
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Fake it til you make it? The Grolier Club has a nifty exhibition up — and available online! — called “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books.” The curator, Reid Byers, presents 100 books — unfinished, fictive (books existing in other novels and dramas) and lost — painstakingly created and recreated. From “Love’s Labors Found” (a Shakespeare sequel) to novels mentioned in Wodehouse’s Jeeves (“The Woman Who Braved All”) and A.S. Byatt’s “Possession” (Randolph Henry Ash’s “Ask to Embla”) to Confucian texts of which no remnant survives, the project is fantastic, beautiful and fun, a gratifying reminder of the powers of human curiosity. Definitely check it out.
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