The question, prompted by two Charles Dickens novels, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, being named to Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, prompted The Wall Street Journal to put the issue to two Dickens scholars: Bates Professor of English Lillian Nayder and Michael Slater, a Dickens biographer and professor emeritus of Victorian literature at Birkbeck College in London.

Said Nayder, “There’s no doubt that A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations will speak to our own concerns with social inequity, mismanagement and greed.” And, she added, “any recent college graduate still living at home and looking for work is also likely to relate to Pip, with his thwarted ambitions and his modest career.”

Nayder is author of The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth (Cornell University Press, 2010), the first comprehensive portrait of the woman whom Charles Dickens married and then repudiated as unfit after 22 years of marriage and 10 children. Nayder’s book demonstrates that Catherine Dickens was a competent woman and her marriage a happy one for much of its duration.

Related stories about The Other Dickens:

• From The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 12, 2010
• Review of The Other Dickens by the WSJ
• Q&A with Portland Press Herald writer Ray Routhier
• Story by the Sun Journal‘s David Sargent ’62

The New York Times called Strout’s book “one of those rare, invigorating books that takes an apparently familiar world and peers into it with ruthless intimacy…” The familiar world is the fictional New England mill town of Shirley Falls. Strout’s story focuses on a mother and teenage daughter and how their conflicts and missteps intertwine and intersect with other large and small dramas.

“Harpo Films did a fabulous job. They were so true to the book and kept its integrity. My work was in the hands of people who cared about it deeply,” says Strout, who called the executive producer and screenwriter “my ideal readers.” Strout lauded the entire cast’s efforts, singling out Shue for praise. “Elizabeth Shue shows internal changes, and so much of what Isabelle experiences is internal. My hat goes off to her.”

An English major at Bates who has had stories published in literary and trade magazines, including The New Yorker, Seventeen, Redbook and Ms., Strout lives in New York City, where she is at work on her next novel.