The Effect of Classic Treasures
By Sophie Masson | September 8, 2017 |
Each year, in both adult and children’s fiction, tens of thousands of new books come out, and to keep up would tax the powers of even the most voracious reader. So why should we bother with the classics, books that first saw the light of day decades or even centuries ago?
My own answer to that question goes back into my childhood. Our house was full of books, many of them classics beloved of my French parents—books by authors like Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, the Countess de Segur and others. We children didn’t think of them as ‘classics’; the ones that we loved (not all of them, of course) we just thought of as great stories. As well, thanks to our great local public library, I discovered many fabulous English-language children’s classics that my parents, having grown up in France, didn’t know: Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, The Railway Children and Black Beauty; The Princess and the Goblin, Wind in the Willows, The Jungle Book, Winnie the Pooh, The Secret Garden and The Little Princess, The Wizard of Oz and the Narnia books, The Silver Skates and The Silver Sword, Little Women and What Katy Did at School, Pollyanna and Anne of Green Gables. And many, many more!
Later, in high school, thanks to wonderful, dedicated English teachers, I discovered lots of other classic books, novels and poetry: works by Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, William Blake, WB Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Donne, Charlotte Bronte—if Verne’s Michel Strogoff was my favourite childhood classic, Jane Eyre was my teenage favourite– and the great Russian writers: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gogol. As I was growing up in Australia, Australian classics too—I loved the works of Martin Boyd, Kenneth Slessor and Miles Franklin, for example. And also what are known as modern classics, many with a political/social tinge: George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Ernest Hemingway, Harper Lee …as well as, by way of contrast, classic fantasy fiction: Lord of the Rings, Dracula, Frankenstein.
But it wasn’t just classics written by a single author that fed my childhood and adolescent reading: for retold fairytales and legends, Greek and Celtic myth, Norse sagas and medieval Arthurian epics, ran like glowing golden threads from many centuries past into the weave of my own imagination.
So what did reading all those classics do for me?
First, I think that as a young person, reading them not only expanded and enriched my vocabulary and my references but also my understanding of other times, other places, other people. And they were also helping me along the way to becoming a writer by furnishing my imagination with rich settings, characters, ideas and notions of how to construct a great story.
For that vast treasure-house of image and character and style and theme that I’d accumulated over those years of reading has been dipped into time and time again for my own writing as an adult, and many of my books have been inspired by fairy tale, myth, and classic fiction—a never-ending, and always-relevant, source of great riches.
Over to you: Do you think classics are still relevant? What are your favorite classic reads, both from childhood and now? What works have inspired your own fiction?
Born in Indonesia of French parents, and brought up in France and Australia, Sophie Masson is the award-winning author of over 70 books for children, young adults and adults. Her latest books include Sydney under Attack (children’s historical novel, Scholastic Australia, 2022) A Hundred Words for Butterfly (adult novella, ES-Press, 2022) and Cock-a-doodle-doo (children’s picture book, (illustrated by Kathy Creamer, little Pink Dog Books, 2022). In 2019, Sophie received an AM (Member, General Division) award in the Order of Australia honours list.
Sophie, what a fun look backwards. You’ve named many of the classics I’ve read (but your list is more extensive than mine). And I loved fairy tales and myths.
As I child I remember Pippi Longstocking and the Laura Ingalls Wilder series. And as a teen, I loved Louisa May Alcott, Georgette Heyer, and Alastair MacLean. Hm…maybe these last two aren’t classics but more vintage…(do books have a vintage category?)
And even though I didn’t seek them out, I still remember the stories from my English classes of John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and Gustave Flaubert.
Sophie, it’s so true that children don’t think of a book as classic. To us, it’s just a good story! I too, grew up on Indian and Greek folktales and mostly British literature and the Bible and what it gave me is a good sense of both the evolution of Eastern and Western thought. So yes, the classics are still relevant now and I’m glad that my own children are receiving a strong foundation.
I feel they are still absolutely relevant, even more so today, because they hearken back to a time when things weren’t so morally gray. Good and evil presented more clearly I think, but not necessarily artificially, because even the good characters struggled and the bad characters had good in them. Of course, there are those stories that are too good to be true etc, but what I most love about many classics, is that they trust the reader. They let the reader discern, instead of so many modern stories that are just preaching some agenda or theme. I find myself returning time and again to these for a breath of fresh air, for the language, the beauty, and the timelessness to them. My first memory of a book was the first Boxcar, my favorite in that original series, then Anne of Green Gables, and so on. SO many memories! However, I’ve most come to enjoy classic literature with my OWN children and am growing as a person through reading with them. I’m humbled at all I’ve been gifted through the minds and pens of so many great writers.
Yes, yes and yes. My literary fixation started with Classics Illustrated comics, and the great adventure stories are the models for what I’m writing. I’ll tell everyone that my newest book, Acre’s Bastard, is just Kipling’s Kim set in the Crusades (which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it!) Anyone who hasn’t read the classics is really missing out.
Sophie, you’ve brought back lots of memories for me about my reading. We have a wealth of literature from the past that continues to be alive! A number of years ago, friends of mine agreed to read a classic short story a week. The group fizzled out but I turned my reading classics into a weekly blog and have connected to hundreds of readers who love to read the old stories and appreciate Hawthorne, Chekhov, Dickens, Mary Shelley, Edith Wharton, etc.. I’m all for reading the dead authors and how they thought and lived in the 19th and 20th centuries. If you really want to expand your vocabulary and writing skills, and reading experiences, read the old world master writers!
Sophie, I believe I’m a writer, and have always been, because of reading books like the ones in this post. My mother was a reader, so excited to give me some of the books she had read and then we became partners in the weekly trip to the library. There we chose books for her, my grandmother and me. Our home had many bookshelves packed with books–old and new. Mom belonged to Book of the Month Club and we got the Landmark series which were lovely books for children about inventors and writers and the founders of the U.S. Thanks.
As long as I could, I read anything I could get my hands on. Reading English in Mexico meant that I also consumed books (and National Geographic) which were not meant necessarily for a child, and the series of high-school compilations of classics for English and American Literature that my grandmother had used to teach in the States.
Jane Eyre was a favorite – I even read it out loud to my kids (they say – I don’t remember!) when I homeschooled. I loved Dorothy L. Sayers Lord Peter Wimsey and where Sayers took him and Harriet Vane before she ended the series.
Those books – and the complex, layered, meaningful plots they were based one – have formed the basis of my own writing. They set high standards: when I started writing, I had to learn how to reach those standards.
I would not be the writer I am without all that reading. It feels very natural now to remind myself that I want the results – so have to put in the work.