Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
read: 2016
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #94, Guardian 1000 Novels

At one point in Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette Cosway and her husband have a conversation about how to him, living in the Caribbean feels like a dream, and to her, his tales of England sounds like a dream. That dream-like quality pervades the novel, from her oppressed childhood to his perceptions of island life, to her ultimate madness and imprisonment.

Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
read: 2016
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

I'm not a huge fan of stream-of-consciousness novels, but Woolf's prose style reads much more clearly than those of certain works or James Joyce or William Faulkner. Clarissa Dalloway, Peter Walsh, and Rezia Smith, among others, reveal their regrets and laments through internal monologues. Of the other novels I've read, it probably evokes American Pastoral more than anything else.