William Thackeray, The History of Pendennis

"One fine morning in the full London season, Major Arthur Pendennis came over from his lodgings, according to his custom, to breakfast at a certain Club in Pall Mall, of which he was a chief ornament." The master raconteur, William Makepeace Thackeray, so begins his irreverent, piquant, comical lengthy novel: The History of Pendennis. The reader soon finds that the book isn't an ordinary history book but a fictional work about the trials and tribulations and love misadventures of Arthur Pendennis. Not to be read in one hour (but in many, as Don quijote is) this lighthearted novel is highly entertaining. Just as Cervantes is Spain's premier novelist, so is Thackeray for England. For those who revel in the English language, this book is a treat. We find character descriptions that not even Fielding, Swift, or Dickens ever achieved. Mrs. Pendennis tranquil beauty shines in full splendor througout the narrative. The amourous incidents are legion and always told tongue-in-cheek, and with such piquancy that one can only burst in loud laughter. But not everything is banter and giddiness, for there's plenty of solemnity and wisdom, too. Aphorisms abound: "It is best to love wisely, no doubt; but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all." Since Thackeray is one of the inventors of the novel, he writes before such contemporary techniques as unobstrusive narrators: "As novelists are supposed to know everything, even the secrets of female hearts, which the owners themselves do not perhaps know, we may state that at eleven years of age Mademoiselle Betsi, as Miss amory was then called, had felt tender emotions towards a young Savoyard organ-grinder at ..." But allowances given, the language is fresh and exciting. Of the three masterpieces Thackeray wrote: Vanity Fair, Pendennis, and Henry Esmond, my favorite without a doubt is Pendennis. The book is out of print, but there are plenty of used copies. Get one! Or, you can download it since Google has digitized it. The writing techniques I employ in this article are all explained in Mary Duffy's bestseller and indispensable writing manual: www.write rivetingprose.com Augustine, City of God Austen J, Pride and Prejudice Austen J, "Marriage Proposals and Me" Austen J, Emma Borges, The Aleph C. Bronte, Jane Eyre Burroughs E,Tarzan Cervantes, Don Quijote Chaucer, Wife of Bath Coelho P,The Alchemist Coyle H, They Are Soldiers Dante, New Life Dickens C, David Copperfield Dostoevsky, Crime&Punishment ConanDoyle,Hound of Baskervilles Dubner S, Superfreakonomics DuMaurier D, Rebecca Ellis B. E. American Psycho Fitzgerald S, Great Gatsby Flaubert G, Madame Bovary Fleming I,Doctor No Freud S, Leonardo Da Vinci Friedan B, Feminine Mystique GarciaMarquez, Of Love & OtherDemons GarciaMarquez,OneHundredYrs Guerrero M,ThePoison Pill Grass G, The Tin Drum Harris T, Hannibal Rising Heidegger M,House of Being Ishiguro K, Remains of The Day Johnson S,Rasselas Kafka,Metamorphosis Kosinski J, The Painted Bird Lee H,To Kill a Mockingbird McBain Ed,Gutter and Grave Murakami H,Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Nabokov V, Lolita Meyer, S, Twilight Ortega,Dehumanization of Art Poe E A, Gordon Pym Prose F, Reading Like a Writer Rushdie S,Midnight Children Sabatini R, Scaramouche Spark M, Prime of Miss Brodie Stendhal, Red and Black Sterne L,Tristram Shandy Stevenson R, Dr.Jekyll & Mr.Hyde Stoker B, Dracula Thackeray W,History of Pendennis Tolstoy L, Anna Karenina Trollope A, Autobiography Unamuno M, Tragic Sense of Life Voltaire, Candide Webb J, Fields of Fire Wharton E, The House of Mirth Woolf V, To The Lighhouse The secrets of 'no-doze' prose: Mary Duffy's Sentence Openers Image via Wikipedia Lindsey Vonn Back to main page

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