The Things That Matter

She felt rather inclined just for a moment to stand still after all that chatter, and pick out one particular thing; the thing that mattered . . . — Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse   An illuminating exploration of how seven of the greatest English novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries— Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts —portray the essential experiences of life. Edward Mendelson—a professor of English