"What really puzzles me about this book is that I'm not smart enough to have written it."
The thing I'm listening to on the radio right now regarding a new book by Edward Mendelson, The Things that Matter, which presents critical readings of Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts.
The alert will notice that these are all novels by women--which has something to do with the state of the novel in the 19th century, and something to do, I think, with the way great art haunts despised corners of the popular culture more readily than it does the rarified halls of aristocracy or academe.
Art needs claws and wit, like an alley-cat.