Sarah Hardy: Five books I read again and again and again…

Just before my talk for Suffolk Book League about my novel, The Walled Garden, I had a conversation with James Phillips, the Secretary, about books we feel we have never finished. By that we meant those books that we can return to countless times and always discover something new.

Villette by Charlotte Bronte

In times of crisis I turn to Villette, to me one of the most extraordinary novels ever written, revolutionary in its depiction of a woman having what today we would call a ‘nervous breakdown’. Though – being the nineteenth century – everything is understated, nothing expressed directly, as the heroine, Lucy Snowe, struggles to keep her pent-up emotions in check – loving and losing and loving – and to conform to her role of a demure teacher.

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

I feel very unoriginal in choosing Jane Austen but I have just read Mansfield Park – yet again. Some people think it is Austen’s best, but this was always my least favourite and I went back to it wondering what am I missing? On this umpteenth reading, for the first time, I felt compassion for the heroine, Fanny Price. Too often I realise, I read it with modern sensibilities, finding Fanny maddeningly meek and mild, but now my heart goes out to her. What hell she was in – penniless and powerless, at the mercy of others’ whims.

North and South by Mrs Gaskell

Yet another nineteenth century novel but the most glorious ‘comfort read’ with what I believe is the greatest romantic hero: John Thornton, the working-class boy who builds a fortune from nothing then loses it all, until he finds love. Also, I find this period of incredibly fast-moving change in Britain fascinating.  Rather than English, I read History at university – writing A level English essays on novels I loved, destroyed their magic – and I spent my final year studying this period and the conflict between city and country, North and South, as industrialisation took over.

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

I have to read this every February as Arnim captures wonderfully the weariness of an English winter, the sense of living in a giant saucepan as it is so grey, and then she transports you to all the bliss and beauty of an Italian garden in spring. You can feel the warmth of the sun, smell the blossom. And she is very funny!

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

One of the many things I love about Macaulay is that she is so erudite, but she wears her knowledge lightly. And she too is funny. To me, no book captures the problems of faith so well and it has one of the most brilliant endings. Although I have read it many times and know just what will happen, her final chapter always shocks and dazzles me.