When I first read Moments of Truth, when it was new, I’d only read a two or three of the authors/books she discusses. And reading it was more like skimming, because I was just as spoiler-phobic then. This time, the essays have felt more inviting, more comfortable and, at least at the beginning, most of the books are familiar.

I’ve planned to take two years to read/reread: six of the twelve writers in each year. So far, I’ve been spending a month (-ish) with the author’s work and then in the next month I read Sage’s essay (sometimes another book, too).

For Edith Wharton, Sage discusses Ethan Frome and The Custom of the Country. The quote about how quickly she wrote EF made me smile: “I have to let its frocks down every day, and soon it will be in trousers!” But I opted to read The Reef instead…and soon realised I’d already read it. A couple years ago, for one of the Club events that Kaggsy and Simon host! All the old-style Viragos on her shelf are a bit of a blur, it seems. So I picked up a quartet of novellas, which I knew I hadn’t touched.

Sage writes about Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out in particular—one I’ve listened to and read—but her familiarity with Woolf makes it seem like she’s talking about ALL the books. Back in the early aughts, I had a Woolf project—reading through her letters and diaries, alongside her published books—and I hadn’t realised that I’d left it unfinished. So I resumed with The Years (her diaries and letters were rewarding at the time, but they’re no longer on my shelves and that’s fine).

It seemed possible I could read it and Between the Acts, which is such a skinny little thing, but turns out The Years is 400 pages and has real heft. All that detail, all those years! Real historical and emotional weight, but it’s not intimidating: anyone who enjoys reading classics but hasn’t tried Woolf would find this a solid starting place.

Here’s a view of a reader from its pages: “The lines that had graved themselves on his face slackened; he leant back; his muscles relaxed; he looked up from his books into the dimness. He felt as if he had thrown himself down on the turf after running a race. But for a moment it seemed to him that he was still running; his mind went on without the book.”

My own mind’s gone on for years since I first read Katherine Mansfield. Her stories might have been my first chronological reading project, actually, quite some time ago. Sage focuses on The Garden Party and her Notebooks, but I chose to reread At the Bay this summer, in one of those cute little Melville House editions. It was just…there.

It almost kick-started an unexpected rereading project, because I’d forgotten how much I enjoy her stories. But then I remembered how Mel had enthused about Kathleen Jones’ biography of Mansfield. And, wow, am I ever glad. What a satisfying biography! She has an absolutely winning way of handling time. You glimpse something in the later years—she knows just how to present these events, with her expansive understanding of Mansfield’s life—and then she takes you by the hand and you travel backwards to explore the backstory. 

Jones’ tendency to highlight bits of letters and diaries really brings her subject off-the-page the whole time, too. So, I not only wanted to read more Mansfield, but all of Kathleen Jones’ books…which is just when the omnibus edition of Jean Rhys’ novels arrived via interlibrary loan, so I had to put all that aside and read those instead.

Sage writes about After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, which came before the two novels by Rhys that I had read (I also knew bits about her from Diana Athill’s Stet because she was Rhys’ editor). As soon as I started to read the first novel, Voyage in the Dark, I knew I wasn’t going to be leaving Mr Mackenzie anytime soon.

It was just too interesting: her narrator’s sense of being a misfit in English society, other people’s insistence that her mother wasn’t white (but she was, the narrator insists), her racialized experiences and memories—it pulled me in hard, thinking about the other books I’ve read from Caribbean writers, since I first read Rhys. (And I realise I have yet to read a collection of stories and a slim volume of autobiography.)

Rhys has Mr James (there are a LOT of misters) muse about women’s unique experience of the world: “Though mind you, women are a different thing altogether. Because it’s all nonsense; the life of a man and the life of a woman can’t be compared. They’re up against entirely different things the whole time.” And, at this point in Sage’s book, the threads of various essays begin to interweave. Writing about Rhys, she quotes a passage from Mansfield’s diaries, and remarks that it would be hard to guess which of the women wrote it.

These classic women writers are so influential that I feel this book is in conversation with many others in this year’s reading too. In Jenny Offill’s Weather, for instance, one character muses on whether their book-ordering history would get them flagged by an imperialist algorithm, and is relieved there’s a Rhys novel to “throw them off the scent”. And another has the habit of looking up their age on each birthday in Woolf’s diaries, because it’s usually “inspiring”…except that particular year proves to be the opposite.

Now I’m searching for a copy of Christina Stead’s The Salzburg Tales. I was planning to read one of her novels instead, because I have a few unread; but the way that Sage describes the stories—“finely worked” narrative patterns, “stories within stories and repeating motifs”—well, I can’t resist.

In the last two months of the year, I’ll turn to Djuna Barnes and her slim novel Nightwood. Next year? Trefusis, Bowles, de Beauvoir, Brooke-Rose, Murdoch and Carter.

Have you read any of Sage’s writing? Or, do you have favourites amongst her “top twelve”?