This spring we look at celebration in its many aspects with a novel based on a classic, a candid memoir, and a whimsical collection of essays.

The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey

Livesey’s new novel is homage to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and provides many of the same pleasures of that classic story of struggle and self-discovery. While Livesey celebrates Jane Eyre in this retelling, Gemma Hardy is her own winning heroine. Orphaned when her parents died in an accident, Gemma was taken in by a kindly uncle and his wife. When her uncle dies, the aunt’s cruelty and inexplicable jealousy force her into a boarding school where she becomes servant as much as student. Quick-witted, sharp–tongued, and determined to survive with her integrity intact, Gemma lands a post as a governess for a wild girl at Blackbird Hall on the Orkney Islands. There she catches the eye of the manor’s owner and her charge’s uncle, Mr. Sinclair, and a friendship between them develops into something more. When Mr. Sinclair’s past threatens Gemma’s understanding of the man with whom she has fallen in love, she flees the Orkneys for a journey that takes her to Iceland and to the secret heart of her own tragic past. Gemma’s story feels timeless while it embraces more modernity of purpose for its female protagonist than Bronte’s time allowed. Best of all, Gemma’s story entrances and her strength of character makes the reader root for her as she navigates life’s challenges and possibilities.

A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance by Jane Juska

Juska’s life changed when she submitted this personal ad in The New York Times Review of Books: “Before I turn 67 — next March — I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.” While this memoir is not for those who shy from the subject of sex or get easily embarrassed, Juska’s memoir is about one woman’s search for pleasure and for an integrated sense of herself as a mature woman with sexual needs. Equally surprising in Juska’s bold exploration is what her particular journey uncovers about female sexuality in general and the ways in which women often subjugate their true emotional needs to have their physical needs met. Juska’s memories of her childhood, her parents and her broken marriage also reveal the ways in which our upbringing, and the time and places in which we grew up, shape our ability to integrate our sexual and emotional selves. Juska is unapologetic about her “adventures,” her hopes and missteps. While she shares stories about her correspondents and lovers, she also shares stories of her career as a teacher, her years as a single mother, her years in therapy, and how she arrived at a point in her life where she felt brave enough to put herself out in the world in newsprint. Juska’s memoir explores the ways in which sexuality, so much a part of all of our lives, is challenging and intriguing, limiting and freeing, so hard to talk about, and so terribly important that we do. You might also want to read her follow-up book, Unaccompanied Women: Late-Life Adventures in Love, Sex, and Real Estate.

At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays by Anne Fadiman

Fadiman, most well-known for her riveting book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, is a masterful essayist who celebrates the details of life in every piece in this revival of the “familiar essay.” Clifton Fadiman, a renowned literary critic and the author’s father, had lamented the loss of the familiar essay in his lifetime, and Anne takes up the charge. Her collection of writings includes a melding of the critical and the personal, with equal parts brain and heart. Spanning subjects such as butterfly collecting, finding the perfect ice cream, coffee consumption, the pleasures of paper mail, and insomnia, each essay radiates intellectual curiosity and the author’s warm, delightful view of the world. In one essay, Fadiman confesses a “monumental crush” on Charles Lamb, a contemporary of Coleridge, and goes into detail about his family and his loyalty to his sister, Mary, who killed their mother; she concludes that if she could inspire a Charles Lamb revival she would “forswear my spectacles, play at put, mend pens, kill fleas, stand on one leg, or shell peas.” Read these imminently pleasurable and fetching familiar essays, and see if you don’t also develop some of Fadiman’s interests and obsessions. Also try Fadiman’s Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, wonderful essays about books and reading.