Alison Case received her B.A. from Oberlin College and her Ph.D. in English Literature from Cornell University. A professor of English at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., she has published two critical books and many articles on 19th-century British fiction and poetry. Her first novel is Nelly Dean: A Return to Wuthering Heights (Pegasus Books, February 8, 2016).
On your nightstand now:
Val McDermid's Blue Genes. I read mysteries for recreation during the semester, and right now I'm working through McDermid's Kate Brannigan mysteries.
Favorite book when you were a child:
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I loved the way she could use her imagination to transform even the most distressing circumstances, and the way she struggled to be generous and kind even when she had little to give.
Your top five authors:
Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, Jane Austen. Among the living: Margaret Atwood, Kim Stanley Robinson. I'm a big fan of science fiction and fantasy, particularly when it has a strong element of social and political reflection.
Book you've faked reading:
Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Don't tell my colleagues!
Book you're an evangelist for:
Well, I always joke that I belong to the United Church of Middlemarch. It is practically a liberal education in itself.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Really? People do that?
Book you hid from your parents:
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) by David Reuben, M.D. I suspect it was on the shelf for my benefit anyway, but I was darned if I would admit to consulting it!
Book that changed your life:
My life has been profoundly shaped by books ever since I learned to read. But if I had to pick just one: W.B. Yeats's Collected Poems took over a whole year of my life in college. His relentless self-questioning honesty and his ability to transform pain, shame and doubt into breathtaking beauty were a revelation to me.
Favorite line from a book:
"Was there no safety? No learning by heart the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?--startling, unexpected, unknown?" --To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Five books you'll never part with:
For my favorite novels, especially the ones I teach regularly, editions wear out and get replaced without much sentiment. It's the contents that matter to me. That first copy of Yeats's poems will stay with me forever, as will the inscribed first edition of one of his plays that my late father gave me. (It was not a very good play, but the inscription is great.) There's also the copy of the Shakespeare Head edition of James Joyce's Ulysses that my grandfather smuggled into the country while it was still illegal and then had bound in green leather. And then there's the complete edition of Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, because who could ever do without that? And James Marshall's George and Martha: Complete Stories of Two Best Friends, which I keep in the house for visiting children but will sometimes spend a refreshing half hour with myself.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. By now I know it so well that reading it is like reciting the Lord's Prayer. It would be lovely to experience it for the first time again.
Strangest book you recommend:
Unquenchable Fire by Rachel Pollack, a fantasy novel that takes place in an America (Poughkeepsie, N.Y., to be precise) in which the laws of physics have been replaced by shamanistic magic. It's deeply strange, very funny and profound all at once. I find myself drawn to reread it every five years or so.
