Julia Glass is the author of Three Junes, which won the 2002 National Book Award for Fiction. Currently she’s at work on a novel about marriage and happiness, and here chooses her favorite works of fiction portraying the agony and ecstasy of married life.
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (Penguin, $10). This is the most exquisitely written, structurally ambitious book I’ve ever read. Gwendolen Harleth—a shrewd, self-possessed woman (and my all-time favorite heroine)—enters a mutually opportunistic marriage, unable to imagine how dark is the path it will lead her down or how badly her heart will be broken.
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