Author

Includes discussion of Corpus Christmas by Margaret Maron, Howards End by E.M. Forster, Emma by Jane Austen, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, and Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust.

But writers such as Mairs and Knapp and Dubus make a subject of their afflictions and return to that subject. I have called them “agonists” because they seem to embody all of the original meanings of the Greek word that came down to us as agony: the struggle, the public contest, the anguish. These writers are performing their struggle with suffering; by writing they make public the pain that is ordinarily invisible and always located within the single self.