86 books like Dombey and Son

Fun home is what the author and her family call the funeral home they were raised in. I was drawn into this graphic memoir of the author’s relationship with her father, with disturbing themes of suicide, unaccepted gender identities, and domestic abuse.

The story manages to stay buoyant despite it all, and the observations are funny. The author’s ability to capture her most painful memories in bright light and intricate detail catapulted this read to the top for me. 

Hester, which came out in 1883, follows two central figures: Miss Catherine, an older woman who runs a bank – in itself quite a surprise to find in a Victorian novel – and Hester, her young relation, who is bored with her dull, ladylike life and wants something more.

What she really wants is to work, as Catherine does, but Catherine is determined that the bank will pass to a man. The novel focuses on their strained relationship – strained partly because they are so very alike. There’s so much I love about Hester, but I especially enjoy how it undermines and undercuts Victorian tropes about the novel and what is and isn’t a happy ending for a female character. It’s an absolutely fascinating read.

Published in 1848, The Half Sisters is the story of two sisters, Alice and Bianca, who grow up without knowing of the other’s existence.

Alice is middle-class, legitimate, and respectable, and goes on to have the life Victorian women were meant to have – namely, marriage. She is also bored and unhappy. Meanwhile, her sister Bianca, who is working-class, illegitimate, and definitively not respectable, chooses a different path.

Keen to make a career for herself, she becomes an actress, and throughout the novel passionately defends women’s right to work. The novel is engaging and accessible, though often forgotten now, and I love how it fantastically examines the different options open – and, indeed, closed – to women in the Victorian period.

Jill is a little-known but fascinating novel from 1884 about a young woman who, bored of her upper-class life, runs away from home to become a maid.

Jill is everything Victorian women weren’t meant to be: ambitious, scheming, brave, happy to lie, and much more interested in money than marriage. She’s also a bit in love with the woman she works for, which Victorian women certainly weren’t meant to be either.

There is so much I love about Jill, but one of my favourite things about it is how it turns Victorian tropes and expectations on their head, taking the set-up of a typically male adventure narrative and giving it to the character of Jill. It’s a wonderfully proto-feminist Victorian classic and well worth a read.

One of the reasons I like this book is because the author is a man writing about a woman’s inner thoughts and, unusually, doing a very good job.

The time and place: London, the 1890s. Single women are known as “the odd women,” the leftovers. Dr. Rhoda Nunn starts a school to train these women in secretarial skills (back then, most secretaries were men) so that they won’t be dependent on relatives or forced into unhappy marriages. Rhoda herself is proudly unmarried and independent – until she meets an absolutely wonderful man. Will she give up her advocacy for “odd women” and marry the man she loves? 

(Warning: this book is out of copyright, so shoddy rip-offs are being sold on Amazon. Make sure you get a legit copy.)

A year before my own father died, I had read Blake Morrison’s tragicomic memoir about his father. I had marked several passages but the page I had book-marked with a card from a London restaurant contained the following lines: “I’ve become a death bore. I embarrass people at dinner parties with my morbidity. I used to think the world divided between those who have children and those who don’t; now I think it divides between those who have lost a parent and those whose parents are still alive.”

That line haunts me even more powerfully now, and I cannot think of a more true line.

With Laura Warrell’s lyrical book, I discovered a different sort of narcissist dad—the musician kind! Also, the womanizer kind. 

I don’t know much about jazz, but you don’t need to know about it to get swept up in Warrell’s story of a trumpeter with the great name Circus Palmer and the female players around him, including his yearning daughter Koko. I admire how Warrell brings you close to Circus and the many women characters: this is no simple story about a man ignoring or abandoning his loved ones.

Circus comes to life, you can almost hear him play, and the novel leaves you with the awareness that a young woman can love and be shaped by a dad, even an absent, maddening one—and even that relation can have a sweet melody.

I read two great memoirs for a panel I moderated about daughters and fathers. At the event, I enjoyed watching Leslie Absher and Leta McCollough Seletzky meet and realize how much they had in common.

Both authors had dads who kept secrets— big, political secrets. Leta Seletzky’s dad worked as an undercover officer for the Memphis Police Department in the 1960s: he was “The Kneeling Man” in the famous photograph taken after King’s death. 

This may sound odd, but I related to Leta Seletzky’s emotional tale of how she gradually got to know her father, as an adult, by uncovering the many layers of his life story. 

The Prince of Steel Pier begins with a line which immediately grabbed my attention: “It’s nine o’clock on Friday morning and Mrs. Goldberg is definitely dead.”

Joey, the main character, is on vacation in Atlantic City and helping out at his grandparents’ hotel. He is a self-conscious boy who  wants to prove to his big Jewish family that he is more than a “squirt.” Along the way he gets himself into unexpected trouble with mobsters in Atlantic City.

Set during the 1970’s, this book features an endearing protagonist navigating adolescence to learn what family and Jewish tradition mean to him. I particularly enjoyed Joey’s honesty as he observes his own behavior and struggles to create a new self-image. 

While perhaps a little late to be truly classed as ‘early-modern’, Andrew Popp’s Entrepreneurial Families is one of the books that sparked my own interest in a social approach to business history. Revitalising the exploration of the role of families in business after Davidoff and Hall’s seminal 1987 study Family Fortunes, this micro-study primarily employs correspondence as its source. This not only allows Popp to explore the validity of this approach, but it also helps him to realise his aim to ‘re-humanise the economic’. The focus on family makes this work appealing not only to those interested in business history, but to those interested in debates about the public/private spheres, gender history, and kinship.