• The Best Essays: the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award - Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich
  • The Best Essays: the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award - Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick
  • The Best Essays: the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award - Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle
  • The Best Essays: the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award - Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé
  • The Best Essays: the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award - Maybe the People Would be the Times by Luc Sante

The Best Essays: the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award, recommended by Adam Gopnik

Every year, the judges of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay search out the best book of essays written in the past year and draw attention to the author’s entire body of work. Here, Adam Gopnik, writer, journalist and PEN essay prize judge, emphasizes the role of the essay in bearing witness and explains why the five collections that reached the 2021 shortlist are, in their different ways, so important.

  • David Russell on The Victorian Essay - Selected Prose by Charles Lamb
  • David Russell on The Victorian Essay - Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings by Matthew Arnold
  • David Russell on The Victorian Essay - Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings by George Eliot
  • David Russell on The Victorian Essay - Studies in the History of the Renaissance by Walter Pater
  • David Russell on The Victorian Essay - The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a Psychoanalytic Treatment by Marion Milner

David Russell on The Victorian Essay

With the advent of the Victorian age, polite maxims of eighteenth-century essays in the Spectator were replaced by a new generation of writers who thought deeply—and playfully—about social relationships, moral responsibility, education and culture. Here, Oxford literary critic David Russell explores the distinct qualities that define the Victorian essay and recommends five of its greatest practitioners.