Campaign for the American Reader: Three classic novels that pass the Bechdel Test

The Bechdel Test asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. For The Barnes & Noble Book Blog, Amelia Schonbek came up with three classic novels that pass the test, including:

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy

Yes, Anna Karenina is a book about an affair. But Tolstoy’s novels contain vast, detailed worlds, and Anna Karenina is concerned with much more than Anna and Vronsky’s love story. So while the women in the book—Anna, her sisters-in-law Dolly and Kitty, her friend Betsy—often talk about love, marriage, and infidelity, their conversations also expand outward. When Dolly comforts heartbroken Kitty, they begin by talking about the man who rejected her (“He’s not worth your suffering over him,” Dolly insists) but their conversation becomes one that hints at a larger issue—the pressure to marry above all else, and how it affects their lives. Elsewhere, such conversations about marriage might turn into discussions of social mores and the upper-class Russian society in which Tolstoy set the book. These moments deserve as much attention as the novel’s more well-known romantic turns.