The good girl gets tricked, exploited and raped the amoral libertine gets wealth and happiness. In the two novels, two orphaned sisters make their different ways in the world. This is the Marquis de Sade's Justine and only makes proper sense if paired with his novel Juliette, subtitled The Benefits of Vice. By a bleak irony, the unwitting 'agent' who carries the bomb to its destination - and gets blown to smithereens - is the simple-minded Stevie.

Joseph Conrad insisted on this mordant subtitle for The Secret Agent, in which nothing is simple and the police are almost as sinister as the terrorists. Juliet, a mysterious and penniless émigrée from revolutionary France, tries to make her way in London and encounters every kind of 'diffculty' - but the subtitle indicates that this is a lengthy parable of the female condition. When she gave this subtitle to The Wanderer, it was almost as if Fanny Burney foresaw all those academics writing feminist articles on her oeuvre. The subtitle lets us know in advance that no one will ride in on a charger to rescue the virtuous or punish the vicious. Vanity Fair may be set during the Napoleonic wars, but Vanity Fair, Thackeray tells us, is where we all live, all the time. 'Passion' seems a generous word for what is driving everyone. But they are driven by dark desires and get up to all sorts: adultery, pimping, a couple of suicides. Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier is a novel in which the characters behave with elaborate politeness and exercise great ingenuity to avoid saying anything nasty. In 1765, when his novel was published, the subtitle meant something like 'a barbarous tale' - and so it was, with ghosts, tunnels and a sexually maddened medieval prince. He was also doing something deliciously camp. Horace Walpole's subtitle to The Castle of Otranto was the ﬁrst application of the word 'Gothic' to a literary work. It was like saying, 'this is what goes on in lovely Normandy'. The story of adultery, stupidity and despair was presented as a study of 'provincial habits'.

Shelley was handing an essay title to generations of students.įlaubert's quietly sardonic subtitle for Madame Bovary was calculated to make the book even more provoking to its ﬁrst readers.

Now the gods are gone, humans make their own destroyers. Portentous, perhaps, but Mary Shelley's subtitle to Frankenstein fearlessly declared that its author was making a modern myth. Hardy wants us to think that even if Tess did give in to Alec, she is (as Angel Clare cannot see) still pure. The current TV adaptation backs Hardy's assertion by showing us a nasty rape, but the novel itself is much more ambiguous. This was Thomas Hardy's rejoinder in advance to anyone who might think that the tragic heroine of Tess of the d'Urbervilles was damaged goods after her sexual encounter with dastardly Alec.

Subtitles example