The Marriage Plot (2011) by Jeffrey Eugenides is a witty, deeply intellectual novel that deconstructs love, literature, and the messiness of post-college life in the 1980s. The story orbits Madeleine Hanna, a bright, romantic Brown University senior obsessed with 19th-century novels (Austen, Eliot, the Brontës), who finds herself torn between two vastly different men: Leonard Bankhead, a brilliant but unstable biologist grappling with manic depression, and Mitchell Grammaticus, a spiritually searching religious studies major who pines for her with quiet devotion.
Eugenides—Pulitzer winner for Middlesex—mines semiotics, existential dread, and the irony of “happily ever after” in an age where love no longer follows Victorian rules. The novel’s brilliance lies in its sharp, self-aware humor and painfully accurate portrayal of young adulthood’s false starts, from grad-school pretensions to misguided relationships.
A love letter to books and the hearts they break, The Marriage Plot is for anyone who’s ever overthought a text message or wept over Jane Eyre.
![A.A. Milne - When We Were Very Young 1924. First edition [1]](https://www.nocloo.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/aam-young1-300x400.jpg)
