Join Faber Members for 10% off your first order. Use code members10.
Summary
After its publication in 1667, John Milton’s Paradise Lost was celebrated throughout Europe as a supreme achievement of the human spirit.
Now it is little read. To bring readers back to Milton’s masterpiece, John Carey has shortened it to a third of its original length. In this fascinating reinterpretation, Carey reveals new insights about Milton’s sources of inspiration, while exploring divided readings of the work’s key characters.
The Essential Paradise Lost presents the epic’s greatest poetry, with linking passages that preserve its cosmic sweep – from the superhuman defiance of a ruined archangel to a pair of tragic lovers, bewildered to find themselves responsible for the fate of the whole human race.
JohnCarey
John Carey was an Emeritus Professor at Oxford University. His books include studies of Donne, Dickens and Thackeray, The Intellectuals and the Masses, What Good Are the Arts? and a life of William Golding. He died in December 2025.
Read MoreJohnCarey
More books by John Carey
William Golding began writing Lord of the Flies in 1951, while he was a teacher at Bishop Wordsworth's School in …