Books Recommended By Maeve Willy Of Sex Education

Am I about to read 10 whole books because a fictional character in a Netflix show recommended them? Yes, it seems that way. Is that a productive use of my time? That’s none of your business. Thank you, but let’s start with a disclaimer.

If you came here because you saw the words Sex education in the title of this article and clicked expecting Sex advice, you are about to be so so disappointed my friend, however, if you like me, are obsessed with Sex education on Netflix you’re in the right place because to celebrate the fact that season 3 is about to drop, I am declaring war on everyone’s favorite book, nerd Maeve Wiley. I want to know if her reading recommendations are any good or not because throughout the series we regularly see her reading or talking about books, as we learned from this iconic scene that she is a fan in particular, of complex female characters.

And I’m excited to read these books. I am here for it honestly. I don’t know if I want to be Maeve Wiley or be with Maeve Wiley, but we stand at this character, and so it’s time to see if her reading recommendations are worth our wily, I hated it as I said it anyway.

1. Othello by William Shakespeare

Let’s crack on with the first book, which is Othello by William Shakespeare. Okay, this is my favorite Shakespeare play. Othello is a tragedy all about revenge, deception, and miscommunication. This guy Othello gets a military job promotion over another guy called Iago andy Iago is one salty little bitch about it. He is so mad because he believes he has more merits in the field and that he deserves a job promotion, the Atlantic ocean is jealous because of how salty he is and so as any rational human being would, Iago decides to deceive Othello into thinking his wife is cheating on him which she isn’t and it results in Othello killing his wife. Spoiler Alert! By the way, I mean it was written 400 years ago.

You’ve had time, but anyway, this play is one of Shakespeare's most accessible because there are not that many characters, and the plot is quite easy to follow. So if you are trying to get more into his work, this is a good entry point the characters are so great and the writing is well extraordinary.

Not me being like yeah Shakespeare’s, okay, break and he’ll have moderate success, but this play is like an onion there are layers to this because you can read and analyze this play through the lens of the race of gender of sexuality. There are some interesting articles about how Iago’s behavior may have some Homoerotic undertones and there’s this character called Emilia, who is Iago’s wife, who makes some cracking observations about gender dynamics. It’s funny, but anyway, Maeve Wiley is a particular fan of Desdemona, who is Othello's wife, because her father forbids her from marrying Othello, but she does not go down without a fight. She pleads her case very articulately and in the end, gets what she wants for a play and a character written in the early 17th century.

She is so subversive and just a total badass, and you may remember that Maeve describes this act as so singular, It is almost transcendental in an essay that she wrote, and while this is true for the time, Desdemona does still operate within the confines of patriarchy. Although she is so self-determined, she never acquires full autonomy because she goes from being the property of her possessive father to being owned by her possessive husband and she’s sort of rarified throughout the play, but we’re talking about the time. This was radical to disobey your father and assert authority, but ultimately, by the end of the play, it is fragile masculinity that kills her. Shakespeare said the men be like trash, this play is awesome, Desdemona is awesome and we’re off to a flying start. So I’ll see you for the next book.

2. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

I do not have words to describe how much I adore this book and I have a whole degree in using words to describe books. That’s how good it is. This is another one of Maeve’s favorite books, and this is The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. It is an absolute cult classic so groundbreaking so original so pioneering and we follow a character Esther greenwood as she moves to new york to start an internship at a fashion magazine, and then we observe the deterioration of her mental health because the author, Sylvia Plath, battled with her mental health so much throughout her lifetime.

And it’s ultimately what killed her, people often read this in a very autobiographical way, but I feel like that’s so reductive because there’s so much more to this book than just that, that’s incredible. There are also these vivid beautiful descriptions of food and fashion and the city. It is so much more multifaceted than people give this book credit for, for it is just chef Kiss exquisite as the greenwood, fits the bill of a complex female character. She’s such a fascinating, interesting protagonist to follow – and this is a great contemporary classic – to sink your teeth into highly recommend it. So far, Maeve Wiley’s taste is immaculate. I mean she’s, not a real person. I may need to take a step back and just remind myself.

She isn’t real. Sometimes I feel like I might be like losing my mind, but very publicly on the internet anyways. You may recall from watching the series that Maeve Wiley’s favorite author ever is George Eliot, so I’ve got two George Eliot books to get to and I’m going to start reading.

3. Silas Marner by George Eliot

I just finished reading Silas Marner by George Eliot. You may remember you probably don’t, but at one point in series two of Sex education, we see a close-up of Maeve Wiley’s nightstand with a bunch of books, and this is one of them Silas Marner was George Eliot's favorite of her novels and by apparently I mean like I just read it on the back of the book. I’m not going to lie. It took me a while to get into George Eliot's style of writing because it’s so rich and dense. There is a metric shit ton of similes and metaphors packed into this tiny little book, and you have to be paying attention to appreciate all of the details which were hard for me because my attention span is the length of a tick-tock. So this was hard work, but it was also beautiful. Silas Marner is a great example of realism in literature where they focus on every minute detail.

So the descriptions are so vivid. You feel like you’re there, and this book is about a weaver, who is a bit of an outcast from society, Interestingly lives away from the town just like Maeve does, but he one day returns to his home and finds that all of his money, all of his fortune has gone missing like my dude had accumulated two whole bags of gold now he’s lives in la Vida broke. I’d be gutted too, and not to mention he had to leave the previous place. He lived in because he was accused of murder so that someone else could steal his wife. So this guy can’t catch a break.

If you think you’re having a bad day think about Silas Marner geez. However, his fortunes later change when he adopts a daughter, he finally finds his purpose in life and the town begins to accept him because they love his daughter, so this is an interesting study about alienation, changes of fortune, labor religion, mob mentality and there are loads Of twists in turn, so it is a quite good fast-paced plot. Was it my favorite book? No did I enjoy it yeah, but finishing this book means that we are now on to the beast itself Middlemarch?

4. Middlemarch by George Eliot

Middlemarch this book is huge, she’s a mammoth I just finally got to the end, and I am low-key, high-key exhausted. I am shattered. I need to go and lie down for a couple of days. The text is so small and my eyesight is so bad. So this was a struggle and my big book fear is back with a vengeance, but this book's Middlemarch is widely considered to be George Eliot's, magnum opus, her masterpiece and it’s an impressive piece of fiction. What surprised me most about this is how genuinely witty it is.

There are some funny lines and sharp remarks that still ring just as true and are just as impactful in today’s world. The concept is we have this fictitious village called Middlemarch, and it’s all about the residents of that village in the lead-up to the 1832 reform act, which implemented huge changes across England and wales. I think the electoral system, so gave more men the right to vote. In the book, we have four main plot lines, but the general theme I would say that binds them all together, is people trying and doing their best and often failing spectacularly, which is relatable. You know what else is relatable is that in season one and season two, we see Maeve slowly very slowly, working her way through this book, like it’s taken, her two whole seasons and I don’t think she’s finished it. Yet that is relatable because this is a long book.

I imagine that the main character that Maeve Wiley would empathize with or understand or appreciate, would be Dorothea Brooke who is this empowering female protagonist who exhibits so much boldness and high-mindedness, flawed and morally quite immature, quite a lot of the time, but she has good intentions right and I think Maeve in Sex education is a sort of modeled on that type of a character I mean you know, setting up a Sex clinic at school to help people with their issues and charging them, for it is big Dorothea, energy, and yeah.

I’m going to go and take a nap for several days. What I will say, though, is I’ve been listening to the Sex education soundtrack and it’s so good. It’s like giving me dangerous levels of the main character's energy, like main character syndrome. It’s hidden pretty deep right now and uh mysteriously reading, a George Elliot novel by the Camden canal doesn’t help that I’m going to be out of control pretty soon. So I will see you when I’m done with another book.

5. Emma by Jane Austen

Two words Jane Austen of course, Maeve Wiley is a Jane Austen fan, but, interestingly, she tells headmaster graf that her favorite, Jane Austen book is Lady Susan, which she describes as a severely underrated piece of feminist literature. This is a novella, so a short novel that Austen wrote when she was 19, but it wasn’t published until long after her death and it’s not usually considered as part of her over or like the Jane Austen cinematic universe. So I’m grateful for this article because otherwise, I don’t know whether I would have gotten around to reading it. Well, I listened to it as an audiobook, so I couldn’t find a physical copy anywhere, it’s very different from the rest of her books because it’s written in an epistolary fashion, which means that it’s written in a series of letters between characters and lady Susan is, a recent widow who seduces and manipulates men, including those who are married. She also has a daughter who she’s very kind of hostile towards and mostly just ignores, and it’s interesting did you.

It wasn’t my favorite Jane Austen book, but I am glad I read it the audiobook is available on youtube for free and it’s quite short. So if you do want to read it or listen to it, go do it, but, as we saw earlier from her nightstand Maeve is also a fan of Emma by Jane Austen, which is my favorite, Jane Austen book of all time. Emma is a comedy of errors. It’s all about misinterpretation, miscommunication, and confusion. It’s quite interesting how a lot of these books are about misinterpretation and miscommunication when that’s Maeve and Otis's relationship like they constantly seem to miss each other. I wonder if that was intentional, but the eponymous character of this book is Emma, which means the character who lends their name to the title, and I love this.

But, when Austen wrote Emma, she described her as a heroine whom no one but myself will much like, and it’s kind of, because she’s, very self-obsessed and self-satisfying a bit snobby and sort of plays with people’s lives come to think of it Emma and Mr. Knightley's relationship sort of does resembles Maven Otis’s in a way, especially because they do end up together. So here’s praying for the Maven Otis end game in season 3. I do feel, though, like Maeve as a character is written in a way that does sort of resemble characters like Dorothea Brooke and Emma woodhouse, very independent and individual and self-determined and flawed, but in a lovable kind of way and the more that we watch them the more we begin to understand why they behave in the way that they do anyway. Emma is brilliant, Maeve Wiley has the taste and I’m enjoying myself a lot.

6. Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

So anyway, these next books are some important and iconic pieces of feminist literature. Firstly, I think we must see Maeve reading a diverse range of feminist books, because it shows she’s thinking about intersectional feminism and not just white feminism, and so the first book is Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri. This is a collection of short stories all about Indian American women and their variety of experiences. It is so intricate and so complex, so stunning, and she also reads: we should all be feminists. This is a book we see not only in her caravan but also she has a poster in her locker that says we should all be feminists on it as well, and this comes under the category of like short book long essay.

If that makes sense, it is all about why everyone in the 21st century should consider themselves to be a feminist super contemporary, expertly written, and also is targeted at both men and women. we should all be feminists and we should also all read this essay, but if you don’t want to read the essay, she also did a ted talk where she does like an abridged summarized version of uh the book. It’s honestly, one of the best pieces of feminist theory that I’ve ever read, and speaking of which we also have the OG piece of feminist writing.

7. Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft

And that is the Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft. This was written in the late 18th century and argues that women deserve equal rights to education as their male counterparts. And the argument is that if women are educated properly, then they can contribute to society more fruitfully and more helpfully. Wollstonecraft was such a pioneer such a feminist icon. She lived in the area that I live in right now and the fun fact is her daughter was Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein so there you go, talented family, as you can see here, this is the perfect bedtime reading for Maeve Wiley and she’s sleeping next to it, and why not?

8. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

And then finally we have Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own. This is the book that Jackson reads: to try to impress Maeve and has quite a high success rate. Maeve refers to Wolff as the Beyonce of her time in a text and honestly, I agree. I can’t fault that argument in this essay. I will but a room of one’s own discusses the lack of female writers in the industry at the time, not because they weren’t talented and that there weren’t female writers, it’s just that they didn’t have the opportunity to write. The title comes from the most well-known line of the book, which is a woman, must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction and wolf explores all of this through a fictional character.

Her name is Mary. She goes to the British Library and realizes that all of female history has been written by men, usually in quite a defamatory kind of way, and so she argues that women are not at all inherently inferior, but the experiences, education, and opportunities offered to them At the time were inferior to men, so it’s a kind of financial, social, the educational disadvantage being imposed upon them and as an example, she proposes like what, if Shakespeare, had a sister called Judith, who was just as talented as he was Judith could have written the Same place and she would never have got the recognition and, as a result, we as a society would have lost out and missed out on so much incredible stuff. So, as you can tell it’s a very interesting piece of feminist literature, it’s a banger of an essay and honestly, Maeve Wiley’s, big brain energy is just on full display, and, of course, Maeve’s own story within Sex Education is very much about her trying to achieve autonomy through financial stability, uh education and showcasing her natural ability and intelligence, even though she is so often underestimated, and I think that’s what makes her such a special character. So, to conclude, Maeve Wiley is a fantastically written character. We only want the best for her.

We only want good things for mate Wiley in season three. I love that she’s a bookworm, I’m intrigued to see what she’ll be reading in series three. She may still be reading Middlemarch, who knows: here’s hoping Maeve Wiley finally finishes middle march in season three of Sex education. The new series is out on Netflix on the 17th of September and, if you haven’t watched it yet it’s this fantastic show all about discovering Sex and sexuality. So many honest and open and candid conversations make mistakes and just being human. It’s such a diverse and incredible show I love it.

Books Recommended By Maeve Willy Of Sex Education