Magda Szabó Reading List
On critically understanding Magda Szabó...
I read Abigail in October and absolutely adored it. You can read my review here, and I’ll have a quotation study following later in the month. But now I want to read more of Magda Szabó’s work properly, which means I need to understand the context she was writing in: culturally, historically, and literarily.
Simply moving from one Szabó novel to the next feels insufficient when I don’t fully grasp the Hungarian context, the political pressures she navigated, or the literary traditions she was working within and against. So I’ve put together a reading list that covers all of these angles without being too text dependent. The goal is to build a framework for understanding what Szabó was doing and why it matters, so that when I return to her fiction, I’m reading with more nuance and awareness.
Magda Szabó: I don’t like bearing grudges
An Interview with Magda
