WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The WRFH Interview: Christopher Scalia

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

Christopher J. Scalia is a senior fellow in the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies department at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on literature, culture, and higher education. He concurrently serves as poetry editor of The New Criterion. His most recent book, 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read), was published by Regnery Publishing in May 2025. He joins Erika Kyba on WRFH for a conversation.

You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. This is Erica Kaiba interviewing Dr. Christopher Scalia from the American Enterprise Institute. Dr. Scalia is a senior fellow in the social, cultural, and constitutional studies department at the AEI. And he joins us today to discuss his new book, 13 novels conservatives will love, but probably haven't read. How are you doing today, Dr. Scalia? I'm doing well, Erica. Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Thank you for joining us, me as well. So let's start with, why is it unlikely that conservatives have read these books in particular? The premise of this book is that conservatives who read fiction have a hearty stock that they go back to. It's a reliable catalog of Tolkien and Lewis and Rand and Waugh, and those are just English language original authors. And maybe Tom Wolfe will be in there. And, you know, there are some others.

But when you talk to conservatives about fiction, we tend to go back to that same handful. And what that means is our conversations tend to be a little bit repetitive. And there's nothing wrong with those books. But by focusing on that handful, we are limiting ourselves and I think blinding ourselves to the literary tradition available to us. And by available to us, I mean novels that in this specific context represent conservative ideas and characters sympathetically, take conservative ideas seriously. I was conscious not to name this 13 conservative novels, but 13 novels conservatives will love because I think calling the novels conservative conservative oversimplifies them a little bit. I don't know how many, some of these authors would have considered or called themselves conservatives, but not all of them would have.

I think most readers who read these novels will recognize that they are exceptional, that they are of great literary merit. And that was kind of the first criterion when choosing these books. But because they take conservative ideas seriously, I think conservatives should know about them and would be especially reward. and pleased in encountering them. Out of curiosity, how palatable do you think these books or some of these books would be to a left-leaning person? Let's say I have a more liberal friend and I want to recommend Evellina. Evolina by Francis Berda.

I think it's Evolina. That's how I've always pronounced it. That's how I was taught to pronounce it. But who knows? Yeah, I think liberals, progressives, whatever, would enjoy most of these novels. And if they don't, I think the one that comes to mind that might be especially tough for some progressives and, unfortunately, some conservatives is Daniel Duranda by George Elliott because it's a novel about Zionism. And it's much of the novel, not all of it, is it makes the case for a Jewish state. And I, but I think it's also, it's more broadly a novel about national identity.

And it is also, there's kind of a parallel plot that's very much about marriage and finding, finding one sense of purpose beyond oneself. And, but I think the Zionist elements of that novel may rub a lot of progress. the wrong way, but the other elements of the novel, I think, more than make up for that possible annoyance. And, you know, frankly, I don't feel too bad for liberals, you know, who read a novel whose politics they don't like, because from a conservative perspective, I think we do a lot of that. We encounter a lot of culture, and we love a lot of culture whose ideas we don't necessarily agree with and often don't agree with, but we recognize.

on balance that this song or this album or this movie or book is nonetheless valuable and noteworthy and enjoyable despite those politics. Since you brought up the theme of Zionism in Daniel Duranda by George Eliot, do you think that that novel in particular could bring anything to bear in the discussion about Zionism within the conservative movement, since that tends to be a pretty fraught issue these days? Yes. I think that the case for Zionism in that novel is, as I said, to give readers a little bit of context,

the title character, Daniel Duranda, over the course of the novel, discovers, well, he is, like many young men and many young men and women in the novels I write about in this book, struggling to find a sense of purpose. He is a man of great sympathy, but almost... capable of too much sympathy and he's unable to focus it. When he discovers that he is a Jew, he finds a focus, an outlet for that sense of sympathy and that sense of purpose. And he determines to try to settle a Jewish state in the Middle East. It doesn't say where. We don't know exactly where that is. And this is, keep in mind, this novel is published by a non-Jew 20 years.

years before the first Zionist conference. So it's really a remarkable novel in that regard. But it was a topic that really interested George Elliott. But Elliot's argument is that the Jews as a people, like the Italians were around that same time, in Germans and people of other people's in Europe were establishing nation states, governments to represent them as a people. And Jews if they wanted to survive, needed to do the same thing. This is some 70 years before World War II, and World War II made that point all the more clear. Ironically, the nationalism she's building her case on was obviously a major cause of World Wars 1 and 2. But in the case of Jews, the case for Israel where a state became all the more evident

along the same lines that Elliot was arguing after or because of World War II. I don't know how many people it's actually going to convince, but to a large degree, novels aren't necessarily about persuasion, about about understanding. And I think at the very least, somebody who reads Daniel Duranda will come away with a better understanding of at least one case for Zionism. And you're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale on 101.7 FM. We're here with Dr. Christopher Scalia talking about his new book, 13 novels conservatives will love, but probably haven't read. Erica.

Yes. Can I go back to that Zionism question? Yes, yes, you can. George Elliott wasn't Christian either. And I just want to make clear there's all this talk now about Christian Zionism. And she was not making a Christian Zionism, a Christian case for Zionism or anything approaching Christian Zionism, however you want to define. that. And I think that's another reason that it's such a useful book. Yeah, for sure. I was wondering if it could maybe bring a little bit of nuance to the discussion.

Yeah, I absolutely think it would. Yeah. That's interesting. The fact that she's a non-Christian, I wonder how that also affects her view of marriage, because you talk about in the book how important that was to her, almost to a sacramental level. So just out of curiosity, could you speak to that? Yeah, it's a very interesting case because George Elliott was her early works were, she was raised Christian and her early works, I think her first published work was a pretty devout Christian work, but she strayed from Christianity. And she had a long extramarital relationship with a married man.

And the reason, he wanted to get to. divorce, but I don't remember the details of it, but was unable to. And so they basically ran off and lived a life together. And so that, you know, there's some irony to including her in this collection of works conservatives would love because by the, in that sense, you know, as the case some other authors in this, in this, or I write about here, she was not necessarily following, you know, a conservative direction. But once she was with, uh, this man who she referred to as her husband, it was a monogamous, decades-long relationship that was, yeah, as you said, almost to the point of sacramental. But it wasn't.

So you were formerly an English professor, and you mentioned in the book that you actually taught one of these books that you recommend, Evelina, two students. Yeah. What was that experience like? How did they take to this book? I taught a number of these novels in my time as a graduate student and as a professor. With Evealina, I like Evelyna, and I included in this book, in part because everybody loves Jane Austen, or many people love Jane Austen, so I didn't want to include any Jane Austen. People didn't need to be reminded to read her. She is great. People should read her, but I don't think they need to be to tell her to read her. Francis Bernie, the author of Evelyn, was an influence on Austin. Austin was a big fan of

hers. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to include it. I also wanted to include it because it's an epilitary novel, meaning it's a novel that's presented as a series of letters. And I didn't have, that was an important form in the 18th century. And I didn't have any novels that followed that form. But students like Bernie, because for many of the same reasons, they like Austin. She writes about a naive young woman who is encountering the real world, quote-unquote, for the first time and has to learn the ins and outs of society at large, has to figure out proper manners, and has to learn how to deal with people who have no concern for other people, no manners whatsoever. As with Austin, there are real, there's a real cultural divide. The emphasis on manners in this, you know, world in the 18th century is very different from our own emphasis on manners. But the point I make in the chapter is that we should care about manners. Maybe not as much as they do in Evalina, but the point is that manners, how you conduct yourself, you. Your habits in certain situations say a lot about what your priorities are and how much you respect the people around you. That's one of the cases I make in this chapter.

And I think the students I taught understood that. And as different as the world was from their own world, I think that's one reason people like reading fiction. It's to experience a very different time and place and way of life. We always talk about how fiction, when we read fiction, we want to see people like us. That's true. We like that. But we also really like seeing people who aren't anything like us or are like us, but are in a very different time and place. And I think that's one of the pleasures of Evolina in particular.

So, Evolina differs from Jane Austen's works in the epistolary form. Does she differ thematically, or does the work differ thematically from what Jane Austen is thinking? Are they pretty similar? I think they're very similar in the cases they make about marriage, about proper conduct. They have a similarly satirical eye. Bernie, Bernie's novel is full of really hilariously repugnant people. She's less likely than Austin to come right out and call characters stupid. Austin is underrated for the number of times she calls her own characters stupid. But there's certainly that that satirical tone that Austin has as well. I think people who read Evelina will recognize similarities between the central couple, Lord Orville and, sorry, Sir Clement, and

Evolina in that novel, and Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. There are some similarities and their initial reactions to each other and then how they come to like each other. Bernie's humor, Austin is obviously very funny. Bernie's humor is less subtle. Evolina is full of some slapstick comedy, some over-the-top comedy. And the comedy is shocking

because there are some occasions where it's remarkably violent. There's one character who likes playing, who plays a prank on an old woman. And it's a pretty mean prank. And initially, the reader might think it's funny, but as the prank develops, you just realize how cruel and mean it is. And there are a couple of episodes like that. I think the novel is three volumes, and each volume has a prank like that that gets progressively stranger.

But you see through those parallel plot, those parallel events, how central characters respond to the pranks differently and in turn how they develop as characters. Austin doesn't have, Austin has high stakes, and obviously is very funny, but she doesn't have that the slapstick humor that you're going to find in, in, um, Evilina. And once again, you're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Dr. Scalia, what are some of the other novels from this list that you've taught to college students? My specialty when I was a professor, was 18th century and early 19th century British literature. So all of the ones in this book from that period,

Rassalist by Samuel Johnson, Evelyn and by Francis Bernie, Waverly by Walter Scott, I've taught. And then I also taught, as you mentioned, the Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark. I think those are the only ones I've taught. And then, yeah, the size. Scott novel Waverly is, Scott is one of my favorite authors to teach. And I recommend him to any listener,

especially readers who are interested in the political philosophy of Edmund Burke. The conservative intellectual Russell Kirk once said that Edmund Burke's ideas were best conveyed not through reflections on the revolution in France, but through Scott's fiction. And Waverly is a great example of that. So you mentioned in the book that Walter Scott has fallen out of favor and that, I mean, you didn't have the space in the chapter to treat that in detail because it's complicated. But I was wondering if you could tease it for us, what your theories are. Because, I mean, I had no idea that Frederick Douglass took his last name from a character

from a Walter Scott novel. Yeah. Well, that's the thing about Scott. Before he was one of the most popular novelists, the most popular novelist, he was the most popular poet. So the name's actually from a Scott poem. Oh, really? And then, but we are recording this in Michigan. Michigan has a place called Ivanhoe.

There's a street in Detroit, I think, called Ivanhoe Street. There's a Waverly, Michigan. There are Ivanhows and Waverleys all around the United States. And those are two of Walter Scott's most famous novels. Everybody read Scott. really up through the early mid-20th century. I think he fell out of fashion for a couple of reasons. I think he's misunderstood to be kind of celebrating war and violence when in fact he's celebrating

the honor and courage required to participate in battle. I think Mark Twain gave him the gave many people the misimpression that Scott celebrated feudalism and therefore slavery, which that's a terrible misreading of Scott, but Twain blamed Walter Scott for starting the Civil War because Southerners loved Scott so much. But Northerners loved Scott too, including Ulysses Grant. And I think he is, I think the biggest obstacle is just that he wrote historical novels. So his fiction is very old. He was writing the same time as Austin, 18 teens through the 20s.

But all of his novels were set in the distant past. So there's another layer of basically footnotes that you have to get through. Austin, while Scott has fallen in popularity, Austin has risen. In George Eliot's Middle March, it's published in the Victorian era. but it's set in 1832. To establish that it's set in that period, Elliot has her characters reading, not Jane Austen, but Walter Scott,

and talking about Walter Scott. Elliot loved Walter Scott. It's one of my favorite things about her. And so this doesn't mean that we shouldn't be reading Austin, but it's just funny how Austin's reputation has climbed. We still need footnotes for Austin, but she's writing about, she's focusing on social virtues and situations and comedies of manners that I think are easier

for us to relate to. But I think it's funny because I think in some ways, Scott is the more appropriate novelist for our time because Scott is writing about different classes, different political ideas, and his novels are set in times of great social, political and cultural change. And I think that's one reason modern readers would be surprised by how much his novels engage with them. How much context do you think your average reader would need going into Waverly? Like, should you do a little bit of background reading? I think if you get a good edition of a Scott novel and read the introduction and the timeline and the footnotes here and there, you will. So if you just get the Penguin Classics or Oxford World Classics edition of that novel,

from the library or $10 on Amazon. You'll have enough background there. Waverly is set in 1745, and it is about an uprising, something called the Jacobite uprising, an attempt to replace the sitting king with the Stuart monarchs who had been deposed a couple of generations before. And that was a serious threat to the British throne. own that originated in Scotland. So that you need some of that background, but you don't, you know, I think you can get a strong understanding of the novel and enjoy the novel without knowing

that going in. Which of these books do you think is the most purely fun to read? Like, it's a rainy Saturday. I'm going to pick up one of them. Which one does my hand gravitate towards? Scoop by Evelyn Waugh. Scoop is a great satire of journalism. I know Hillsdale has a lot of, has a great journalism program. And, you know, a lot of these novels focus on particular conservative themes or ideas. Scoop doesn't so much. Scoop just makes fun of journalists. And conservatives like doing that.

Liberals like doing it, too. But conservatives have gotten especially good at it. And Scoop is just a, it's a quick-moving satire of journalism. The main character finds himself through a case of mistaken identity. covering, he becomes a foreign correspondent following the rebellion in a fictional African country. And he learns a lot about the trade of journalism. And what he learns especially is that journalists don't mind making things up and they do mind correcting mistakes. It's very funny.

It's more than that, but that's the core of it. And I think that's, even Waugh's more serious novels are very, very, they go down very easy even when he's dealing with bigger ideas than that. So Scoop is an especially great rainy day book. So I wanted to ask you about the Blythe Dale romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I love it. It's the one book that I have read in the list. I'm looking forward to reading the other ones.

So I'm glad you brought that up. I feel terrible when people say, oh, I feel so dumb. I've only read one of these books. That's the point. And I hadn't read all of these books. before I started this project. I had read about half of them, and then I read many others over the course of my research. I had read the Blyd-Dale romance as an undergrad, but hadn't returned to it.

I just remembered, you know, very generally what it was about. So I'm glad to hear you say that, and I'm glad that you read at least one of them. Yeah. But let me turn it on you. What did you like about, why do you like Blyde-Dale romance? I thought the characters were very well drawn. Yes. I felt myself just pulled into this inner world and there's all this intrigue and there's like a two-way love triangle.

That's right. That's right. There's like all this human passion and foibles. And these are the people that think that they're going to rebuild America in their image. Yes. It's an anti-utopia novel. So some background. The author Nathaniel Hawthorne spent a very little time at an agricultural commune called Brook Farm. and he didn't last long.

About 10 years later, he wrote the Blydeal romance, which is, he says it has nothing to do with Brook Farm, but it's obviously based on Brook Farm. And the character in kind of the stand in for Hawthorne in this novel is an aspiring poet who thinks that this is a chance to create a new society, a new, basically a new constitution. and he thinks that working, if he's just a farmer, he'll have time to work on his poetry. The latter delusion is quickly dispelled as he realizes he's too tired from all the work in the field to actually write any poetry. So that's disappointment number one. Disappointment number two is that it's just there's no way to make this commune work, in part because the labor is so difficult, and in part because of the personal conflicts that you mentioned before. Defenders, some people argue that this isn't really an anti-socialist novel because the problem isn't with, it's the old argument.

Real communism has never been tried. That's basically the argument here. It's the personal conflicts in the love triangle that gets in the way of this project. It's not the communism. But, you know, human nature is one of the reasons communism doesn't work. And that's part of it. But what they realized along the way is that they were treating predecessors, people would come before them as complete fools. And they were acting as if they were the only people trying to make the world a better place.

But in fact, every generation thinks they can do better than the one before. And they can, but they can't create a new world. They can't start from scratch the way utopians try to. And I think there's so much more to the novel than that sort of political lesson, but that I think political lesson is what, or ideological lesson is anti-maybe ideological lesson is why I wanted to include it in this book. Do you think there's anything to the Blythedale project? because when Coverdale, the narrator, returns to the city, he's been working on the farm, he's in better shape, more tan than he was before, he seems healthier.

Yes. And then he goes back and he's back in this life of total foppery. And then he sees one of the other main characters, Zinobia, and she's in like all this regal attire. And you get the sense that something's been lost and that life in the city rings hollow in comparison to what they had at Blythdale. So what do you make of that? Yeah, I think that's a great point. that seems to be more a point about or a hint about the virtues of rural life that he's unable to actually he does seem healthier but remember when he first gets there he gets sick right away and and when

people come to visit him and kind of they they think they can do what the what the people in the commune are doing very easily and he just he scoffs that idea because he realizes how hard that is But I think there's a point to maybe the virtues of a rural life, but not a socialist commune or not one built to scale. What do you make of the character of Silas Foster, kind of like stout agricultural salt of the earth guy? Silas Foster is he's working on the farm. He's basically the he's the professional farmer. He already knows how to farm. and he is a great, he's kind of, he's what they should aspire to. And Coverdale thinks he can become that easily, but he can't. And Silas is a real, especially early on, is a real skeptic about this project.

And, yeah, justifiably looks down on them, especially on that first night. We get a sense that, yeah, Silas doesn't have a whole lot of confidence in project. Maybe it's doomed. There's some readers that look down a little bit on Silas Foster as someone who's just kind of too literal and he is unable to appreciate some of the symbolic things that the other characters are appreciating. Do you think there's any truth to that reading? Well, one passage that comes to mind is I think that that opened that first dinner, I can't remember the imagery specifically, but it's something about they see a fire in the

distance and how about that fire represents them being. being a beacon and Silas dispels. It's not the fire he thinks it is. I'm forgetting the details of this. But Silas is more literal, but he's right. And it's not that Coverdale is being figurative based on a misconception. And Foster is dispelling that misconception by explaining what he's actually seeing. So yes, he's being too literal, but he's also right.

And one more thing I wanted to ask about the novel. is that it kind of takes apart this idea that we can imminentize the Eschaton, as you quoted William F. Buckley, Jr. But what do we do with that human instinct to make the world a better place? You know, if we're not trying to, like, create these grand utopian projects, do you think the novel itself gives us any direction? I'm not sure the novel does give us any direction. But I do think that I think conservatism in general gives us direction. It's not that the point isn't that we can't improve the world. The point is that trying to remake the world to make it new is flawed and that's that is doomed.

You know, the Americans celebrate a revolution. We celebrate the American Revolution. It's not that revolutions are necessarily doomed. But that wasn't, you know, some talk in the, some American revolutionaries did talk about making the world new, like Thomas Payne did. But really, it was a revolution about already established conventions of English law that we wanted. And obviously, there were innovations on that. But it wasn't a radical departure from tradition in the way, say, the French Revolution was. So I point those out just to say, conservatives don't believe the world cannot be improved and that the human

condition can't be improved, we think it can. We see that it has been. That's one of the reasons we like free markets. We think it's capable of doing that. But we also believe in something like an enduring, constant human nature that cannot be changed. Utopians think human nature can be changed. Conservatives don't. That's a point I hit on a lot in the first book I write about Rassalist by Samuel Johnson. That's really a large part about the idea of the constant enduring human nature across time and place. Not that cultures don't differ, but at our core, humans have the same desires, the same instincts, the same impulses and urges, vices and virtues to different degrees. And so I think conservatives recognize that enduring human nature, recognize that we cannot

change human nature, but we can modify how we live to get the best out of that human nature. The chapter right after the Blythdale chapter is the one on Daniel Duranda, and you place those two novels in conversation with each other. So how do you think that, for the audience, how do you think that Daniel Duranda acts as a corrective for Blythedale? First of all, thank you for reading my book so carefully. You're welcome. It was great. Everyone should buy it. Thank you. Daniel Duranda has a bold vision to create a Jewish state. And that is ambitious. But it's not utopian. He doesn't set out to change human nature and to make the world new. He's trying to reestablish something that had been. So in some ways, it's kind of a conservative attempt. And it's also, he does not know if it's going to work. He does not, he is not as ideal. about the projects as other Zionists in the novel, but it's something he thinks he needs

to try and he wants to, he wants to, he wants to try it. That's what he sets out to do. We don't know if it's going to work. The reader doesn't know, but, but his, as ambitious as that goal is, it's not utopian. And finally, do you have any last thoughts that you want to offer on the book, on literature, conservatism, anything? Well, as I said before, I think I know your listeners probably are conservative, but to any non-conservatives out there, if you want to know conservatism a little more deeply, these novels will help that. And it will not be like taking medicine.

These are great novels you will enjoy. But I would just encourage people to keep reading fiction. And, you know, kind of implicit in this book is a desire to get people to keep reading fiction or to start reading fiction again. People aren't reading much of anything anymore. And fiction and poetry, too, are in especially dire conditions. But fiction teaches us about human nature. and our fellow humans in a way that other books just can't. I think people should read history and other types of nonfiction, but we get different

things from them. Fiction helps us get into the mind of characters and people different from ourselves in a way that no other kind of reading really can. And I think a lot is lost if we lose fiction. And where can people buy the book? Well, I would say it, find bookstores everywhere, but I'm not confident about that. So I would say you can get it on Amazon. You can also get it at my publisher's website.

It's published by Sky Horse Press. Or if you do a search for Regnery Press, too, you should be able to find it there. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Scalia. Thank you, Erica. My pleasure. Once again, we have been interviewing Dr. Christopher Scalia of the American Enterprise Institute on his new book 13 novels Conservatives Will Love but probably haven't read. You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.