Emily Milledge is an Australian actor whose recent theatre credits include Carrie: The Musical, The Good Person of Szechuan, Frankenstein and La Cage Aux Folles. She was in the TV series Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries and Paper Giants II: Magazine Wars. She is playing Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz at Belvoir Theatre in Sydney this month, and will perform in Antigone at Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre from August 21.
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Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
This novel is perfect for a cold winter's afternoon by the fire. A cliche yes, but what better scenario in which to enjoy Mary Shelley's epic, gothic telling of the horror unveiled when a scientific experiment goes dreadfully wrong. Man's fierce ambition and attempts to defy the rules of nature and the tragedy of the abandoned child are powerful in Shelley's work. The novel has a real contemporary resonance with modern technology continuing to advance at an alarming rate - how far is too far?
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
I first read this beautifully constructed and finessed novel as a 16-year-old and was taken by the delicacy and purity of the language. It is so perfect in form that it's almost more like reading poetry than prose. I love the way the novel explores the juxtaposition of fantasy and dreams and the fragile, yearning human soul. The tragedy of Emma Bovary's romantic desires contrasted with the sad reality of her situation is very powerful.
Violette Noziere: A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris
Sarah Maza
On the evening of August 1, 1933, 18-year-old Violette Noziere of Paris murdered her father and sent her mother into a near-death coma by poisoning them both with a concoction of barbiturates. I stumbled across this non-fictional examination of parricide via the Isabelle Huppert film. It gives such an interesting insight into Violette's duplicitous character, the public response to her incest allegations against her father, her eventual redemption and release from jail.
The Wizard of Oz
L. Frank Baum
I have only recently read L. Frank Baum's children's classic. The novel is so often superseded by the 1939 film starring Judy Garland and her ruby slippers and melancholic rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. I found myself swept up in the violence of the landscape Dorothy enters and the relentlessness of the trials she must undergo in order to return home. What it means to be a witch and whether the notion of home lies in the physical or psychological are interesting questions.
