100 Must-read Classic Novels

Nick Rennison

• Publisher: A&C Black Academic and Professional
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781408136102
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Édition

Want to become a classic novel buff, or expand your reading of some of the finest novels ever published? With 100 of the best titles fully reviewed and a further 500 recommended, you'll quickly set out on a journey of discovery.

A–Z OF ENTRIES

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT (1832–88) USA

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LITTLE WOMEN (1868)

The daughter of Bronson Alcott, a renowned American educationalist, Louisa May Alcott published more than two hundred books but is largely remembered for just one – Little Women. Following the fortunes of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March, the daughters of an army chaplain in the American Civil War, the book records both the everyday pleasures and the trials and tribulations of their lives. Would-be writer Jo has the excitement of getting a story published. The wealthy Mr Laurence and his grandson Laurie become close friends of the family. Laurie’s young tutor falls in love with Meg. A telegram arrives with the bad news that Mr March is hospitalized in Washington DC and Mrs March, partly financed by money from the sale of Jo’s hair, is obliged to travel there to look after him. As the girls, based on Alcott and her own sisters, progress from teenage years to young womanhood, they face further crisis and tragedy. The saintly Beth contracts scarlet fever while visiting sick neighbours and, as the other girls grow up and face the challenges of work and romance, she has to battle with terminal illness. In later life, Alcott wrote in her journal that she was ‘tired of providing moral pap for the young’ and published a number of novels which attempted to deal with what she saw as more adult themes, but Little Women survives and thrives nearly a century and a half after it was first published precisely because it is much more than just a simplistic morality tale. The novel is set very firmly in the place and period in which it was written – readers can learn much about the social history of mid-19th-century America from reading Little Women – but it has a universality that transcends both.

Film version: Little Women (starring Elizabeth Taylor as Amy and June Allyson as Jo, 1949); Little Women (with Winona Ryder as Jo, 1994)

Read on

Little Men

Geraldine Brooks, March (a modern Pulitzer Prize-winning novel which takes the father of Alcott’s March family as its central character); Susan Coolidge, What Katy Did; Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Little House on the Prairie

JANE AUSTEN (1775–1817) UK

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EMMA (1816)

Young, well-off and spoiled, Emma Woodhouse is complacently convinced that she knows what is best for everyone, particularly in matters of the heart. Her matchmaking skills are largely directed towards her young, amiable and innocent protegée Harriet Smith, whom Emma decides would be ideally matched with the clergyman, Mr Elton. Elton, however, has other ideas and, despising Harriet for her lack of social status, he has his eye on Emma herself. Emma plays with the idea of being in love with Frank Churchill, recently arrived as a visitor in her village, but her real, unrecognized feelings are for the sympathetic and warm-hearted local squire, George Knightley who watches her attempts to shape other people’s lives with a mixture of affection and irritation. As Emma’s assorted schemes collapse in embarrassment and, occasionally, distress, she is forced to acknowledge that she knows less about herself and about other people than she once believed she did. ‘Three or four families in a country village,’ Jane Austen wrote in a letter to one of her relatives, ‘is the very thing to work on.’ It was the world which she knew intimately herself. Born in a Hampshire village where her father was rector, she spent most of her life in the midst of her family either there or at Chawton, another village in Hampshire, or at Bath. Although she had several suitors, she never married. She died of Addison’s disease in Winchester at the age of only 41. All this might suggest that, as a novelist, she worked on a restricted canvas. Emma, as much as any of her novels, shows that there is far more to Jane Austen than the image of a rural spinster implies. Her tough-minded realism about human motivation and self-deceit, about the manoeuvrings of the marriage market and the institution of the family give her works a sharpness and a truthfulness all their own.

Film versions: Emma (starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Emma, 1996); Clueless (a version of the story updated to 1990s Beverley Hills, 1995)

Read on

Mansfield Park; Persuasion

Joan Aiken, Mansfield Revisited; Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (1813)

Jane Austen began writing Pride and Prejudice, then entitled First Impressions, when she was in her early twenties but it was rejected by a publisher and only finally appeared, in a much revised form and under a new title, in 1813. The book focuses on the Bennet family of mother, father and five nubile daughters, thrown into confusion by the arrival of two rich and unattached young men in the neighbourhood. Charles Bingley leases Netherfield, a house close to the Bennet residence and stays there together with his friend Fitzwilliam Darcy. During visits exchanged between the two houses, Bingley falls in love with the eldest Bennet daughter, Jane, while Darcy and Elizabeth, the second eldest, circle one another warily. Witty, clever and ironic, Elizabeth is intrigued by Darcy but dislikes his apparent coldness and arrogance and is prejudiced against him by stories she hears from others. At different times throughout the novel, misunderstandings, social snobbery and self-will conspire to keep both Jane and Bingley and Darcy and Elizabeth apart. But true love finally triumphs. A supporting cast of characters, often richly comic, orbits the central figures of Darcy and Elizabeth. The ill-matched relationship between the ironic, detached Mr Bennet and his gushing, silly wife is beautifully observed. Lady Catherine de Bourgh is a splendidly self-satisfied and snobbish representative of everything that is bad about the aristocracy. Mr Collins, the clergyman and toady to Lady Catherine, unwittingly reveals himself in his true colours during the memorable scene in which he proposes marriage to Elizabeth. Pride and Prejudice has long been Jane Austen’s most popular novel and, with its clear-eyed portrait of the ways in which society’s conventions dictate the shifting patterns of the relationships between the men and women in it, it is one of the greatest comedies of social manners in English literature.

Film versions: Pride and Prejudice (starring Greer Garson as Elizabeth and Laurence Olivier as Darcy,1940); Pride and Prejudice (Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth, Colin Firth as Darcy, 1995, TV); Pride and Prejudice (Keira Knightley as Elizabeth, Mathew Macfadyen as Darcy, 2005)

Read on

Sense and Sensibility

>> Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters; Alison Lurie, Only Children; Emma Tennant, Pemberley (a sequel, published in 1993); Joanna Trollope, Other People’s Children; Fay Weldon, Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen

READ ON A THEME: THREE OR FOUR
FAMILIES IN A COUNTRY VILLAGE

>> Jane Austen, Emma

>> Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford

Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield

F.M. Mayor, The Rector’s Daughter

Barbara Pym, Some Tame Gazelle

Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford

>> Anthony Trollope, Framley Parsonage

HONORÉ DE BALZAC (1799–1850) France

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EUGÉNIE GRANDET (1833)

Balzac began his career as a novelist with pseudonymously published historical novels in imitation of >> Sir Walter Scott but, as he turned to fiction with a contemporary setting, he gradually evolved a grandly ambitious plan to write a series of novels which would provide a panoramic portrait of French society in the first half of the 19th century. La Comédie Humaine (The Human Comedy), as he entitled the whole project, was never finished but, even so, it runs to more than 90 individual but interconnected works of fiction which together include thousands of characters. Eugénie Grandet, one of the earliest novels in the series, is set in the stifling household of Monsieur Grandet, a wealthy but miserly wine merchant in the French provincial town of Saumur. Grandet controls th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About this Book
• Introduction
• A–Z of Entries