When I put Rebecca on my Classics Club list, I didn’t know anything about it. I put it on my list with the same intention I put many classics on it: I want to read well-known or important classics, and knew this was one of them. When I started book blogging, I discovered how many …
Category: English LIterature
The Foolish Gentlewoman, Margery Sharp (1948)
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1399938094i/22074996.jpg For a moment he was left suspended between past and present, and well he knew which way his heart yearned. What he longed to return to was an orderly world. No one, in Mr. Brocken’s opinion, had tasted the sweetness of life who had not lived before 1914. What years those were for solid …
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Agnes Grey, Anne Bronte (1847)
I was the only person in the house, who steadily professed good principles, habitually spoke the truth, and generally endeavoured to make inclination bow to duty; and this I say, not of course in commendation of myself, but to show the unfortunate state of the family to which my services were, for the present devoted….she …
Roxana, Daniel Defoe (1724)
If you have any Regard to your future Happiness; any View of living comfortably with a Husband; any Hope of preserving your Fortunes, or restoring them after any Disaster; Never, Ladies, marry a Fool; any Husband rather than a Fool… So begins Roxana’s life of woe, written as a cautionary tale “to my Fellow-creatures, the …
Mansfield Park, Jane Austen (1814)
The nonsense and folly of people’s stepping out of their rank and trying to appear above themselves makes me think it right to give you a hint, Fanny, now that you are going into company without any of us; and I do beseech you and entreat you not to be putting yourself forward, and talking …
Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen (1817)
….there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them…. Catherine Morland is seventeen when she accompanies her wealthy neighbor Mrs. Allen to Bath where her husband has been ordered to take in …
Mrs. Miniver, Jan Struther (1939)
Mrs. Miniver was “more powerful to the war effort than the combined work of six military divisions.” Prime Minister Winston Churchill What effect can a book made up of the vignettes of simple family life have on a world in conflict? Can descriptions of dentist visits, a mother/daughter shopping spree in search of the perfect …
Where Angels Fear to Tread, EM Forster (1905)
“Remember, that it is only by going off the track that you get to know the country. See the little towns—Gubbio, Pienza, Cortona, San Gimignano, Monteriano. And don’t, let me beg you, go with that awful tourist idea that Italy’s only a museum of antiquities and art. Love and understand the Italians, for the people …
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The Island of Dr. Moreau, HG Wells (1896)
These creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought into new shapes. To that, to the study of the plasticity of living forms, my life has been devoted. There are so many ways to approach this novel: as a horror story, an adventure story, a scientific experiment gone bad. But it is definitely a …
The Time Machine, HG Wells (1895)
It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change….There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. The Time Machine is one of H.G. Wells’s earliest works and as the title suggests a story about time travel. We are introduced to the Time …
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