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Book recommendations please! Period novels especially

68 replies

StillNo · 25/12/2021 18:14

Hello! Merry Christmas!
I’m looking for something new to read and I need help please. If any clever person has a moment.

I don’t do modern books. I try but I haven’t found one I like since the Time Traveller’s Wife.

Looking for some period novels I haven’t read yet. Things I like:

All Jane Austen
The Turn of the Screw
Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Jane Eyre
Agatha Christie
Cold Comfort Farm
Anything by MR James
Return of the Native
Rebecca

Would really appreciate some recommendations please. Thank you!

OP posts:
abouquetofsharpenedpencils · 26/12/2021 10:23

I love your list OP!
I have very similar tastes.
I absolutely loved:
The Woman in White -Wilkie Collins
Aurora Floyd - Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Ibane · 26/12/2021 10:59

Charlotte Bronte’s Villette knocks everything else written by the Brontes into a cocked hat, for me. (Though have you read Jane Eyre and Shirley too?)

You’ve had some brilliant recommendations here, OP. I envy that you still have so many Hardy and Dickens novels yet to read (I’d start with The Woodlanders and Great Expectations respectively).

For Edith Wharton, start with The Age of Innocence, The Buccaneers (though the visible creak where Marion Mainwaring finished it is a problem) and the blackly hilarious The Custom of the Country — if you lean towards ‘cosy’ avoid Ethan Frome and The House of Mirth, both wonderful but grim.

MJ Farrell/Molly Keane (same person) is astonishing — socially-acute, brilliantly-written, often very funny stories set in Anglo-Irish Big Houses, mostly in the early 20thc, written out of her own experience. Austen-ish in their social attunement, Mitfordish in their humour and grotesque characters. Start with the very funny Good Behaviour, which should have got the Booker in 1981

I also recommend Persephone Books and finding old Virago classics in second hand shops — that was what led me to something I have seen recommended here yet, but which would suit you, and which is unspeakably brilliant, Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows and its sequels, This Real Night and Cousin Rosamund.

Everyone should read these novels — not only are they a brilliantly evocative portrait of Edwardian family life in south London, based on West’s own childhood (parties and Christmas rituals and clothes and food and odd bits of south London ) but they are also brilliantly characterised (a narrating child musical genius, an eccentric former concert pianist mother, a brilliant, unstable journalist father, a local murderess, a rich, lonely Jewish patron etc) and have moments of being almost magical realist because of the matter of fact way they present poltergeists, ghost horses, mind-reading.

TheMarzipanDildo · 26/12/2021 13:45

“Charlotte Bronte’s Villette knocks everything else written by the Brontes into a cocked hat, for me.”

I love Villette too. It’s quite a weird novel really but all the better for it.

Interested in this thread?

Then you might like threads about this subject:

RampantIvy · 26/12/2021 13:49

@TheMarzipanDildo

“Charlotte Bronte’s Villette knocks everything else written by the Brontes into a cocked hat, for me.”

I love Villette too. It’s quite a weird novel really but all the better for it.

Nope. I disagree. It is the only Bronte book I have given up on because it was so boring.
GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER · 26/12/2021 14:13

You might well enjoy Barbara Pym - I love hers.

Mostly set not long post Ww2 so period pieces now, but Crampton Hodnet (my favourite) was written just before WW2. Set in North Oxford and gently takes the piss out of both academics and the clergy. IMO it’s gently but wickedly funny.

Others of hers I’d recommend are
Excellent Women
The Sweet Dove Died
Some Tame Gazelle
Jane and Prudence
Civil to Strangers

Also Quartet in Autumn, which was shortlisted for the Booker not long before she died in the (IIRC) early 80s. That one is more melancholy but an excellent read.

Elizabeth Taylor is another author you might well like, all period pieces now.

If you’ve never read Cranford (Elizabeth Gaskell) that is IMO a lovely read.

StColumbofNavron · 26/12/2021 14:13

@RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie

Definitely Georgette Heyer.

No Name is my favourite Willie Collins, and I've read most of not all of them.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day for totally joyous escapism for a couple of hours.

A Town Like Alice for WW2

All Quiet on the Western Front for WW1

I couldn't get on with the Cazalet Chronicles at all, but they're pretty much universally loved on here

Noel Streatfeild, especially the one about an aunt who may or may not be called Clara. This one isn't a children's book. Will try to find the title.

I read the first Cazalet this year and I really could not understand the love (I also feel the same about Heyer - though have only read The Unknown Ajax).

Lots of great suggestions.

I would suggest

Frenchman’s Creek, Daphne du Maurier (so much witty dialogue and Cornwall really comes to life. It’s different to her other works though).

If you already like Hardy (I enjoyed Return of the Native this year) then obviously many more to read through.

On the Hardy vein, Emile Zola might work for you, though his are set predominantly in France.

If you do opt for W&P then there is a chapter a day read along happening in ‘What We’re Reading’ starting 1 Jan.

There is also another Dickens readalong starting shortly - Hard Times I think.

StColumbofNavron · 26/12/2021 14:17

Oh and Adam Bede, Georg Eliot.

RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie · 26/12/2021 14:30

@StColumbofNavron
Try one of Heyer's more fun ones - The Grand Sophy, The Toll Gate and The Masqueraders are some of my favourites.

Bloatstoat · 26/12/2021 14:33

So many good suggestions here.

I recently discovered D. E. Stevenson - really nice, gentle reads, written in the 1940s/50s.

Also for Victorian novels I love Mrs Henry Wood, novels like 'The Channings' and 'Mrs Halliburton's Troubles'. Most of these and a lot of the ones people have mentioned above can be read for free from the faded page website.

crosshatching · 26/12/2021 14:35

I wasn't sure if it was classic novels you wanted recommending or historical fiction OP, anyways here are some favourite historical fiction reads of mine.

All the light we cannot see - Antony Doerr
A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel
Life after Life and A God in Ruins - both by Kate Atkinson
Life Class trilogy - Pat Barker
Blackberry and Wild Rose - Sonia Belton

StillNo · 27/12/2021 07:54

Thank you so much - I have read every post and looked up every book and I’ve got a great list now.
Much appreciated!! :)

OP posts:
notawittyname1954 · 27/12/2021 08:42

How about
Diary of a Nobody
The Eliza stories by Barry Pain
The Sherlock Holmes Stories
MR James - if you like scary
The Saki stories
More Modern but Poldark and the Morland Dynasty (34 ish books)

Stiffcondomhat · 27/12/2021 08:49

Great thread. I recently discovered The Feast by Margaret Kennedy. Written in 1950. Very much an Agatha Christie vibe and one of the best books I've ever read.

tarheelbaby · 27/12/2021 08:55

Cynthia Harrod-Eagles - War at Home series and Morland Place series
Sharon Kay Penman - not just The Sunne in Splendour, Here be Dragons too
Julian Fellowes - Past Imperfect, Snobs

StruggleStreet · 27/12/2021 08:59

I can’t see it’s been mentioned yet, I really enjoyed Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. It’s quite light and funny, just a really lovely book.

Ibane · 27/12/2021 10:50

@TheMarzipanDildo

“Charlotte Bronte’s Villette knocks everything else written by the Brontes into a cocked hat, for me.”

I love Villette too. It’s quite a weird novel really but all the better for it.

It’s deeply weird, isn’t it? You can entirely see why her publisher had reservations — a narrating character who is a prig and frequently peculiar, and is quite upfront about withholding key information from the reader, a change of love interest halfway through from Standard Sexy Doctor to a man who is alternately depicted as comic relief, sadistic teacher and Catholic lapdog to the Church, lots of untranslated French, a subplot involving cross dressing and a phantom nun, long, vitriolic diatribes about Catholics and foreigners, and a strange, inconclusive ending? Grin

I absolutely adore every oddball paragraph.

HaroldMeeker · 27/12/2021 11:10

I can recommend Susanna Gregory's novels, both her Matthew Bartholomew and Thomas Challoner series. I also enjoy Phillipa Gregory.
Pat McIntosh's Glasgow set Gill Cunningham books are wonderful, but its set in Glasgow in medieval times and the dialogue is accurate to rhe time and place. It took me (east coast scot) a while and a Scots dictionary to get my head tuned into it, but they're worth it.

AuntMasha · 27/12/2021 14:30

Someone mentioned Emile Zola upthread — ‘Nana’ is my absolute favourite, a sort of female rake’s progress set in mid 19th century Paris.

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