To ask what your favourite classic novel is?

[SpectacleLectacle]

I have a plan to read some classics this summer I’ve never got round to... what’s your absolute favourite classic novel? And why?

I guess I’m thinking mainly of those that would be in the ‘Classics’ (in terms of fiction rather than the subject!) section of a bookshop but feel free to diverge from that

Wuthering Heights
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
The Great Gatsby

Bleak House
The Go-Between

Persuasion
Vanity Fair

Also Wide Sargasso Sea

@Meredithgrey1

Rebecca, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and anything by Jane Austen by Persuasion is my absolute favourite

Persuasion is a masterpiece, isn’t it?

@sageandroses

Also Wide Sargasso Sea

I can’t bear it - I just cry - it physically hurts me.

When I say ‘I can’t bear it’ I mean it’s phenomenal.

I'm not one for the classics at all, but I loved Gone with the Wind and Grapes of Wrath.

Oh, Wuthering Heights all the way. I adore that novel. I love all things Bronte and have enjoyed all their work but Wuthering Heights will always be my favourite. Jane Eyre comes in as a close second.

The Rainbow by DH Lawrence

I haven't read any Jane Austen, I really really do need to remedy that.

There's lots of classics I've liked, especially the children's classics like Secret Garden, Little Women, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, Wind in the Willows.
I actually really liked War and Peace.

I'll second Dracula - that was a good read.

Silas Marner- such a great story, with all the required elements of betrayal, anger, broken trust and friendship.

Anyone who loves Jane Eyre I'd recommend
Wide Sargasso Sea - tells Blanche's story
Mr Rochester - his imagined back story and Jane Eyre from his perspective.

Pride and Prejudice is great, but the (slightly) lesser known Persuasion is my absolute favourite.

Thanks for all the replies! I’m embarrassed to say I’ve read very few of these. Never got into Jane Austen but maybe now is the time? Where would you say I should start? I feel like Pride and Prejudice is maybe too familiar from TV adaptations

Making a long list of others too.... keen to read George Eliot in particular.

My favourite (that I have read) is Wide Sargasso Sea. So beautiful!

I found all of the following easy reads and very engaging:

• Pride and Prejudice
• Gone with the Wind (highly recommended)
• Rebecca
• Great Expectations and Oliver Twist (really any Dickens)
• To Kill a Mockingbird

I found most of the Russian classics pretty hard going and Wuthering Heights didn't really engage me

Frankenstein
Middlemarch
Jude The Obscure
Northanger Abbey
Great Expectations
Frenchman’s Creek
A Christmas Carol

Jane eyre
Pride and prejudice
Far from the madding crowd

I can get lost in them and read them again and again

Pride and Prejudice
Mansfield Park
Cold Comfort Farm
Middlemarch

Frankenstein!

Modern classics, The Wasp Factory is such a good read

1984 - G Orwell
Midsummer night's dream- W Shakespeare
A Christmas Carol -C Dickens (I read this every December
Someone else mentioned Handmaid's tale which I love too but I never thought of it as a classic before
I've got a few for my list from this thread!

Like PP, school "classics" put me off many of these for decades, I cannot stand Hardy, whose women - IMHO - are passive victims caught by their own circumstances. Similarly, anything Austen.

Got shown a 1960s film classic version of Taming of the Shrew as an impressionable 14yo and that was enough to turn me off Shakespeare for life 🤔

What I would bother with/return to:

To kill a Mockingbird
Lord of the Flies
1984
The great Gatsby

Maybe some Mark Twain?

And if, on the odd chance you are Antipodean, try Mr Pip. A manageable dose of Dickens plus South Pacific history and social history.

• Mansfield Park
• I disagree with pps who disliked The Three Musketeers - I love it and have read it many times. It might be dependent on the translation (unless you are fluent enough to read it in French). My Penguin edition is translated by Lord Sudely.)
• The Go Between (LP Hartley)
• The Sea, The Sea (Iris Murdoch)

Any of Orwell's novels.

I love Jane Eyre - have read it countless times. I've also enjoyed other Brontë books - the tenant of wildfell hall, Agnes grey.
The woman in white by Wilkie Collins is good too.