Genuine favourite genuine literary classic?

[ElizabethX]

Ok what genuine pukka classic work of literature do you genuinely love and repeatedly re-read?

For me there is The Great Gatsby, The Turn of the Screw and Wuthering Heights. Dracula maybe although the theme has been so overdone since it feels a bit tarnished.

I'd like to say I love Jane Eyre and Dickens and what not but although I've got through lots of these I can't say I as rapt throughout.

What are yours?

Anthony Trollope books (anything of his, well not anything actually) are my comfort reads.

Also Wuthering Heights. Was my favourite as a teenager. And predictably Austen; Northanger Abbey especially, as it introduced me to Ann Radcliffe etc

Bleak House has to be the best Dickens novel, imo.
Really engaging and also loathsome characters, some fabulous plot twists.
Wonderful criticism of the outdated chantery court system, highs and lows aplenty and a very very happy ending.
I also really enjoyed The Man in the Iron Mask.

Taggie - oh yes, Beloved. That said, I did it for A-Level and it's a completely different experience this side of motherhood.

I love Jane eyre so much it hurts. I'm hugely fond of most of Dickens, all of Austen, the Palliser and Barchester novels, and Middlemarch - but if I could only have one book for the rest of time it would be Jane Eyre. I just adore it, even though I basically know it off by heart.

The Great Gatsby

A Room with a View

Vanity Fair
Great Expectations (still haven't got over the shock of the "reveal")
All of Jane Austen
Grapes of Wrath (sob)

Catch-22
To Kill a Mockingbird
Birdy. Is that a classic? I don't know.

I find I don't read much literary fiction at all these days, but re-read Austen every year, plus Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Then all my Pratchetts and all my Heyers and the Lymond saga.

But my favourite is Wind in the Willows. Oh, poop-poop!

The Netherworld by George Gissing(and anything by Gissing - most under rated writer ever)
l'Assomoir- Emile Zola
Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky-Patrick Hamilton
Of Human Bondage- Somerset Maugham (especially from Chapter 51 where the foul Mildred appears)

Wuthering Heights. Read it first as a hormonal teenager and dreamt of someone loving me like Heathcliffe......

Esther Waters, Jane Eyre, Dracula

Candide by Voltaire. I first read it in my teens and must have replaced it half a dozen times because I keep giving it away.

Don't know if it counts but Factotum by Charles Bukowski really speaks to me. I love most of his stuff, but Factotum is the one I go back to.

I'm gonna include Chandler, too. If his sheer writing skill doesn't put him in the literary classics club then it's a club I want nothing to do with!

Candide pisses me off. The target of it is Leibnitz, who invented calculus. By any reckoning that's a huge accomplishment up there with Sir Isaac Newton (who invented it in parallel). Meanwhile there's clever-clever little Voltaire whose entire achievement consists of taking the piss out of someone he didn't understand because he was a liberal arts fuck whereas Leibnitz was a scientist.

He wasn't taking the piss out of calculus though, he was taking the piss out Liebnizian optimism which, to my uneducated ear, has always sounded a lot like clever-clever philosophical bollocks that deserved to have the piss taken out of it by a rationalist.

If I had to pick 5:

Rebecca
Madame Bovary
Pride and Prejudice
Wuthering Heights
and a toss up between Emma & Jane Eyre

Jamaica Inn

Brave New World

The Barchester Chronicles

In no special order:

Pride and Prejudice
Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre
Emma
Bleak House
Great Expectations
Grapes of Wrath

Are we allowed plays too?

If so:

A Streetcar Named Desire "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers" [blub]
All My Sons/A View from the Bridge/The Crucible
All of Shakespeare's tragedies - particularly Hamlet and Macbeth

East Of Eden is my absolute favourite. Not sure it qualifies as a classic though.

In no particular order:

Great Expectations
Little Women
Rebecca
Not sure if this qualifies as a classic but The Handmaid's Tale - love love love Margaret Atwood.

Also love The Secret History thepeanutsparent but I've only read it once - plan to do so again soon.

Middlemarch and Wuthering Heights and Mansfield Park

Parade's End, and The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford

The Cloister & the Hearth - Charles Reade
Lilith - George MacDonald

Most favourite: Vanity Fair.

The Woman in White is my favourite classic novel. The Moonstone, also by Wilkie Collins, is pretty fab too. Rebecca is a second favourite and I only just read Jamaica Inn (also by Daphne du Maurier) and will be re-reading again soon.

Have read Austen and Brontë books and enjoyed them, but not as much as the above. With the excpetion of Anne Brontë's Tenant of Wildfell Hall. LOVED that one.

Rebecca by DDM - have lost count of the number of times I have read it.

A Room With a View