Recommend classics / traditional books please

[DawnChoral]

I‘m enjoying books again, and often follow up on recommendations from here, which are mainly contemporary. Can you help educate me on where to start with non-contemporary books?

I’ve read very few classic, traditional older books, and would like to do so this academic year. Anything from … Shakespeare perhaps … to 20th century must-reads. Where should I start?

preferences (not obligatory):
uplifting (at least, not depressing)
female authors (Austen? Brontë? Elliot?)
female characters
adventure, action, rural, outdoor, women with agency
Likely to be mostly fiction, but could be non-fiction.

I’ll listen to them as audiobooks (I walk a lot for health reasons) so bonus points for good audio editions. I mostly use the library apps, or free on Audible, but do have some Audible credits.

Thank you so much!

I've just binge read the complete works of Elizabeth Gaskell, I love her writing about the social conditions of, and women's role in, Victorian society. And then - a real treat!- the complete works of Jane Austen. I love her wit and powers of observation (she would have got on tremendously with Victoria Wood!), and they are something I didn't read after A level English sucked all the joy out of them! Edith Wharton and Wilkie Collins are great reads too.

In rough chronological order, these are some classics I've loved:

Henry Fielding: Tom Jones
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice (it has never been bettered, though many have tried – Lizzie Bennett is so alive and real it's almost spooky)
Jane Austen: Emma
George Eliot: Adam Bede
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Dickens: David Copperfield (I prefer it to Great Expectations)
Oscar Wilde: Dorian Grey
D H Lawrence: Sons and Lovers
Aldous Huxley: Chrome Yellow and Point Counter Point
Anthony Burgess: Enderby
Evelyn Waugh: Decline and Fall and The Sword of Honour
Virginia Woolf: Orlando
Edward St Aubyn: Melrose novels

If you want a reliable guide to the canon, read some stuff by the critic Harold Bloom. He will point you in the right direction.

The trouble with 'The Canon' is that's very white and male. A good list to partially counter that is the list of 70 books from the Commonwealth generated for the Queen's jubilee: The Big Jubilee Read. Covers 1952 onwards and has many modern classics.

I always recommend Mrs Miniver and anything by Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym or Rosamund Lehrmann.

I love Elizabeth Taylor’s ghost story “Poor Girl” but have never read any of her novels. I tried Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women but couldn’t quite get on with it.

As to good audible readings; dovetailing with the above,

Rebecca read by Anna Massey

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters read by Juliet Stevenson

Again - thank you for such a breadth of recommendations and suggestions.

I’ve started with The Woman in White, and
am about a third of the way through - enjoying the characters so I do hope it ends reasonably well!

Far From the Madding Crowd is the least sad of the books by Thomas Hardy and Bathsheba Everdene is a good, strong character.

Wilkie Collins is one of my favourite authors (as you might guess from my username) and Count Fosco is a wonderful villain!

Jane Eyre! She's a badass. Great book. But avoid Villette, the main character (female) is annoyingly wet imo.

Oh, I tried to use LydiaGwilt as my username on here and was most annoyed someone else had it! She's my favourite Wilkie Collins character.