Best of the classics

[ThumbTowers]

I have a big birthday coming up and plan to ask friends/family for a classic book in hardback from each so that they can write a little message inside for me to keep. My favourite book is Wuthering Heights, so I have asked for that already. What else can I ask for? I don't like books that are very long, or horribly sad/depressing, so that probably rules a few out. Was think of Great Expectations perhaps, as another one.....

Sherlock Holmes stories?

Dracula is fairly short

I’ve just read a couple of lovely ones with happy endings - Dr Thorne by Trollope, and Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. The way we live now by Trollope is WONDERFUL but quite long so fails one of your qualifications- has a happy ending (mostly) though!

Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice and Emma are my favourites. Have a look at the lovely clothbound editions
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/55905/pride-and-prejudice-by-austen-jane/9780141040349

Wilde’s Dorian Gray
Jane Austen’s Emma
D H Lawrence’s Sons and Lover's
Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

Jane Eyre, Brideshead Revisted, and The Great Gatsby also spring to mind.

Persuasion by Jane Austen is very good.
The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton
Middlemarch by George Elliott is excellent but is long.
And this is going to sound very pretentious but War and Peace by Tolstoy is actually a crackingly good story. The edition I had was two separate paperback volumes so was easier to physically handle.

And Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South.

Howard’s End by E.M.Forster
Any Thomas Hardy eg Far From the Madding Crowd or Tess of the D’Urbevilles.
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome ( a classic that’s funny)
Dickens, of course. The Pickwick Papers or Bleak House….so many to choose from.
The Tennant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, & Jane Eyre of course by Charlotte

Not Tess, if you don't like anything too depressing!

Definitely Persuasion!

The Mill on the Floss?

What about a Shakespeare, one of the comedies? Or poetry?

20th century fiction or non British authors?

To kill a mockingbird, Madame Bovary (maybe a bit depressing), Hilary Mantel?

Just as a caveat for the OP, The Buccaneers is unfinished, though — a couple of modern authors have written endings based on Wharton’s notes, I think the most well known by Marion Mainwaring.

Maybe The Age of Innocence or The Custom of the Country instead, as The House of Mirth and Ethan From, while brilliant, are grim.

I’d add Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, and in the 20th Wool’s To the Lighthouse, Forster’s Howard’s End, Jean Rhys’ Good Morning Midnight, Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows trilogy and Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris.

Vanity Fair by Thackeray.

Thank you all. I've got a lovely list that I am dishing out to family and friends now. I'm really looking forward to receiving them and displaying them on my bookcase (if I can find the room!). I've gone for the Penguin clothbound classics mentioned by a pp, as I've seen these before and they look so pretty. My only concern is that reviews suggest the cover designs on the books wear with even a little handling. Not a huge problem as the books will be keepsakes for display and will probably only be read once. I also quite like the old, worn look. But at the same time, I don't want them to disintegrate to just plain covers! I think I will create a separate post to ask if anyone has found a way of protecting them, a spray or something. Thanks again!

Vanity Fair and Villette are both great reads.

For less well known but beautiful books you could also look at Persephone books.
https://persephonebooks.co.uk/

Good Morning Midnight is one of my favourite books but, my god, it's depressing.

Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’ and ‘My Cousin Rachel’ are classics, I reckon.

So many classics are a bit depressing! My favourites are House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, Brideshead Revisted ny Evelyn Waugh, and Anna Karenina, which is both long and depressing but beautiful

My absolute favourite though is Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Madame Bovary.

Hi

Can I just add that Audible have Brideshead Revisited read by Jeremy Irons, and it is hands down the most beautiful thing I have listened to!

Yes, Vanity Fair is underrated. It’s one of the great forgotten 19th-century novels. For some reason, it has always been overshadowed by Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice, and Middlemarch.

This is a good thread as my New Year’s resolution is to read at least 12 classics by the end of the year.
Have just read Brideshead and am now on Mrs Dalloway.
Planning Catcher in the Rye, War and Peace, Anna K, , Turn of the Screw, Pride and P and The Prince -Machievlli. I will also do a few translations of Latin and Greek text

I don't think Vanity Fair is at all unjustly forgotten. It's read, taught, adapted, still very much canonical etc. I think it suffers now by comparison to the other great 19thc novels you list because it features a complex female central character who is, nonetheless, still filtered through a 19thc male author's biases and prejudices. Becky is a groundbreaking anti-heroine in many ways, sure, but she's still a scheming villainess on the make, which means she must therefore be an awful wife and a terrible mother, as well as war profiteering and planning, on the even of the Battle of Waterloo to become the mistress of one of Napoleons marshals if he wins!

It suffers from a less pernicious version of what so often limits Dickens' novels -- his very Victorian version of the virgin/whore dichotomy.

I do think also that WH, JE and several JA novels are in part popular because they are misread, or their ambiguities are tidied away in popular adaptations. WH is often mistaken for a romance, only a fairly naive reader of JE would think that the heroine is going to happy or safe with a former employer who preyed on his penniless teenage employee and locked up his previous wife, and too many readers don't see that P and P is as much about economics as romantic relationships, and that in fact Lizzy makes exactly the same bargain as Charlotte Lucas in marrying an unpleasant man to make a comfortable establishment for herself. She only bags a higher quality chap because she's younger and prettier than Charlotte.

That’s a really interesting post. Couple of quick thoughts:

I’m not sure Lizzie is quite so mercenary as all that. The ending of P&P is deeply moving because it is a glimpse of a happy marriage. We are told that Lizzie teases d’Arcy, and in that one sentence we see it all. We see the marriage. We know they are happy, and that d’Arcy loves her deeply and that she knows he loves her. As we all know from real life, marriages that seem doomed, or mismatched, often flourish, while perfect romances so often turn sour. Somehow, their marriage has a ring of truth to it. I feel the same about the Macbeths. Harold Bloom once said that it was one of the happiest marriages in Shakespeare, even though it descends into nightmare. George Orwell said the same.

Dickens is often accused of the virgin-whore thing. It’s true that he creates these nauseating sexless dolls (like Agnes in DC). But I have faith in the test of time. Dickens would not have lasted, nor been admired by so many first class minds (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Aldous Huxley and Nabokov all revered him), if his writing was so flawed. Agnes may be sickly, but in the same novel you have David’s aunt, who is one of the most striking and vivid characters in all literature. She is a feminist hero - strong, brave, independent and self-reliant. Read the scene in which she stands up to Murdstone and then tell me Dickens could only create virgins or whores (I know that’s not what you’re saying). If I ran a class on feminism, I’d open with a reading of that scene.

Frankenstein is a cracking read, i couldn't put it down when I had to read it at university, plus it's written by a woman (Mary Shelley) and its genesis is fascinating. I'd second any Jane Austen bok as well. Her books are unexpectedly funny at times which surprised me. I've never managed to get through any Dickens but I should probably keep trying. They're timeless stories but there's something about the way their written that I find impenetrable.

I don't think anyone's mentioned Robinson Crusoe yet?

Wives and Daughters by Mrs G.
Tristram Shandy,
Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett (but depressing)
Anna Karenina (ditto)

Cranford. Is a lovely read