Recommendations for 15 year old girl who has enjoyed Jane Austen and Jane Eyre

[OrangeBlossomsinthesun]

Can you suggest some books for my 15 yo DD? She has read Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights and is now about to start Jane Eyre.

Sense and Sensibility? Other authors?
Is Anne of Green Gables too young for her?

She would be reading them in translation in Spanish so nothing too obscure.

The Woman in White isn’t a ghost story!

Has anyone suggested
The Mill on the Floss by George Elliot? And also Silas Marner by her.

Yep! Dickens was my next stop post Austen and Brontes as a teen 😅

Aw she sounds like me at that age! She’s going to love Jane Eyre, I bet! Hard to beat that one but I think she would also like the Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë. Definitely Austen’s Sense and sensibility and Emma. She would probably love To Kill a Mockingbird, too. The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy? Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck is short and easy to read with a powerful message. Don’t scare her off with too much Dickens, they’re a hard read.

Forever Amber is a good shout by a pp. Also The Three Muskateers and Frankenstein. Yy To Kill A Mockingbird!

Lorna Doone
Tess of the D’urbevilles

Anthony Trollope (Barchester Towers etc) and EM Forster (A Room With A View, Howards End etc) for sure! But also, if she has enjoyed Pride and Prejudice, has she seen the new BBC series - The Other Bennett Sister? It's GREAT - focuses on Mary Bennett, the "bookish" one. I wasn't expecting to like it so much! Available on bbc iplayer.

I enjoyed John Steinbeck - has she read 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'?

For Whom The Bell Tolls is by Hemingway, not Steinbeck.

There’s already lots of good suggestions on this thread - I’m not a big fan of Jane Austen myself, but I would definitely suggest Northanger Abbey, particularly if she’s also reading some more gothic classics like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Woman in White etc because Northanger Abbey has lots of amusing references in it to that kind of fiction.

In addition to all the good suggestions of the other Brontes, Dickens, Mrs Gaskell etc, I would add Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier. It gets overlooked a bit these days in favour or Rebecca (and Rebecca is indeed brilliant) but Jamaica Inn is really good and has a young female protagonist living in the isolated Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor with her shady aunt and uncle, realising that some highly illegal things are going on and getting mixed up in murder, smuggling and all sorts. Also it has a very attractive, roguish love interest.

PH Wodehouse's short stories are very accessible and humorous - 'Carry on, Jeeves' and 'The Inimitable Jeeves'
As she enjoys Jane Austen, Barbara Pym would be worth a look - 'Excellent Women', 'Quartet in Autumn' and 'The Sweet Dove Died' - a very English sensibility and finely observed unassuming lives
At 15, I fully embraced D H Lawrence, having bought three volume of his short stories in a jumble sale. I quickly moved on to 'Sons and Lovers', 'The Rainbow', Women in Love' and 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'. Lawrence has fallen out of fashion but has a lot to offer, in my view - the relationship between men and women and gender roles, the tension between the natural world and industrialisation, the impact of social class, the increasing independence of women
Katherine Mansfield's short stories are distinctive if she enjoys short stories
Nancy Mitford's 'Love in a Cold Climate' and 'The Pursuit of Love' offer diversion of an eccentric kind
Margaret Mitchell's 'Gone With The Wind' - very long but straightforward narration which is accessible for a 15-year old
Muriel Spark 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie', 'Girls of Slender Means', 'Girls in their Married Bliss' - short and mostly cheerful
Penelope Fitzgerald - 'The Bookshop' and 'Offshore' would be a good way in, both short and depicting two quite distinctive worlds
She might enjoy Bernadine Everisto's 'Girl, Woman, Other' - crammed with intriguing characters and offering snapshots of the different lives women were able to live from the 1980s onwards

Oh gosh, yes! All the PG Wodehouse novels, particularly the Jeeves and Wooster ones - so funny and very well-written.

Lady Audley’s Secret, by Mary Elizabeth Brandon. It’s available in Spanish.

I started on the Agatha Christies at this stage. Short and gripping to break up some of the larger and heavier classics up thread.

The Poldark novels by Winston Graham.

For Whom The Bell Tolls is by Hemingway, not Steinbeck.

Argh of course Sorry!

Has she read all of the little women series? My daughter reads through the whole series on repeat.

The woman in white is great, I loved that book.

I also remember loving The Great Gatsby as a teenager.

Im reading the Anne of Green Gables series now and im late 40s so she’s definitely not too old 😉😂

Yes, read them all at her age and watched the tv series about 20,000 times hahahaha.

Although maybe I was a bit younger, hence asking what people thought. I did love them though.

I have sent her all the suggestions I can find in translation and she's going to make a list. The only one I couldn't find so far as available in Spanish in Spain was A Town Called Alice.

Frankenstein

Many of my suggestions have already been said so the only one I’m going to add is Gone with the Wind. ( it’s a big old chunky thing - my mother recommended it and I was dubious but I loved it ).

My daughter is 13 and she didn't like the later ones as Anne is older - so depends on the teenager really. I still like them as an adult so worth trying for sure. Can get the whole series on kindle.

Lots of great suggestions. Slightly different, but after I had read a lot of Brontë and Austen the same age, I started reading more modern classics - Orwell, Wyndham, Margaret Atwood Cat’s Eye and the Handmaids Tale. Fay Weldon - Loves and Lives of the She Devil, Margaret Drabble, Lynne Reid Banks - the L
Shaped Room, Sylvia Plath - the Bell Jar. Not very cheering, but continued to develop my feminist principles! For light reading in between these, I enjoyed the children’s classics - The Railway Children, the What Katy did books, Pollyanna, A Little Princess. For
some reason, I didn’t get into Anne of Green Gables or Little Women. Oh and the children’s modern classics - Joan Aitken, Helen Cresswell, Alan Garner, Nina Bawden, Charlotte Sometimes etc - these were all books i happily reread and still do now.

Lovely that she is enjoying literature so much!

Good call @CatherineCawoodsbestie - I remember reading lots of Wyndham, Atwood and Agatha Christie in my middle teens. Wodehouse as well.

And Georgette Heyer's Regencies are perfect - Cotillion, Venetia, Frederica or The Grand Sophy would be my suggestions for entry into that world.

Some great suggestions on this thread. I’ve just remembered Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde. We read this at school when I was 14 and we were all gripped.