The Greatest British Literature

It wasn't called Beowulf until 1805 and was not printed till 1815, more than a millennium after its appearance in manuscript. But to early Anglo-Saxons, the slaying of the monster Grendel and Grendel's.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Translations • At the movies • Buy

It can be difficult to read Edward II today as a Christopher Marlow play. One keeps sliding into thinking of it as minor Shakespeare—you know, all those early plays with kings and numerals in their titles. Partly this is a matter of.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Possibly Shakespeare's best-known play. Everyone knows the story of star-crossed lovers who defied their families—the feuding Capulets and Montagues—and ended their lives tragically. Romeo and Juliet is a play with.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

I once read all Shakespeare's historical plays in chronological order. Not in the order he wrote them, but in the order of the historical events they supposedly relate. Like many before me, I discovered that (1) the historical.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Hamlet is such a famous play—so much the great drama, the one that everyone in the world can quote at least six words from—that we usually can't see how strange it is that this should be so. Look at the.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

A straightforward play really, about a dysfunctional family. People thinks it's cosmic because of that annoying storm in the middle. That's not my opinion but the summary of Jonathan Miller, given in a television interview.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

Shakespeare's sonnets have been dissected and speculated upon for profound and hidden meanings for years, but I think the best way into them for a novice is to consider them as Shakespeare having good fun—entertaining himself.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

A favourite play. Not exactly sure why. It doesn't present many of the elements generally admired in drama. No great tragedy. Not much scintillating wit. Little realism. A fantastic plot and several fantasy characters, which.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

Perhaps the most shocking thing about 'Tis Pity She's a Whore is that it still shocks. John Ford's plays were written in a period of increasingly scandalous theatre. After Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Your first go at The Country Wife may leave you mystified. Especially mixed up over all the criss-crossing plots involving characters who can scarcely be told apart. They're all randy, witticism-spouting, wealthy layabouts.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Aphra Behn's most famous work might disappoint a reader who has heard it's a staunchly anti-slavery, anti-colonialist or feminist work. One may find Oroonoko is none of those things, at least by modern standards.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

I'm not sure why The Rape of the Lock is Alexander Pope's most famous poem. I understand why it might have been popular in its day. It satirizes an incident that was infamous in a certain aristocratic crowd.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

The biggest mystery about Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe may be why it is so well known, so fondly remembered, so enshrined in our culture. As novels go, this is one dreadful piece of work. The writing is.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

It's often called the first modern novel. Or, worse, a post-modern novel written before the modern had been invented. Which ought to turn off anyone looking for a good read. So here's the story of Laurence Sterne's.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto is one of those "classic" works that is better known for its impact in its time that for its subsequent readability. It's more influential than admired. In fact, any reader today is likely.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

The Vicar of Wakefield is supposed to be a satire, an ever gentle one in which the wide-eyed trust and peiety of the good pastor leave him at the mercy of larcenous rascals, until they have stripped him clean of everything.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Two things keep me from dismissing the drama She Stoops to Conquer as severely overrated. One: I don't recall seeing it performed. Live on stage it may be hilarious for all I know. And two: if it's overrated, it's been long.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

In the dichotomy suggested in the title, Jane Austen in her first published work comes down conclusively on the side of sense over sensibility. It's supposed to be a study of two marriageable sisters with the eldest.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Pride and Prejudice has one of the most skilful beginnings in literature. It opens of course with that famous "truth universally acknowledged" about single men and fortunes—and its equally delicious corollary.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

If you're a Jane Austen aficionado, particularly loving her headstrong heroines picking their plucky but principled way through the constricting marriage plots of the time, Mansfield Park may come as.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

If you're not a Jane Austen admirer, Emma could be her novel you most despise. But if you are a fan, Emma is likely the one you most think shows how adept a writer she was. Austen set out in the last of the works.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Northanger Abbey is the satire on popular literature Jane Austen had to write before she could get down to creating her own classics. It often happens in a first novel an author is driven to imitate and have fun with the work.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It starts with an evening not at all dark or stormy, something like an ancient Greek dialogue actually—two friends meeting and discussing their dining plans. But already the signs of bad writing are evident. And it's all.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Oliver Twist may be the novel most publicly associated with Dickens, though it's not nearly his best nor his most admired. It may also be the first major novel to feature a child as the central character, which.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

Nicholas Nickleby is Charles Dickens still trying to work out how to sustain a novel. It's usually classified as his third novel, coming hard on the heels of the sketchy Pickwick Papers and the diversely stitched together.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

Everyone knows the story of A Christmas Carol, if not from reading Charles Dickens, then from incessant showings of the many film versions, especially at the holiday season. And everyone thinks they know the moral.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

Charlotte Brontë's narrator and protagonist, like many a youthful Dickens protagonist, is the epitome of spunk. But Jane Eyre is also female, a young girl to begin with and a young woman for much of the novel.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

For a few, Villette is Charlotte Brontë's big book—not just the longest of her four novels, but the most realistic, most interesting and most progressive. I fully understand this. There are times reading Villette I have to.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

What's to like about Hard Times: A lot. It's short, for a Dickens novel. It's accessible—anyone can read it without a great deal of learning and without getting lost in convoluted descriptions. It's vivid—the characters are.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

You could make a case for every Charles Dickens novel being atypical in some way, but Little Dorrit really is a special case. It's been called his most political novel—the book George Bernard Shaw said converted him.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

It's the most political of Charles Dickens's novels, it's the least political—even anti-political—of Dickens's novels in some ways. But its positions on politics, revolution, mob rule, democracy and reformism has tended to.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

In the argument about whether The Woman in White or The Moonstone is Wilkie Collins's first great mystery novel—and thus arguably the first great mystery novel ever—a compromise is generally found.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

The greatest expectation to be quashed in Great Expectations may be our assumption that the innocent lad at the centre of the story will turn out to be another David Copperfield or Oliver.... Critique • Other views • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

The Moonstone is sometimes presented as the first great mystery novel. It wasn't the first of its kind though. Wilkie Collins's own The Woman in White eight years earlier featured a mystery and a crime-solving detective.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

It's an irony of sorts that Edward Bulwer-Lytton's most influential book may be his last, one of his shortest, written in a genre different from everything else he had done to that point, and not even published under his own.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

I'm not sure we should even call Erewhon a novel. If it is one, it's a novel of ideas. Not like, say, one of Aldous Huxley's novels of ideas though. Great ideas don't play out among characters or decide the plot. In Butler's.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

Far from the Madding Crowd was Hardy's first great novel and the one that made his reputation. It also might be the only real crowd-pleaser among his great works. For it not only has tragedy, intrigue, betrayal, obsession.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

No one needs to be told what Treasure Island is about. Robert Louis Stevenson's novel has defined the pirate story, not to mention the treasure-hunting story, the mutiny-on-the-seas story—and.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

I don't know whether it's still being taught to teens but The Mayor of Casterbridge turned me off Thomas Hardy for many years after studying it in high school. Too melodramatic, too full of ridiculous coincidences and.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

When we're talking about Arthur Conan Doyle's contribution to detective literature, we really mean the entire oeuvre of fifty-six Sherlock Holmes stories, plus four Holmes novels. But if you're looking for a.... Critique • Quotes • Text • At the movies • Buy

Jude the Obscure is the novel whose reception, coming five years after the similar scandal of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, is famous for leading Hardy to quit writing novels. The book was widely denounced as "Jude the Obscene".... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Lord Jim is one of the Joseph Conrad novels that has me thinking at times "This may be the best writing I've ever read" and at other times "Come on, get on with it, would you?" Part of this ambivalence can be put down to... Critique • Quotes • Buy

If Rudyard Kipling were to publish his most acclaimed novel today, he would likely face more than the usual charges of colonialism and imperialism that have been levelled at him through much of the twentieth century.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

You think you know Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness even if you haven't read it in years, or ever. It's been widely taught in school, so its most famous lines ring with musty familiarity. Its plot has been adapted for.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Samuel Butler never published The Way of All Flesh in his lifetime, being unsatisfied with it. I can understand why he might have wanted to rework it. The story is skimpy, again being sandwiched among pages and chapters.... Critique • Quotes • Text • Buy

It is difficult to separate The Forsyte Saga from the justly acclaimed films and television series based on it. The adaptations have enchanted everyone who followed them, most of whom have likely never read the books. But.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

With a few exceptions, I dislike the kind of horror and fantasy that's in your face—tales that start with incredible, supernatural phenomena and then keep building on it, getting wilder and wilder. It just seems...well.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

All the important elements of Eliot's longer, more difficult poem The Waste Land are in "The Hollow Men". The view of this world as insubstantial, a realm for the living dead. The attempts to revive religious concepts, to offer.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

This novel hasn't a single character one is likely to care about. Normally this would be the death knell for a piece of fiction. But somehow To the Lighthouse won immediate acclaim upon publication in 1925 and has ever since.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

I wonder if people who refer to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World as a cautionary tale—that is, those who aren't confusing it with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four—could actually spell out what it is cautioning against.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

A lot of mystery novels don't stand up to repeated readings. Makes sense. Once you know the ending—once the mystery has been solved—the tension in the slow buildup to the conclusion is dissipated. Plot holes.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

British mystery authors like to place their imagined crimes in the hallowed halls of distinguished universities. Maybe they hope uncovering wickedness in the English and classics departments distinguishes their.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Why critics think Eyeless in Gaza is Aldous Huxley's greatest novel: It's very long. It's his most difficult novel, using a fractured timeline, so we follow several narratives that occur during Anthony Beavis's life almost simultaneously and.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Let's deal with the religious aspect of the Narnia works right off the top. The idea that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) and its successive novels present a Christian allegory is raised by both detractors and.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

The biggest obstacle to properly appreciating The Quiet American as a novel may be Graham Greene's uncanny political prescience. In the 1950s, when Vietnam wasn't yet on the radar for most Western readers, when U.S.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

If The Crystal World were a typical science fiction novel about an impending global disaster, it'd have scientists and military heroes working against the clock trying to stop the apocalypse. In J.G. Ballard's world.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Sometimes it seems the English-speaking world spent the entire twentieth century trying to shake off the repressions of the Victorian era. The rebellious 1960s, for example, may have prided themselves on rejecting.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

To get an idea of what the Hitchhiker's Trilogy is like, you have only to read the titles of the five novels that comprise it: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

It may seem odd an acclaimed series of novels near the end of the twentieth century should feature characters from the period of the First World War. Or that issues from that war time should continue to resonate with.... Critique • Quotes • Buy