The Really Long List of Great Literature (cont'd)

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

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

Partway through The Sorrows of Young Werther you might wonder if this is actually a parody of romantic writing. Werther's attachment to his beloved Charlotte, Lotte for short, can come across as a ridiculously over-the-top.... Critique • Quotes • Buy

Most modern collections of Robert Burns's works include poems and songs from throughout his life. You're unlikely to pick up an exact copy of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, his first published collection.... 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

Take "The Frog Prince". It's about a beautiful princess who kisses a frog to turn it into a handsome prince, right? Wrong. The princess is a petulant, promise-breaking brat who tries to get rid of the frog by smashing.... Critique • Quotes • Text • 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

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

Immensee is one of those seemingly simple, short fictional works that can read differently each time you sample it. The story recalled by an old man is more or less the same each time through. A young boy Reinhardt forms a.... Critique • Quotes • 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 great thing about Jules Verne's stories of fantastic voyages is that they don't come across as fantastic. At least while we're reading, we believe we could fly across the world in a balloon, ride a rocket to the moon.... Critique • Quotes • At the movies • Buy

After spending a good part of a summer living in and out of War and Peace, I was dismayed to learn Leo Tolstoy disdained the book in his latter years. The novel, whose title has become shorthand for monumentally.... Critique • Quotes • 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

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

Flatland is a curiosity. This novella, fable, allegory, satire or math lesson—whatever it's supposed to be—is often counted as a classic science fiction work. From a bare description of Flatland, I could see why. A hypothetical.... Critique • Quotes • 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

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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