The good folk over at The Classics Club are doing a great job of encouraging readers to seek out those books we might call ‘classical literature’ and give them a go. There are plenty of Books to Read Before You Die compilations out there but with all that wonderful new stuff being published all the time, it’s easy to forget about the ones we collect at church fairs with good intentions of crossing them off the list.

The good ones never really go away and publishers such as Penguin with their orange series, Virago’s Modern Classics (Hachette) and Persephone Books bring out lovely new editions that can be addictively collectible – to say nothing of public libraries. The Classics Club offers a chance to keep them on your radar with online discussion and sharing part of the deal. But first you have to make a list.
I confess my list is roughly thrown together and in no particular order. I have included a mix of books that are obvious classics and quite a few from early to mid 20th century women authors – a particular interest of mine. There are some I’ve read before and want to read again to see if I still like them. Tweaking and adding to the list is also a possibility. This is what I’ve come up with so far:

- Sanditon by Jane Austen
- Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte
- North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
- Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth Von Arnim
- Kim by Rudyard Kipling
- The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West
- My Antonia by Willa Cather
- The Happy Foreigner by Enid Bagnold
- Open the Door by Catherine Carswell
- Pomfrett Towers by Angela Thirkell
- Diary of a Provincial Lady by E M Delafield
- Frost in May by Antonia White
- Company Parade by Storm Jameson
- Full House by M J Farrell (Molly Keane)
- The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann
- Silas Marner by George Eliot
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
- The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
- Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
- The Group by Mary McCarthy
- A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell
- Friends and Relations by Elizabeth Bowen
- The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym
- Victoria Cottage by D E Stevenson
- The Corner that Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner
- The Wings of a Dove by Henry James
- Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Maugham
- The Beat of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
- Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
- Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winnifred Watson
- Justine by Alexander Durrell
- Chéri by Colette
- Harriet Hume by Rebecca West
- The Bell by Iris Murdoch
- Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome
- Round the Bend by Neville Shute
- The Women’s Room by Marilyn French
- The Grass Is Singing by Doris Lessing
- The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
- Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
- We Have Always Lived in a Castle by Shirley Jackson
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Sons and Lovers by D H Lawrence
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- True Grit by Charles Portis
- Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott
- Lorna Done by R D Blackmore
- Watership Down by Richard Adams
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man by Sigfried Sassoon
- Tender Is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
- The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier
- Harriet Said by Beryl Bainbridge
- Nightingale Wood by Stella Gibbons
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
- King Solomon’s Mines by H Rider Haggard
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
- Green Dolphin Country by Elizabeth Goudge
- Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
- Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
- The Foundling by Charlotte Brontë
- The Warden by Anthony Trollope
- Squadron Airborne by Elliston Trevor
- A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor
- The Land of Spices by Kate O’Brien
- Green Hands by Barbara Whitton
- Lotte in Weimar by Thomas Mann
- Stoner by John Williams
- Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
- ‘The Forsythe Saga by John Galsworthy
- A Buyer’s Market by Anthony Powell
- The Acceptance World by Anthony Powell
- At Lady Molly’s by Anthony Powell
- Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant by Anthony Powell
- The Kindly Ones by Anthony Powell
- The Valley of Bones by Anthony Powell
- The Soldier’s Art by Anthony Powell
- The Military Philosophers by Anthony Powell
- Books Do Furnish a Room by Anthony Powell
- Temporary Kings by Anthony Powell
- Hearing Sweet Harmonies by Anthony Powell
- The Doves of Venus by Olivia Manning
- South Riding by Winifred Hotly
- One Pair of Hands by Monica Dickens
- Perfume by Patrick Suskind
- A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle
- Out of Africa by Karen Blixen
- How I live Now by Meg Rosoff
- Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford
- Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves
- Music in the Hills by D E Stevenson
- Susan Settles Down by Molly Clavering
- Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym
- All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville West
- O Pioneer! By Willa Cather
- The Rainy Moon and Other Stories by Colette
- Mandoa, Mandoa! by Winifred Hotly
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
- The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens
- Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
- A Passage to India by E M Forster
- Howard’s End by E M Forster
- A Room with a View by E M Forster
- Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier
- The Harp in the South by Ruth Park
- Station Life in New Zealand by Lady Barker
- Persuasion by Jane Austen
- Emma by Jane Austen
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
- Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
- Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- The Waves by Virginia Woolf
- The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
- Miss Buncle’s Book by D E Stevenson
- The Makings of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple
- Cheerful Weather for a Wedding by Julia Strachey
- Saplings by Noel Streatfield
- At Mrs Lippincote’s by Elizabeth Taylor
- The River by Rumer Goden
- Kingfisher’s Catch Fire by Rumer Goden
- George Beneath a Paper Moon by Nina Bawden
- Crewe Train by Rose Macaulay
- A Woman of My Age by Nina Bawden
- Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky
- Thank You, Jeeves by P G Wodehouse
- Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
- The Nine Taylors by Dorothy L Sayers
- Everything that Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor
- Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
- The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark
- The Garden Party and other stories by Katherine Mansfield
- Nor the Years Condemn by Robin Hyde
- The Godwits Fly by Robin Hyde
- Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stephenson
- The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
- The Shrimp and the Anemone by L P Hartley
- The Sixth Heaven by L P Hartley
- Eustace and Hilda by L P Hartley
Thanks for this exhaustive list!
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