How to get started reading English literature.
An introductory syllabus.
Today I am republishing an introductory syllabus that was originally published on ’s excellent website syllabi.directory, which says this about itself:
This is a starter collection of syllabi compiled by experts, aimed at helping you get quickly oriented to their area of expertise. Across syllabi, two things are constant:
Readme. An introduction to the topic from the author. Why study this? What are some of the big questions? How does one study this?
In ~5 hours. How should someone spend their first ~5 hours to get a feel for the topic?
If you have ideas for other syllabi you’d like to exist, get in touch.
There are also syllabi about cities, housing supply, and clinical trials.
Contents
(I am going to include links to each section, but I will edit that once this is published, so you need to read it online, not in email. It is unworkable with the current Substack editing tools.)
In the original, there is one book I have not read (Mortimer Adler), but which is well regarded, and one that is well regarded but that I do not love, which is Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity. I removed those in this version.
Readme
Why read great literature?
Great literature is the heart of a civilization. When we think of the Greeks, we think of Homer and Sophocles, of the Romans, Virgil and Seneca. Dante was Italy’s greatest flourishing, and Shakespeare England’s. These works might be representative of a set of core beliefs or ideas, but they are also extraordinary aesthetic achievements. They record aspects of a society, but they also give them an intensity of expression that has lasting power in the world. Many versions of Romeo & Juliet were played in the London theatres before Shakespeare’s — but it was his words that remained with audiences so unforgettably.
This all points to several of the reasons why literature has been valued. First, is enjoyment. The heart asks pleasure first, as Emily Dickinson said. Second is beauty. Literature is not just story: it is the best that has been thought and said. It is the finest writing in the language. Finally there are ideas. Literature is a particular form of expression for thought, emotion, and experience that isn’t matched in any other discipline. In literature ideas are alive, they walk and talk amongst the mess of the real world, or they follow the cognitive flow of an individual writer. The image of the Western canon, as Harold Bloom said, is of the individual at thought.
Humans pay much more attention to stories than to data. The pictures of life that great artists can give us, as the novelist George Eliot said, provide the raw material for moral sentiment. It is in the imagination that we turn the disorganized data of the world into something structured, something understood.
Some people will tell you literature is more about some of these things than others—that it transmits moral values, expresses emotions, or is primarily about beauty. But the wonder of literature is that it is all these things and more. Literature is heightened life, as broad and deep and varied as human society. There is a poem for almost everything, even laundry day.
Although this page will give an overview of some of the major works of the Western Canon, it will largely deal with English Literature. This is because it otherwise becomes too vast a subject, and because, when you are starting out, reading in your own language is the best idea. It means you will struggle less to fit your imagination to a new context, a new way of thinking, strange uses of language and so forth. But this page shows you some important roots of English literature and offers recommended reading from other parts of the Western Canon too.
What do we mean by literature? What’s the taxonomy/map/mental model for organizing it all?
General principles
Literature largely means works of the imagination, but it also includes well-written non-fiction genres like essays and biographies. There was a time when literature was a much broader term and would have included works of philosophy and other areas of thought—and sometimes we still do call works like Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution literature because it is written so beautifully.
The three main imaginative genres are: poetry, drama, fiction. Within that are many variations from comic (ends in a resolution, like marriage) to tragic (ends in death or catastrophe), from mythic (things not of this world) to realistic (it feels like real life). Literature can be thought of like biology, a vast ecosystem, much of which has not survived and some of which has become hugely influential upon later works. The most significant non-fiction genre of literature is literary criticism.
The best works of literature from all ages form the canon. This is a consensus list of the most accomplished works. There are many disputes about what should and should not be included in the canon. The main objection to the canon is that it is too male and too white. In recent years, lots of work has been done to add the works of African American writers to the canon, for example, to focus more on women’s writing in history, and to introduce people to literature from other cultures. This has led to a more catholic view of great literature and introduced readers to many excellent works.
But for the beginner, these debates are largely a distraction. Why dispute what the canon is before you have read some of it? The important thing is to read great works, and to sample different things, so that you can find a way into appreciating literature. Remember, Ars longa, vita brevis.
I do not recommend this as a starting point, but if you want to read one book that introduces the canon, try The Western Canon by Harold Bloom. The writer Naomi Kanakia writes well about the Great Books (not just the great Western Books) and Tanner Grier has made lists of the Great Books of Eastern cultures.
What I am going to outline here is a basic spine of mostly English Literature, from which you can branch out in the next section to works that appeal to you.
I strongly recommend that you find a copy of The Apple and the Spectroscope by T.R Henn as one of your starting points. It is a short book, written as a series of lectures requested by science students at Cambridge in 1951 to introduce them to poetry. It is the best introduction to poetry for smart people that I know of.
Make liberal use of anthologies. The Poetry Foundation website is invaluable. Wherever possible you must listen to the poets reading their own work, which you can do on Poetry Archive.
Ancient poetry
Much of this work is foundational to the literature that comes after it, both as a matter of content—the stories later writers told—and as a storehouse of images, ideas, and influence. These works were all read by the important English poets. At some point, you have to read Homer, just as you have to read Plato.
To begin with, there were epics. The Iliad and The Odyssey in Greece, stories of which were turned into tragedies by the Greek tragedians Aeschlyus, Sophocles, and Euripedes. The epics also contained much myth, short stories of Gods and their exploits. In Rome, the epic was the Aeneid and many myths were collated and rewritten by Ovid in the Metamorphosis.
There were other forms of poetry, such as the lyric, a form of short, individual writing about personal thought and feeling. The ancients also wrote satires, such as the work of Horace or Catullus, as well as other genres like elegy, pastoral, and odes.
Medieval English poetry
In fourteenth century Italy, Dante wrote a new sort of epic, The Divine Comedy. The Middle Ages was a great period for narrative poetry and tales, epitomised by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which was influenced by Boccachio, another Italian writer. The narrative myths of England (and often of French literature) were the Arthurian Legends, collected and rewritten by Thomas Malory in Le Morte D’Arthur, and epitomised in the splendid quest narrative Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Tales of heightened reality are often called Romances.
Chaucer, who died in 1400, was known as the “Father of English poetry” because his vast output not only brought so much influence from Italy and other cultures to England, but he also invented the iambic pentameter. This is the basis of English verse, and was used by Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, who, along with Chaucer, are the centrally important English poets.
Shakespeare and Milton
Shakespeare is perhaps the most important writer of all in the Western Canon. He wrote comedy, tragedy, history, romance, and problem plays, and re-invented each genre. His poetry and prose are unmatched for their versatility and excellence. He was a bestseller in his own time, on the stage and the page, and has been popular ever since. He wrote primarily in the 1590s and 1600s, a time of great flourishing in English poetry, with writers like Donne and Sydney.
In the later seventeenth century, Milton wrote the great English epic Paradise Lost. Milton is the most learned English poet, who worked the iambic pentameter (sometimes known as the heroic line) into a grand style. Whereas Shakespeare wrote about all of life from the throne room to the brothel, Milton wrote to “justify the ways of God to man and drew on unparalleled learning in Greek and Roman literature, as well as the influence of Shakespeare and other poets like Edmund Spenser (another Elizabethan).
Romanticism and Modernism
The next great innovation in English poetry came from Wordsworth who, rather than writing about God, wrote in the ordinary speech of common people. The Lyrical Ballads might be the most radical work of poetry published in English and marked a new era, one in which we still live, of Romanticism.
The last major stage of English verse was the creation of modernism, marked by works like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, written slightly more than a century after Wordsworth.
English fiction
The great age of the English novel begins in the eighteenth century, with the works of Fielding and Richardson. But the novel as we know it today really begins with Jane Austen, whose work was published in the 1810s. They are all splendid, but Emma is a significant moment of invention, creating narrative techniques that defined the later works of major writers. Austen’s innovation is called free indirect style.
The most popular nineteenth century novelist is Charles Dickens, whose powers of imagination are enormous, and whose large, dark, comedic books are some of the most significant works of English Literature.
George Eliot was England’s most intellectual novelist, who perfected Austen’s art of realism, that is, showing us life as it really happens, unlike Dickens’ heightened and distorted world.
After Darwin (1859), fiction became darkly deterministic, as exemplified in the work of Thomas Hardy. And with the advent of psychology, fiction was well placed to explore the inner life, as in Henry James.
The modernist novel in English was invented by writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield.
English Drama
Commonly held to be a less fruitful medium, English Literature nonetheless has produced a string of exceptional playwrights: Shakespeare, Sheridan, Shaw, Stoppard are the four central writers.
How do all of these lists hang together?
Literature is often chronological and influential. Dante is the beginning of European poetry, and he influenced Chaucer. Chaucer became the father of English poetry and influenced everyone, including Shakespeare, who became the centre of the canon and the major influence on all subsequent English poetry. Similarly, no-one escapes the influence of the Bible. No-one.
However, you can read a Dickens novel or a Dickinson poem right now, without knowing all of that. And that is probably the best way to start. Find things you like and work your way out from there. This syllabus is a spine for you to work from, not a list you must take in order (though you can do that if you want to). This interview with Emily Wilson gives you a good introduction to the way Homer influenced later writers, for example.
How does one read great literature?
Samuel Johnson. “A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.”
The basic aim is to find books you don’t want to put down—but also to become a reader capable of reading books currently outside your scope of interest and capability. In both cases, having someone to talk to is useful—this might involve being part of a reading club on or off line, being part of a community on a blog, having a literary friend or colleague, setting up a reading group on a forum like InterIntellect… there are lots of ways. What matters most is having someone to share your sorrows with when you read The Mill on the Floss. (Oh Maggie! Poor, poor Maggie!)
Once you have read a classic book it also helps to read some literary criticism to give you context and help you understand it more fully. But, finding the right criticism is hard. So make sure you get an edition with a good introduction and notes. Norton Critical Editions are excellent, as are Oxford and Penguin Classics. I have made a series of financially unadvisable life choices that mean I can spend my days roaming a library reading the works of Northrop Frye and John Bayley. You may not want to do that. If so, take advantage of critical editions. And find good articles online.
Syllabus
In ~5 hours
In five hours, all you can do is to get a sense of where to begin. Art is long, said Horace, life short. So, your reading here should make use of the explore/exploit dynamic. Read anthologies. Read books that introduce you to the basic principles of understanding literature. Sample widely so that you can find a good entry point. I am going to recommend a series of different ways for you to get started. Follow your instincts. And remember: we live in a benighted age that thinks “storytelling” is a high art. But poetry is the heart of literature. What we most justly love in great literature is language, character, pleasure, beauty, truth, imagination, and the promulgation of virtue. Storytelling is an important aspect of literature, but it is given far too much prominence in modern culture.
Introduction to poetry
Poetry is the most intense, concise, and vivid literary art. It expresses everything from moods to philosophies. There are many ways to begin, but I recommend these two excellent books.
Oxford Book of English Verse, ed. Ricks (browse to find what you enjoy; the Introduction is excellent)
The Apple and the Spectroscope, T.R. Henn
The first is an anthology that takes you through several centuries of English verse, in which you will surely find something that you love. The best poetry is once read, always remembered. Short lyrics by Shelley were what did it for me when I was young (“Music when sweet voices die vibrates in the memory”), but it will vary for everyone. The second is a very short book, a set of lectures arranged by a literature academic after a group of mid-century science students at Cambridge University requested some introductory instruction. It will teach you more in a few dozen pages than most other books could manage in a dozen volumes.
Here are some other anthology suggestions, in case you want to try something more specific (including a couple of non-English options).
Penguin Book of Prose Poems
Staying Alive (modern poetry)
Elizabethan Poetry ed. Edward Lucie Smith (This is a personal favourite of mine)
Haiku by Robert Hass
The Rattle Bag ed. by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes
One Hundred Poems from the Japanese, Kenneth Rexroth
Any of the Oxford anthologies are worth reading (not just the various eras of poetry, but the Book of Prose, the Book of Essays, etc.) As are the Norton Anthologies for American literature. There is a Norton anthology of world literature too.
Introduction to short fiction
Some of you will simply want to begin with a short novel or two, preferably from the last two hundred years. Again, the best thing is probably to read the Oxford Book of English Short Stories (edited by A.S. Byatt, a truly splendid collection.) But here is a list of books that are ~200 pages, any of which would make a very good starting point for reading literary fiction. Pick one or two. Again, some non-English options are included here.
Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower
Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Barbara Comyns, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Arto Paasilinna, The Howling Miller
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
E.M. Forster, Room with a View
Henry James, Washington Square
Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich
George Eliot, Silas Marner
Trollop, The Warden
Dostoevsky, The Double
Introduction to canonical literature
I do not suggest most people begin with these sorts of books. After all, the aim is to read literature, not books about literature! But if this is what you want, this book is commonly regarded as useful, informative, and enjoyably provocative.
The Western Canon, by Harold Bloom (also How to Read and Why)
With more time ~50 hours
In fifty hours you of course can’t go through everything, so you’ll have to pick one of a few strategies. First, you could sample from each of the sections below, or pick a category and read in more depth. The amount of time each of the categories takes varies a lot. What I tried to do is give you lists that give you starting points, depending on your preferences. For each, I’ve included a few companion readers I think are especially helpful in understanding the genre.
In the introduction I said that the three main imaginative genres are: poetry, drama, fiction. The various reading lists here are arranged around those categories. Shakespeare gets his own section because he’s the core of the canon (and he counts in more than one genre…) So you will find categories of: Shakespeare, Bible, Drama, Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction, and within those some sub-categories split out by period or genre.
Many undergraduate reading lists recommend these two anthologies, which would allow you to skip what I am saying and just march through the history of literature in order (though it would take hundreds of hours)
Margaret Ferguson et al, The Norton Anthology of Poetry (fourth edition).
Vincent B. Leitch et al, The Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory.
I do not doubt the excellence of either of these works, but I am trying to suggest the various routes by which you may begin to explore literature and develop your own taste. These anthologies are big and comprehensive in a way that some would find inimical to the whole conception of literature. You may discover that what you love are Elizabeth lyrics, the letters of Bernard Shaw and Ellen Terry, and Victorian memoirs. Anthologies will be less helpful in getting you to that point.
I want to encourage you to be like Helene Hanff and to read great books but also follow your nose a little bit.
A note about companion readers: Sometimes, I have recommended books to read alongside the primary texts. But sometimes I have not. What you should do in most cases is to get a “proper” edition, such as Oxford or Penguin Classics, or the Norton Critical editions, or Longman Annotated English Poets, and to make good use of the Introductions and Notes. For Shakespeare read Arden or Cambridge editions. The RSC editions are also good. If you want to do further reading about the genre or author, the notes and bibliography in these will give you the best guidance.
I have not recommended any “literary theory”, partly because I do not think it is helpful to non-university readers, partly because I have a strong personal distaste for the whole practice and conception of what is called literary theory. If you are interested, here is one undergraduate syllabus with many recommendations. But I strongly advise you against this until you have done a good deal of proper literary reading first.
Shakespeare
This comes first because Shakespeare is the core of the cannon and because he is part of poetry and drama…
I have given you two lists. The first will give you a sense of the different sorts of plays Shakespeare wrote. The second will give you a sense of Shakespeare in chronological order. I have also recommended some decent films if you prefer to watch. The BBC made a complete series in the 1970s and 1980s. They are hard to watch online in the UK but available in the USA, and are mostly very good, especially Jonathan Miller’s Merchant of Venice.
Shakespeare: five types of play
Hamlet (tragedy)
Midsummer Night’s Dream (comedy)
Henry IV part I (history)
Measure for Measure (problem)
The Tempest (romance)
Shakespeare: from early to late
Romeo and Juliet
Much Ado About Nothing
Twelfth Night
Macbeth
Antony and Cleopatra
The Winter’s Tale
Shakespeare on film—a starter list
Romeo and Juliet Baz Lurhman
Hamlet Kenneth Branagh (the Richard Burton version is also excellent)
Hollow Crown, BBC
The Chimes at Midnight Orson Welles
Twelfth Night at the Globe with Mark Rylance
Companion readers—some books to help you get started understanding Shakespeare’s work and his times.
Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language
AD Nuttall, Shakespeare The Thinker
Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age
James Shapiro, 1606
The Bible
This comes next for the same reason: you cannot outrun the influence of the Bible. The essential readings are:
Genesis
Ecclesiastes
Psalms
Song of Solomon
Gospels
A good guide to the English Bible is The Shadow of a Great Rock by Harold Bloom. And please, read the King James Bible, not the modern versions. Please.
Drama
Personally I love drama and theatre, but it is not always an easy thing for readers to get into. If you can see great plays on stage, you should. But reading Chekhov and Noel Coward isn’t always the best way for people to start with literature. However, here are five works each of the two main modes, comedy and tragedy. These lists spans centuries and are missing many wonderful things—Euripides, Plutarch, the Miracle, Mystery, and Morality plays, Webster, Sheridan, Goethe’s Faust, Gogol’s Government Inspector, Ibsen, Chekhov, Wilde, Strindberg…
Tragedy
Sophocles, Oedipus
Aeschylus, Orestes
Racine, Phaedra
Miller, View from a Bridge
Williams, Streetcar
Comedy
Aristophanes, Lysistrata
Terence, Comedies
Moliere, Tartuffe
Shaw, Pygmalion (you can also watch My Fair Lady…! Just be sure to compare it to the script!)
Stoppard, Travesties
For drama, I suggest you read the Introductions in whatever editions of the plays you read. Aristotle's Poetics is essential reading for more serious literary criticism.
Poetry
A lot of these are in the Oxford Book, but The Poetry Foundation website is another good starting point for finding anything you want to read. Sometimes my choices of more modern poetry are dictated by what is available online. The Poetry Archive is an excellent website where you can hear more modern poets read their own work (one of my favourites is John Heath Stubbs). Again, for poetry I cannot recommend The Apple and the Spectroscope enough. Lastly, when you find a poem you like, memorise it.
English “short” poems
This is a starter list of some of the major, classic poems in English that are not too long (some are only a few lines). This is the sort of thing school-children used to know. I have picked this list based on what is available online.Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (audio)
Auden, Musee de Beaux Arts (audio of ‘One Evening’)
Eliot, The LoveSong of J. Alfred Prufrock (audio)
Hopkins, God’s Grandeur
Tennyson, The Lady of Shallott
Rossetti, Goblin Market
Barrett Browning, Sonnet 7
Keats, St Agnes’ Eve
Shelley, Ozymandias
Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey
Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Blake, Songs
Cowper, The Winter Walk (find The Poplar Trees and The Castaway in an anthology)
Pope, Eloisa to Abelard
Anonymous, Tom O’Bedlam
Anne Finch, To Death
Anne Bradstreet, To My Dear and Loving Husband
Herbert, The Flower
Herrick, Daffodils
Donne, Death, be not proud
Jonson, On my First Son, On My First Daughter
Tichborne, Elegy
Marlowe, Shepherd to his love
Sidney, Come Sleep O Sleep
“Landmark” English poems (this list is WAY more than 50 hours…. Use the anthologies and be selective!)
Beowulf (Heaney translation)
Chaucer, The Knight’s Tale (as an intro to The Canterbury Tales more generally), Troilus and Criseyde
Spenser, The Fairy Queen (trigger warning: this is LONG)
Milton, Paradise Lost (get the Longmann annotated edition)
Wordsworth, The Prelude, Lyrical Ballads
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Companion reading
James Fenton, An Introduction to English Poetry
Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry, Milton’s Grand Style
Murray Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (a classic study of Romanticism)
John Carey, John Donne: Mind, Body, Soul (a splendid work of literary criticism that will introduce you to the golden age of English poetry through one of the most splendid of poets)
Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life (splendid book introducing you to Chaucer and his world)
Medieval Romance
This is not the sort of literature many people will want to start with, but it is full of some wondrous work and is well worth your time.Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Penguin Classics) This is short, but very marvellous.
Malory Morte d’Arthur (translation by Peter Ackroyd) (this is prose… but it is part of the Romance genre…)
The Romance of the Rose (Oxford Classics, translation)
Companion reading: J.A. Burrows’s A Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which you may struggle to find, but is well worth your time if you enjoy the poem or want to know more about quest literature. Burrow also wrote a textbook of mediaeval literature, Medieval Writers and Their Work. Personally I love The Allegory of Love by C.S. Lewis.
Fiction
English fiction before the nineteenth century
Samuel Johnson, Rasselas
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Samuel Richardson, Pamela
Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones
Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders
Companion reading: Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel
English novel of the nineteenth century
Emma, Jane Austen (If you want to start with an “easier” novel, read Pride and Prejudice)
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens (I think Bleak House is the great English novel, but David Copperfield is the one that has a bit of everything that Dickens can do, and might be his most loved novel, so I put it as the introductory choice.)
Middlemarch, George Eliot (Personally, I love Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss, but most people regard Middlemarch as the most important English novel)
Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
The Golden Bowl, Henry James (this is a cheat in that it was written in 1904 and James was an ex-pat American, but it is simply too good to leave off the list; warning: many people love this book, many find it mind-boggling)
Companion reading
John Mullan What Matters in Jane Austen, The Artful Dickens
James Wood How Fiction Works
David Lodge, The Art of Fiction
Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas
Michael Chwe, Jane Austen, Game Theorist
Reading Jane Austen by Jenny Davidson.
Claire Carlisle, The Marriage Question
Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy
Modernist fiction
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (get the Norton edition edited by Merve Emre)
James Joyce, Ulysses
Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
English novel of the twentieth century
Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows
Elizabeth Jenkins, The Tortoise and the Hare
Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea
Penelope Fitzgerald, The Beginning of Spring
Classic “genre” novels
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man
Children’s books
Lewis Carrol, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
George Macdonald, The Princess and the Goblin
Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Tales
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
Hilaire Belloc, Cautionary Tales
European novel
Goethe, Young Werther
Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Lydia Davis translation)
Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Turgenev, Fathers and Son
Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Kafka, Stories
Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Non-fiction
Literary criticism
Johnson Preface to Shakespeare, Selected Lives of the Poets
Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
Hazlitt, Selected essays
Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’
T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’
Woolf, The Common Reader or Selected Essays
Tolkien, Of Fairy Stories
C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, Of This And Other Worlds
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
English Biography
Aubrey Short Lives
Walton’s Lives (esp. The Life of Donne)
Samuel Johnson, Life of Savage
James Boswell, Life of Johnson
Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an Opium Eater
Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte
Froude’s Life of Carlyle
J.S. Mill, Autobiography
Strachey Eminent Victorians
Essays
The best place to start is the Oxford Book of Essays, but here are some choices for dipping into.Bacon, Essays (try ‘Of Gardens’ or ‘Of Great Place’)
Swift, Drapier’s Letters
Addison, Spectator
Johnson, Selected Essays
George Orwell, Essays (ignore his “writing rules”, it’s total rubbish)
May I ask why the following were excluded?
- Agatha Christie (surely undisputed queen of genre fiction?)
- P.G. Wodehouse
- Tolkien
- Enid Blyton
- Frog and Toad
All hugely influential, surely part of the canon?
Very interesting!
I happen to be reading The Canterbury Tales at the moment and I can't help but feel that reading only the Knight's Tale as an introduction to CT would give a skewed impression. I think recommending (in addition to the Knight's tale) the Miller's Tale which immediately follows would offer a better insight into the breadth of Chaucer. It's not all high-minded knights and courtly love! The bawdiness of some of the tales has, for me at least, been quite fun and unexpected. And those two tales go nicely together, one being a parody of the other.