Austen was my Everest, and the struggle really was uphill. After a couple of years reading staccato sentences from aspiring LinkedInfluencers, diving into endless semicolons and subordinate clauses feels like going from a McDonald’s happy meal to a whole head of cauliflower: you know which is better for you, but it’s too much to bite off in one go. The first book I tackled was Emma, and I had to force myself through the first two chapters: page after page of character names, relationships and parenthetical asides, and not a bullet-point summary in sight.
Not long after that, though, something clicked. My brain got into the rhythm of the denser text at more or less the same time as I worked out who all the characters were (it helped to have seen Clueless several times), and suddenly I was … enjoying Austen. The chapter openings are consistently great, the asides are savage, and the social critiques are delivered in a flurry of bon mots. There’s a bit where a character goes to London for a haircut and everyone else is so bracingly mean about it, I laughed out loud in a cafe.
After that, I was off to the races. I started reading every night, tucking myself under a blanket on the sofa to chug through as many pages as I could before the embrace of nature’s soft nurse (Shakespeare’s words, not mine) caught up with me. Eventually, I started leaving my laptop and phone upstairs, far from where I might be tempted to grab them, and going straight from one classic to the next. Turns out almost all of them are as good as you’ve heard – rather than being a boring chore to read, they are fizzing with good ideas and beautiful phrasing. Apologies to every single person I’ve ever had a conversation about literature with, and also my mum.
Don't forget Dickens! I worship Austen and adore Charles Dickens. I've read them all. The lovely thing about Dickens is that there are so many novels! Many of them are worthy of rereading. I was introduced to him in a class taught by a talented scholar when I was in my thirties.
In between raising children and Labradors, running a house and entertaining my husband's clients I was a student who took doctoral exams in my forties. 19th C British lit is one of the wonders of the world. I include George Eliot in the wondrous category.
If you want to go hard core, try Walter Scott - often crazy dense, but once through that, a world of experience.