I’ve just read Dracula, Jane Eyre, Dr. Jekyl, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Loved them all but need something completely different!
I need them to be “classics” or at least 100 years old if not more, I’m listening on audiobook and I can’t listen to modern fiction that way. I’ve already read the standard French classics, and all the Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner I care to.
Bonus points if they’re lesser known titles from renowned authors, especially women or people of color, but not entirely necessary.
Your thoughts are greatly appreciated!
by GoodKid_MaadSity
13 Comments
My two suggestions are wildly different: The Illiad or Little House on the Prairie.
Maurice by E.M. Forster is Edwardian I believe. The Good Earth by Pearl S Buck is also good but it’s a little less than 100 years old.
Well the opposite of Victorian literature would most likely be turn of the century modernism so:
Orlando, by Virginia Woolf
Love For Lydia by H.E.Bates
The House of Mirth or The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
A Passage To India by E.M.Forster
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Light In August by William Faulkner
What about some classic sci-fi. eg Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Or Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World.
I’d say James Joyce was the most strident and significant writer rebelling against Victorian convention. I have not listened to audiobook versions, but I think they would be a train wreck.
The Tale of Gengi by Murasaki Shikibu. Written in Japan in the early 11th century.
Not 100 years old and non fiction, Hidden Figures
The Frozen River
How about the Picture of Dorian Gray or The Scarlet Letter?
The Awakening by Kate Chopin. 1899. A woman rebels against the repressive social and sexual mores of the late 19th century.
DH Lawrence- Sons and Lovers, Lady Chatterly’s Lover
John Dos Passos?
Adding to the previous suggestion of Willa Cather-The Song of the Lark is a great book.
Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone. He subverted and criticized Victorian ideals and pioneered the detective novel.