yet another of these...

Looking though this blog, I've realised that there are almost as many posts apologising for not blogging or setting out new reading resolutions that there are actual book reviews. So logically I thought the solution to this was to write another post apologising and setting out a new reading resolution!

A lot has happened since I last wrote here. Most excitingly, I got into my top uni choice and fingers crossed on me getting my grades I'll be off to read English next year! Rather more dauntingly, I received a fifty book long reading list from them last week...

So I thought as I really do have to read at least the majority of these books before October, this would be the perfect place for me to share and discuss my thoughts about them - especially as once term starts it'll be very useful to have a record of what I thought.

A lot of the list were literary theory books and preparatory reading for studying Anglo-Saxon literature (which I'd be happy to copy into this blog if anyone is interested). But I thought as a lot of you will have read books from the Victorian literature list, it might be a good idea to pop that down here. Let me know which ones you've read and would recommend, and which ones for which I should prepare myself for a hard read...

Novels

Charlotte, Jane Eyre (1847); Villette (1853) 

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)

Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)  

Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854); Bleak House (1852-3); Great Expectations (1860-1) 

Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848); North and South (1855)

George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859); The Mill on the Floss (1860); Middlemarch (1874)

Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859)

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)

Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (1878); Tess of the D’Urbevilles (1891); Jude the Obscure (1895)

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902); Nostromo (1904)

Poetry

Alfred Tennyson, especially In Memoriam, Ulysses, Tithonus  (Longman edition)

Robert Browning, (Penguin edition of the complete works)

Either: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry, eds. Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow, especially Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Oxford University Press, 1996)

Or: Gerard Manley Hopkins (Penguin Edition of the Poems and Prose)

Drama

Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance (1893), The Importance of Being Ernest (1895); An Ideal Husband (1895); and a selection from Nineteenth-Century Plays ed. by George Rowell (Oxford UP, 1972)