Classic British Fiction

For the past few years, one of my projects has been to read or re-read classic British novels of the 1775-1925 period. I would consider it an impertinence to "review" these books; the acknowledged classics are pretty obviously great - which is partly to say, within 20 pages I usually know exactly why they are classics - and even the lesser volumes are cherishable. I concentrate on these books as experiences, not as objects to be assessed (with new books, both those dimensions are in play). It is especially good to encounter them now, in my fifties, when the life-adventures they describe are all much clearer to me than they could have been in high school or college. My early readings of some of these novels were not without value, but the later readings are incomparably richer.

Here is a list of the completed volumes in the current project, in the order read:

Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit
Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?
George Eliot, Middlemarch
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Jane Austen, Emma
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native
Charles Reade, It Is Never Too Late to Mend
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
Charlotte Bronte, Shirley
Sir Walter Scott, The Antiquary
Anne Bronte, Agnes Grey
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
George Gissing, The Whirlpool
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
Bram Stoker, Dracula
George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Currently I have two more books in progress in this project, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, which I am about to finish, and James Joyce's Ulysses.

There are all too many novelists I have not covered yet, but intend to. Some of the biggest names on that list are R.D. Blackmore, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Samuel Butler, William Carleton, Benjamin Disraeli, Maria Edgeworth, John Galt, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Charles Lever, Frederick Marryat, George Moore, Margaret Oliphant, Thomas Love Peacock, Mark Rutherford, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Robert Smith Surtees. It's not as if one could ever run out - it's an abundant period.