Twenty marriage plots

20 books · original English texts · free to read online

The list

1. Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen, 1813. The sharpest opening in English comedy of manners, and still the most readable account of how money shapes a marriage.
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2. Sense and Sensibility — Jane Austen, 1811. Austen's first novel, and the best study of the difference between feeling something and saying it.
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3. Northanger Abbey — Jane Austen, 1817. Austen's funniest novel, and the best-tempered parody in English.
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4. Persuasion — Jane Austen, 1817. Austen writing about regret rather than courtship, with the most grown-up heroine she created.
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5. Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë, 1847. The first great English novel narrated by a woman with no fortune and no intention of apologising for it.
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6. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — Anne Brontë, 1848. The most clear-eyed Brontë novel, and the one that wears least well with romantic readings.
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7. Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë, 1847. The most structurally ambitious of the Brontë novels, and the least sentimental.
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8. Middlemarch — George Eliot, 1871. The fullest account of ordinary life in English fiction, and the wisest novel of the century.
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9. The Portrait of a Lady — Henry James, 1881. The great novel about a woman's freedom being granted and then quietly withdrawn.
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10. The Wings of the Dove — Henry James, 1902. James at his most morally intricate, with Venice doing half the work.
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11. The House of Mirth — Edith Wharton, 1905. A controlled, painful novel about a woman with taste and no income.
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12. The Age of Innocence — Edith Wharton, 1920. Wharton's masterpiece, and the best novel about how a society enforces its rules without ever stating them.
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13. Washington Square — Henry James, 1880. A small, perfect novel about a father, a daughter and the uses of intelligence.
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14. The Awakening — Kate Chopin, 1899. The first great American novel about a woman's desire, and still one of the most radical.
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15. A Room with a View — E. M. Forster, 1908. Forster's most generous comedy, and the best novel ever written about a pension in Florence.
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16. North and South — Elizabeth Gaskell, 1855. The best-balanced novel about the industrial dispute, with a heroine who has to learn what she is looking at.
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17. The Bostonians — Henry James, 1886. James on American reform movements, written with the cold eye he usually reserved for Europe.
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18. The Longest Journey — E. M. Forster, 1907. Forster's most personal novel, and the one that shows what he was arguing with for the rest of his life.
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19. The Well of the Saints — John Millington Synge, 1905. A comedy about the cost of a miracle, and Synge's most underrated play.
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20. The Importance of Being Earnest — Oscar Wilde, 1895. The wittiest play in the language, and a complete demolition of Victorian earnestness.
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