NOVELS

A very smooth, handsome, sophisticated treasure-hunting idler exercises his considerable charm on Catherine, the daughter of a famous and quite well-to-do physician who moves into a splendid residence in the fashionable (we are in the early part of the 19th-Century) Washington Square, with the aid of the girl’s aunt who lives with her and her father and who has nothing else to do but meddle in the innocent – and awkward, unsophisticated, unworldly and unattractive – young woman and future (...)

This was the second of Hardy’s major novels (after Far From The Madding Crowd in 1874), set again in a rural community in a region of unfarmed and sparsely-populated semi-wild heaths in the south-west of England baptised Wessex by Hardy, closely resembling his own native Dorsetshire where he had been raised and where he had returned to settle down shortly before undertaking this deeply-felt novel of the intense inter-relationships and tensions between a man and his mother, between three (...)

The famous tale of growing up in grassroots America in the first part of the 19th Century, with two of the best-known characters in the whole of American fiction, the resourceful and imaginative Tom Sawyer and his adventurous, semi-wild bosom friend Huckleberry Finn.
An American classic (although first published in England!) it was really intended for young people by its structure (anecdotes loosely linked together), its content matter (youthful escapades and high-jinks) and its style (...)

This was the first of Hardy’s major works and his first major success, set in a pastoral setting [1] and centered on the yearnings of a farmer-shepherd after the lively and independent farm-owner heroine Bethsheeba.
The novel has a huge amount of local colour, with a full set of country characters whose vernacular and often quite comical conversations and doings take up a considerable amount of the story, and its many dramatic countryside dramas do indeed tend to get the reader away from (...)

This big, complex, ambitious, very sophisticated novel is set in an almost claustrophobic provincial setting, where its great strength – the sharpness and intelligence of the dialogues and the conversations – are somewhat dampened by the just-about-mediocre or at least typically-provincial qualities of the main characters and their environment. But there is much, an awful lot, to be thankful for here, in addition to the generally elevated tone of the thinking and talking and writing; for (...)

One of Trollope’s best-known novels, beautifully delivered in his unmatchable, elegant and precise prose. The mess that Lady Eustace gets into with her fabulous diamonds provides T. with the framework for an examination of the mores and morals of the increasingly-crass society of his day that (of course) keeps the reader well engaged from start to end. The charm of his Barchester Towers is less present in this sharper social saga, but it is certainly another excellent example of Trollope’s (...)

This was the sixth and last novel in Trollop’s Barsetshire series, that began with the excellent The Warden and continued with his wonderful masterpiece, Barchester Towers. Surprise and delight, this final and most sober work in the series, on the quite eternal themes of honour and dishonour, of honesty and integrity and social opprobrium, of pride, poverty and self-respect, rises to the glorious heights of Barchester Towers thanks to the sparkle of Trollope’s prose, to his gift for (...)

The most dramatic of all George Eliot’s novels (that quite unforgettable final scene!), this was her second novel, published when she was 40, so there’s nothing juvenile in the writing or plot, concentrated on the heroine’s intense relationships with three men (her brother, her suitable suitor, and her unsuitable lover). It is less intellectualising than the later Middlemarch (1872) but retains the country setting and nature-centred flavour of Adam Bede, written the previous year (she may (...)

An enchanting story of strife in the hierarchy of the established church in a glorious, ancient and utterly civilized corner of south England baptised Barchester.
A story that subtly is saying things about tolerance and justice and openness to men’s hearts and the virtues of kindness and understanding in an increasingly harsh, competitive, strife-ridden world. And in the most easy and natural prose one can imagine, constantly underpinned with a sense of humour and whimsy at the foibles (...)

Written in a vigorous style peppered with very American humour and a quite unparalleled enthusiasm for his subject, the quality of the text is of the very highest order, complex and rich and highly articulate – perhaps too sophisticated in fact for the American public of the day who practically ignored this novel at the time of its publication in spite of the big successes of his previous books, Typee and Omoo, both about life in the Polynesian islands in the exotic South Seas.
Melville (...)