Austen-tations and Other Curiosities
Discover Austen-tations and Other Curiosities: a curated book list featuring Jane Austen classics like Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, plus literary gems from George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and more. Explore fiction, juvenile tales, and intriguing curiosities in this handpicked collection for book lovers.
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Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” So begins Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s witty comedy of manners—one of the most popular novels of all time—that features splendidly civilized sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as they play out their spirited courtship in a series of eighteenth-century drawing-room intrigues. Renowned literary critic and historian George Saintsbury in 1894 declared it the “most perfect, the most characteristic, the most eminently quintessential of its author’s works,” and Eudora Welty in the twentieth century described it as “irresistible and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be.”
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Emma
by Jane Austen
Emma, first published in 1816, was written when Jane Austen was at the height of her powers. In a novel remarkable for its sparkling wit and modernity, Austen presents readers with two of literature’s greatest comic creations—the eccentric Mr. Woodhouse and that quintessential bore, Miss Bates. Here, too, we have what may well be Jane Austen’s most profound characterization: the witty, imaginative, self-deluded Emma, a heroine the author declared “no one but myself will much like,” but who has been much loved by generations of readers. Delightfully funny, full of rich irony, Emma is regarded as one of Jane Austen’s finest achievements.
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Persuasion
by Jane Austen
The romance between Captain Wentworth and Anne, the daughter of Sir Walter Elliot, seems doomed because of the young man's family connections and lack of wealth
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The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins
Wilkie Collins’ classic tale of murder, intrigue, madness, and mistaken identity ONE OF TIME’S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME “There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road—there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven—stood thefigure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments.” Generally considered the first English sensation novel, The Woman in Whitefeatures the remarkable heroine Marian Halcombe and her sleuthing partner, drawing master Walter Hartright, pitted against the diabolical team of Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde. After more than a century since its publication, Wilkie Collins’s psychological thriller has never been out of print.
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The Mill on the Floss
by George Eliot
This novel, based on George Eliot's own experiences of provincial life, is a masterpiece of ambiguity in which moral choice is subjected to the hypocrisy of the Victorian age.
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Wuthering Heights
by Emily Bronte
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Wuthering Heights, first published in 1847, the year before the author's death at the age of thirty, endures today as perhaps the most powerful and intensely original novel in the English language. “Only Emily Brontë,” V.S. Pritchett said about the author and her contemporaries, “exposes her imagination to the dark spirit.” And Virginia Woolf wrote, “It is as if she could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality. Hers, then, is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts, with few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.”
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Complete Anne of Green Gables
by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Favorites for nearly 100 years, these classic novels follow the adventures of the spirited redhead Anne Shirley, who comes to stay at Green Gables and wins the hearts of everyone she meets.
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The Chronicles of Narnia Rack Box Set (Books 1 to 7)
by C. S. Lewis
Collection includes all seven of the novels in the series.
