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What are your favorite 19C books?

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Spitfire
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Post by Spitfire » Sun September 7th, 2008, 5:18 pm

I Love Bronte's Jane Eyre!
Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice and Emma
Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, I saw the movie rendition of North and South (Loved it!) - haven't read the novel yet...it's on my TBR pile!
Orczy's The Scarlette Pimpernel
Does Anne of Green Gables count by Montgomery...loved those book when I was younger, still a classic!
Mental blocking right now, I know there are more, and am too lazy to go look through my library! :o
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MLS859
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Post by MLS859 » Tue September 9th, 2008, 7:56 pm

Pride and Prejudice (Austen)
North and South (Gaskell)
A Take of Two Cities (Dickens)

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Divia
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Post by Divia » Sun September 14th, 2008, 3:45 am

Little Women (Alcott)
Rose in Bloom (Alcott)
The Awakening (Chopin)

I'm hoping to read Gaskell soon.
News, views, and reviews on books and graphic novels for young adult.
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Madeleine
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Post by Madeleine » Mon September 15th, 2008, 7:42 pm

Jane Eyre
Wuthering Heights
The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins)
Uncle Silas (Sheridan le Fanu)
Most of Thomas Hardy's but especially Tess and Far from the Madding Crowd
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

chuck
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Post by chuck » Mon September 22nd, 2008, 3:03 am

My college Literature class has to take credit for many of these 19Th century reads.....I can't remember them all.....here are a few of my favorites

Turn of the Screw..... Henry James
Red Badge of Courage....Stephen Crane
Last of the Mohican's....James Fennimore Cooper
Moby Dick....Herman Melville
Picture of Dorian Gray....Oscar Wilde
The Count of Monte Cristo...A. Dumas
Legend of Sleepy Hollow/Rip Van Winkle....Washington Irving
Last edited by chuck on Mon September 22nd, 2008, 3:09 am, edited 2 times in total.
Reason: spelling

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Christina
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Post by Christina » Thu November 6th, 2008, 3:23 pm

Wuthering Heights
Great Expectations and most of Dickens' other works.

(Yikes, but I can't bear Thomas Hardy - the ultimate in depressing!! Does anyone ever live happily ever after in Hardy??)

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Misfit
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Post by Misfit » Thu November 6th, 2008, 3:37 pm

[quote=""Christina""]Wuthering Heights
Great Expectations and most of Dickens' other works.

(Yikes, but I can't bear Thomas Hardy - the ultimate in depressing!! Does anyone ever live happily ever after in Hardy??)[/quote]

I seem to recall that Far from the Madding Crowd had something close to reasonably happy ending. But I know what you mean -- Tess!!

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boswellbaxter
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Post by boswellbaxter » Thu November 6th, 2008, 4:05 pm

[quote=""Misfit""]I seem to recall that Far from the Madding Crowd had something close to reasonably happy ending. But I know what you mean -- Tess!![/quote]


Under the Greenwood Tree is supposed to have a happy ending, as far as Hardy goes.
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chuck
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Hardy's perpective

Post by chuck » Thu November 6th, 2008, 4:05 pm

[quote=""Christina""]Wuthering Heights
Great Expectations and most of Dickens' other works.

(Yikes, but I can't bear Thomas Hardy - the ultimate in depressing!! Does anyone ever live happily ever after in Hardy??)[/quote]

I don't mean to generalize about the nineteenth century, but I think Hardy was telling it like it "was"....Hardy books were a college reads and they were really a struggle.......Some of Dickens' were very bleak and dark....much of the time he took the middle road and worked on ending on happier times.....

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Christina
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Post by Christina » Thu November 6th, 2008, 11:21 pm

Oh, yes, Dickens was bleak, too, but his stories usually have some sense of a happy ending - in a 'in spite of everything' kind of way. Hardy is the Leonard Cohen-without-the-music :-) of 19th century literature! Jude the Obscure??? Oh, no...this is just too unbearable!!
When he was a child, Hardy saw a hanged man left swinging from a gibbet in his village. That - and his obsession with architecture (which, I must confess, I find rather boring in his books) - seemed to hang over everything he wrote.
I know Dickens had a very difficult childhood and there is a great deal of the grotesque and hyperbole (not to mention, too many 'coincidences') in his books but he gets away with it because his characters are so unique and have their own phrases and mannerisms - right down to their names! - that they are still people we can relate to, today.
Emily Bronte...a completely different kettle of fish :-) ...wow!! what a writer! What an amazing mind and spirit! I adore her poetry even more than her one amazing book!

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