Victorian Literature

Ah, Victorian Literature, term so many people know - even complete non-readers. As with all literary modes and traditions, tacking down the time and place of Victorian Literature (hereafter VicLit) is difficult. We are roughly talking about literature written by mainly white people in the mid to late 1800s. To give you an idea, here are a few of the major writers of the Victorian period:

The Brontes, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lewis Carroll, William Butler Yeats, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Oscar Wilde and honestly the list cold go on forever. Much of the popular classics we read are from this period.

Thematically, VicLit runs the gamut: propriety, morality, social advancement and inequality, civility, gender roles, evolution, colonialism and colonization, industrialization, and on and on. Clearly over such a long time, roughly 70 years, times and tastes and trends change and so did the literature.

I have quite a bit of VicLit on my shelves- roughly 90 books - either waiting to be read or re-read or even re-re-read. Here are a few of the VicLit books I have on the shelves by author:

• Wilkie Collins - The Moonstone, The Woman in White, No Name,
• Elizabeth Gaskell - North and South, Mary Barton, Cranford, Wives and Daughters, Cousin Phyllis,
• Charlotte Bronte - Villette, Jane Eyre,
• George Eliot - Adam Bede; Silas Marner; The Mill on the Floss; Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda, Scenes of a Clerical Life, Romola, Felix Holt,
• Samuel Butler - Erewhon,
• Charles Dickens - Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Martin Chuzzlewit, A Tale of Two Cities,
• Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest
• Bram Stoker - Dracula
• Robert Louis Stevenson - The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
• Mary Elizabeth Braddon - Lady Audley's Secret, Aurora Floyd
• William Makepeace Thackeray - Vanity Fair
• Arthur Conan Doyle - The Complete Sherlock Holmes
• Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
• Anne Bronte - Agnes Grey
• Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
• Thomas Hardy - Far From the Maddening Crowd
• Lewis Carroll - Through the Looking Glass, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• Anthony Trollope - Barchester Towers, Lady Anna, Rachel Ray,
• John Stewart Mill - The Subjection of Women,
• H.G. Wells - The Island of Dr. Moreau

The ones I have reviews for have links, and the ones I've read but haven't reviewed are italicized. As you can see, I have A LOT of VicLit to choose from if I wish to participate in the Victorian Literature in November event.

As it stands, I have so many books going right now, and I'm participating in Nonfiction November, so I'm not sure I will get around to any of these. Fingers crossed though.

If I do decide to pick one up, which one do you recommend?