Some Key Novels
A "favorite novel" is a novel which one reads from time to time for the pleasure or the profit of the re-reading. In general, a-teacher of English does not have "favorite novels," and for various reasons. In the first place, he assimilates in one reading about all that he is capable of assimilating from a novel. In the second place, he does not have time to re-read; there are too many books which he must push on to. And, finally, if he has been teaching a course in the novel for some time, he knows that at a certain period of the year he will be obliged to skim over the output of a novelist to be fresh for his class lectures.
For these reasons I have used "key novels" instead of "favorite novels" in the caption. Each of the following novels is good reading and each represents an important mood in the history of the English novel. I end with Hardy because someone else will furnish a list of contemporary novels.
Henry Fielding: Tom Jones. Oliver Goldsmith: The Vicar ofWakefield. Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice. Walter Scott: The Heart of Midlothian. Charles Dickens: Pickwick Papers. William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair. George Eliot: Adam Bede. George Meredith: Evan Harrington. Thomas Hardy: The Return ofthe Native.
