In our September issue (on shelves August 3), Sarah Churchwell discusses how great literature has the power to liberate the mind. Here, she tells us her top 10 classic novels – we’d love to read your suggestions. Just comment below or tweet @psychologiesmag.
1. Emily Brontë’s own Wuthering Heights. The most atmospheric book ever written in English — it hangs in your head like a bat for months after you put it down.
2. Her sister Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the story of the plain orphan girl who survives through intelligence, guts, and strength of character to triumph over a cruel world. Is there a more beloved heroine in the English novel?
3. If there is, it’s Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. A classic for a reason: the sharp-tongued Lizzie gives as good as she gets, goes to toe to toe with Mr Darcy and earns not just his love, but his respect. Every smart girl’s idea of a happy ending.
4. George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The first 100 pages are slow going, but if you stick with it the novel becomes a page-turning read suffused with wisdom and love.
5. Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. A completely misleading title for one of the least bleak books Dickens wrote, in which virtue is rewarded, vice punished, and Victorian London leaps to life on the page.
6. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the only novel before 1800 on this list (although Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders deserves honorable mention if only because of the insane daring of its sibling incest happy ending). Tristram Shandy is a great shaggy dog of a story in which the hero takes several hundred pages to be born: it invented and outdid so-called “postmodern literature” long before the 20th century discovered it.
7. Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (aka Fiesta), because early Hemingway was actually pretty good (before he became a big, bullying blowhard) and it has one of the best last lines in literature.
8. Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. This will not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I absolutely adore its riffs on the idea of the quest, on metaphor, language, revelation and the search for meaning in life.
9. My favorite contemporary novel, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. A beautiful, uplifting meditation on life and a brilliantly disguised submerged history of America from the Civil War to Civil Rights.
10. Last but far from least, The Great Gatsby, the book I’m writing a book about now. Gorgeous, romantic, brilliant, evocative, unforgettable: one of the most poetic novels ever written, and it has champagne glasses “bigger than finger bowls.” What’s not to like?
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