A Reading List of English Classics of Literature f

Middle Ages

1.      c. 1387, The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer

2.      1485, Le Morte D’Arthur by Malory

Renaissance

3.      1594, Sonnets by Shakespeare

4.      1594-1600,  plays including Midsummer Night’s Dream; As you Like It; Merry Wives of   Winsor; Julius Caesar by Shakeapeare

5.      1597, Essays by Bacon

6.      1601-4, plays including Hamlet; Twelfth Night; Mesure for Measure by Shakespeare

7.      1604-8, plays including Othello, King Lear; Macbeth; Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus              by Shakeapeare

8.      1605, Advancement of Learning by Bacon

17-th Century

9.      1667, Paradise Lost by Milton

10.  1678, The Pilgrim’s Progess by Bunyan

11.  1695, Love for Love by Congreve

12.  1700, The Way of the World by Congreve

18-th Century

13.  1712, The Rape  of the Lock by Pope

14.  1719, Robinson Crusoe by Defoe

15.  1722, Moll Flanders by Defoe

16.  1726, Gulliver’s Travels by Swift

17.  1740, Pamela by Richardson

18.  1742, Joseph Andrews by Fielding

19.  1749, Tom Jones by Fielding

20.  1777, School for Scandal by Sheridan

21.  1779-81, The Lives of the Poets by Johnson

22.  1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Wollstonecraft

Romanticism

23.  1798, Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge; The Wrongs of Woman by Wollstonecraft

24.  1811, Sense and Sensibility by Austen

25.  1813, Pride and Prejudice by Austen; Queen Mab by Shelly

26.  1814, The Excursion by Wordsworth; Mansfield Park by Austen; Waverley by Scott

27.  1818, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion by Austen; Endymion by Keats; Rob Roy by Scott;

28.  Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

29.  1820, Prometheus Unbound by Shelley; Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes by Keats; Ivanhoe by Scott

Victorian Period

30.  1837, Oliver Twist by Dickens

31.  1838, Nickolas Nickleby by Dickens

32.  1840, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge by Dickens

33.  1841, On Heroes and Hero Worship by Carlyle

34.  1846-8, Dombey and Son by Dickens

35.  1847, The Princess by Tennyson; Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte; Wuthering Heights by Emily

36.  Bronte; Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte; Vanity Fair by Thackeray

37.  1848, Mary Barton by Gaskell

38.  1849, David Copperfield by Dickens; History of England by Macaulay

39.  1852, Bleak House by Dickens

40.  1854, Hard Times by Dickens

41.  1855, Westward Ho! By Kinsley; Men and Women by Browning; North and South by Gaskell;

42.  Little Dorritt by Dickens

43.  1859, A Tales of Two Cities by Dickens; Adam Bede by Eliot; The Origin of Species by Darwin

44.  1860, The Mill on the Floss by Eliot; The Woman in White by Collins; Great Expectations by

45.  Dickens

46.  1868, The Moonstone by Collins; The Ring and the Book by Browning; The Earthly Paradise by

47.  Morris

48.  1871-2, Midllemarch by Eliot

49.  1872, Erewhon by Butler; Under the Greenwood Tree by Hardy

50.  1874, Far From the Madding Crowd by Hardy

51.  1876, Daniel Deronda by Eliot

52.  1878, The Return of the Native by Hardy

53.  1879, The Egoist by Meredith

54.  1880, The Trumpet Major by Hardy

55.  1886, Kidnapped and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Stevenson; Demos by Gissing

56.  1888, Plain Tales from the Hills by Kipling

57.  1889, The Wanderings of Oisin by Yeats; The Master of Ballantrae by Stevenson

58.  1891, Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Hardy; New Grub Street by Gissing

59.  1892, Widower’s Houses by Shaw

60.  1893, Mrs. Warren’s Profession by Shaw

61.  1895, The Time Machine by Wells

62.  1896, Jude the Obscue by Hardy

20-th Century

63.  1900, Lord Jim by Conrad

64.  1901, Kim by Kipling

65.  1902, Anna of the Five Towns by Bennett

66.  1903, The Way of All Flesh by Butler

67.  1905, Major Barbara and Man and Super Man by Shaw

68.  1907, The Playboy of the Western World by Synge; The Secret Agent by Conrad

69.  1908, The Old Wives’ Tale by Bennett; A Room with a View by Forster

70.  1910, Howards End by Fosrter

71.  1911, Under the Western Eyes by Conrad

72.  1913, Sons and Lovers by Lawrence

73.  1914, Dubliners by Joyce

74.  1915, The Good Soldier by Ford; The Voyage Out by Woolf; The Rainbow by Lawrence

75.  1916, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce

76.  1920, Women in Love by Lawrence; Heartbreak House by Shaw

77.  1922, The Waste Land by Eilot; Ulysses by Joyce

78.  1924, A Passage to India by Froster

79.  1925, Mrs. Dallaway by Woolf

80.  1927, To the Lighthouse by Woolf

81.  1928, The Tower by Yeats; Lady Chatrerley’s Lover by Lawrence

82.  1934, A Handful of Dust by Waugh

83.  1943, The Ministry of Fear by Greene

84.  1944, The Horse’s Mouth by Cary

85.  1945, Loving by Green; Animal Farm by Orwell

86.  1948, The Heart of the Matter by Greene; The Lady’s not for Burning by Fry

87.  1949, The Heat of the Day by Bowen; Nineteen Eighty-four by Orwell; The Cocktail Party by Eilot

88.  1954, Lord of the Flies by Golding; Lucky Jim by Amis

89.  1955, The Inheritors by Golding; Waiting for Godot  by Beckett

90.  1956, Look Back in Anger by Osborne

91.  1958, A Galss of Blessing by Pym; The Birthday Party by Pinter; The Bell by Murdoch

92.  1962, Happy Days by Beckett; The Golden Notebook by Lessing

93.  1965, Saved by Bond

94.  1966, The Jewel in the Crown by Scott

95.  1969, The French Lieutenants Woman by Fowles

96.  1978, Betrayal by Pinter; The Sea, The Sea by Murdoch; The Virgin in the Garden by Byatt

97.  1981, Midnight’s Children by Rushdie

98.  1982, Top Girls by Churchill

99.   1990, Possesion by Byatt

      100.  Tales from Ovid by Hughes