“Emma” holds an unusual place in the work of Jane Austen, not least because it is a lot longer than her other novels. There's also the...

It seems that Jane Austen liked "Mansfield Park" better than anything she had done before. With all due respect to her many excellent...

From time to time I read a critical opinion on “Pride and Prejudice” that, while acknowledging its excellence, wonders why Jane Austen...

It's taken me an unconscionable length of time to get through this work. Perhaps in this review we'll be able to figure out why. It's not...

If memory serves, Jane Austen has been a highly esteemed author for most of my life, mostly because of “Pride And Prejudice”. The first...

For a story so crowded with incident, “Castle Rackrent” is surprisingly short. This works largely because the first-person narrator,...

It's taken me far longer to read “Camilla, A Picture Of Youth” than almost any other book of equivalent length. While I was slogging...

This is one of those novels that I hesitate to comment on, simply because I'm not a Christian, let alone a Catholic, and as you can tell...

Here we see one possible disadvantage of reading the books listed in “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die” in their order on the list...

Here's one of the earliest of the so-called “slavery narratives,” works from those who lived through slavery times. Thus, they are...

Reading very long books normally doesn't cause me any problems. “The Adventures Of Caleb Williams” isn't exceptionally long – the edition...

This is a story by an Englishman, written originally in French, about a caliph in and around what is currently parts of Arabia, Persia,...

Here's a novel about a young English woman (Cecilia, of course) whose parents and uncle have all died, leaving her a considerable fortune...

Fanny Burney is only the sixth woman, out of 56 books so far, whose work appears on the “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die” list,...

The most obvious difference between “The Expedition Of Humphry Clinker” and Tobias George Smollett's other work is undoubtedly that, in...

When it comes to the older literature on the “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die” list, I've at least heard of most of the titles....

I find “A Sentimental Journey Through France And Italy” a trifle confusing. This may be due to the fact that Laurence Sterne never...

At the end of Volume 6 of this work, Mr. Shandy as the teller of his own life story provides a drawing of his narrative line over the...

Some years ago, Robert Duvall starred in a movie called "The Apostle" about a famous television preacher who loses everything largely...

Written some years before the American Revolution by a Member of Parliament, it should come as no surprise that Horace Walpole's work...