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 fairly simple story, the title of this novel is – let's face – a trifle confusing. “Elective Affinities”? What the heck does that...

Authors who take pen names are nothing new – Mark Twain for Samuel Clemens, for instance, or even J.K. Rowling for Joanne Rowling. It's...

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...

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

Awhile ago, I told you that I found Samuel Richardson's “Clarissa” infuriatingly difficult to read because the characters were either too...

This is one of those items of popular culture that impacts the society to such an extent that the mere fact of its existence is almost...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been called a great many thing, both during his life and after his death – a philosopher, a political theorist,...

The older I get, the less patience I have with fools. A great many people besides me get impatient with fools, of course. The surprise to...

Well, here it is - maybe the most famous dirty book in the history of the English language. And it's dirty, all right, but what it mostly...

My question is, how is one to encounter an early novel like "Tom Jones"? When Fielding wrote it, there wasn't much in the way of...

If I'm not mistaken, Tobias George Smollett is not one of the best-known authors of his age, which is a shame, because man was he good....

When reviewing a book from a previous age, like this one, I generally try to judge it according to the standards of the time in which it...

Here's a huge bestseller from the 1740s in England – so much so that it gave rise to an early parody. Henry Fielding published "Shamela"...

Here's the last novel by Daniel Defoe, author of one of the best-loved novels in English literature – "Robinson Crusoe", of course....

I was one of those rotten kids who taught himself to read at the age of three, fifty-(ahem) years ago, and I studied literature in...

Here's one of the first novels by Aphra Behn, one of the first women in England to make her living by writing, a pretty rare thing even...

I was surprised to learn that Cervantes, author of the classic "Don Quixote," thought that his last work, "Los Trabajos De Persiles Y...

Some confusion seems to exist as to the true provenance of "Amadis Of Gaul," and even as to its true author. Did Garci Rodriguez de...