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15 responses to “What to Read After Austen?”
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Great post. Anne Bronte is very underrated, I’ve always felt, but Jane Eyre and Middlemarch my fav. of the ones you’ve mentioned. I just wanted to put in a good word for someone whose prose and wit I’m sure Austen would have loved, though Edwardian in period.
E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia books are beautifully written, cleverly plotted and extremely witty. There’s never a word out of place. Here’s an example: “Miss Mapp might have been forty, and she had taken advantage of this opportunity by being just a year or two older.”
Austen could have written that.
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Thanks for the suggestions! I agree, Austen could have.
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Yes to Mapp and Lucia! It was actually mentione by HRH the Queen in her Reading Room just this week.
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I love the Brontes too, and Tenant is (IMHO) the best of the bunch from those talented sisters.
Something I read recently, with a lot of the same wit we love in JA, is A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster. I saw the movie a gazillion years ago, but hadn’t picked up the novel until about a year ago. It was wonderful!-
I’ve been meaning to read more of Charlotte’s works, but I haven’t managed to find time yet. But I adore Tenant, it’s an amazing novel. She manages to get the voices of the main characters in first person POV so different!
I haven’t seen or read A Room with a View, I’ll add it to my list!
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Great analysis of possible post-Austen reads! My personal favourite is Oscar Wilde. I love A Room With a View, but I think it is the sunniest of Forster’s works and have the-read it several times.
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I’ll add it to my list!
I discovered Oscar Wilde in high school and I read almost everything he wrote, including his short stories and some of his poetry. The Ballad of Reading Gaol is one of the few poems I enjoy (it’s not my thing).
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Read Middlemarch. You won’t care about its length. I just read Tenant of Wildfell Hall. At least as good as JaneE and Wuthering.
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Middlemarch just looks intimidating, I’m sure I’ll love it. I have a copy sitting at home, shaming me…
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I too love Oscar Wilde. The Importance of being Ernest is one of my favorites. I have read the Brontes too. Tenant is very good. I think Anne does get overlooked sometimes. I have read Cranford as well. I may read North and South but I hear it’s long!lol I love posts like this with recommendations! I too read Silas Marner in school.
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North & South was long, but it was very good!
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Thanks for this post! Middlemarch and Pride and Prejudice are my two favorite books of all time. Dorothea is such a fun heroine (and Will Ladislaw does not disappoint). But I get it. It would be harder to pick it up now that it’s not being assigned in school.
I loved A Room with a View too, and I love Oscar Wilde. I don’t think I’ve read A Woman of No Importance and just downloaded it. Thanks for the recommendation. Great post.
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Thank you!
I was so obsessed with A Woman of No Importance that I read, listened to it, and then found a free online production of it. I needed everything! Its so good (in my opinion). I hope you like it.
I will do Middlemarch! Soon… probably
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The one writer that I’ve found comparable to Austen in wit and satire, and I really ought to have read more of than I have, is Brazilian great Machado de Assis.
I can’t tell you about the quality of the translations of his work into English, but there’s an American tiktoker, Courtney Henning Novak, who went viral in Brazil recently for reading his books and falling in love.
Particularly of note are:
Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas), in which a dead man tells his life story and romantic misadventures from beyond the grave
Dom Casmurro, a sort of 19th century Brazilian Othello in which the questionably sane narrator tells the tale of the obsessive romance that took him out of seminar and turned him into a paranoid, bitter man. Whether or not Capitu, the woman who inspired it all, actually cheated on him or not is probably the greatest debate of brazilian literature.
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That sounds very interesting. I have read some translated books and it’s sad for me because I wish I could read the originals and get all the nuance.
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