One difficulty of reading Austen is that the writing style for which she is so celebrated – a light, ironic tone – is sometimes hard for non-native English speakers to spot. She is deeply enthusiastic about Gothic novels, the more “horrid”, the better, and has a tendency to imagine their narrative structures and melodrama applying to her own life. It tells the story of Catherine Morland, a 17-year-old on holiday in Bath as the guest of wealthy neighbours. Of Jane Austen’s six novels, Northanger Abbey is the shortest at about 78,000 words. And all are either unusually short, or written in relatively simple English, or both. All are the kind of classics that would often make in on to reading lists for higher-level literature courses, as well as cropping up regularly on must-read or greatest-ever-novel lists. We’ve therefore put together this list of novels.
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… which is hardly easy even for native speakers to follow. ““I have been here before,” I said I had been there before first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fool’s-parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer it was a day of peculiar splendour, such as our climate affords once, or twice a year, when leaf and flower and bird and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the glory of God and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.”
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Brideshead Revisited is a more manageable 115,000, but that’s with sentences like the following: Great Expectations is a similarly challenging 196,000 words – and many of Dickens’ novels are much longer. George Eliot’s Middlemarch, for instance, is a superb novel, but at 316,500 words, it’s no small effort to get through it. We’ve provided a list of essential English novels that everyone should read in a previous article, but many of these are likely to prove daunting if you’re not a confident reader of English.
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Getting to grips with the best of English-language literature can be hard for those learning English as a foreign language.