SO WHAT AM I READING?

In my PhD program, everybody comes up with a "major field," which is supposed to be a historical period or some other broad, clear category that everyone working in English will recognize as something you can specialize in--so you can pick "Victorian literature" or "American literature 1870 - present" or "postcolonial literature" & so on. You also pick two minor fields, which are more tailored to your research interests and can be more specific and quirky. I'm still working out my minor fields with my advisers, so since I have to start reading NOW I'm going to concentrate on my major list--Victorian literature and beyond!--and fill in the rest as we figure it out. This list is still absolutely subject to change, but it will give you a rough idea of what I'm going to be reading over the next year. As you can see, these are pretty famous books and you've probably read a lot of them, and so have I. We'll see what I do about rereading/refreshing my memory about some of these books; but I'm going to start with the ones I've NEVER read, which are marked with a star. You will notice my bizarre underpreparedness in Dickens & Hardy:

Fiction

1) Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838)*
2) Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
3) Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
4) William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847-8)*
5) Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849-50)*
6) Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852-3)*
7) Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853)*
8) Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1854)
9) Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859)*
10) George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
11) Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862)
12) Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864-5)
13) Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (1864-5)
14) Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
15) Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868)
16) George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-2)
17) Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1875)*
18) George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876)
19) Henry James, Portrait of a Lady (1881)
20) Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
21) Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)*
22) George Gissing, The Odd Women (1893)
23) Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895)*
24) Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
25) Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)*
26) E. M. Forster, Howard’s End (1910)
27) James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
28) Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (1918)*
29) May Sinclair, Mary Olivier: A Life (1919)
30) DH Lawrence, Women in Love (1920)
31) Katherine Mansfield, Bliss and Other Stories (1922)
32) Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)
33) Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)*

Poetry

1) Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)*

2) Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856)

3) Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Cry of the Children” (1844), “Grief”
(1844), “Substitution” (1844), “To George Sand: A Desire” (1844), “To
George Sand: A Recognition” (1844), “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”
(1850), “A Curse for a Nation" (1860)

4) Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859)*

5) Tennyson, The Princess (1847)*

6) Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850)

7) Tennyson, Maud: A Monodrama (1855)

8) Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott”(1832), “The Palace of Art” (1832), “Mariana
in the South” (1832), “The Lotos-Eaters” (1832), “Oenone” (1832), “Ulysses”
(1842), “Morte d’Arthur” [The Epic] (1842), “Locksley Hall” (1842), “Break,
Break, Break” (1842), “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854), “Tithonus”
(1862), “Crossing the Bar” (1889), “Flower in the Crannied Wall” (1869)

9) Robert Browning, “Porphyria’s Lover” (1842), “My Last Duchess”
(1842), “Meeting at Night” and “Parting at Morning” (1845); “Home-Thoughts
from Abroad” (1845); “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix”
(1845),“Fra Lippo Lippi” (1855), “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”
(1855), “Love Among the Ruins” (1855), “The Last Ride Together” (1855), “The
Statue and the Bust” (1855), “Caliban Upon Setebos” (1864)

10) Emily Brontë, “The Night Is Darkening Around Me” (1837), “Long Neglect Has
Worn Away” (1837), “Riches I Hold in Light Esteem” (1841), “Plead for Me”
(1844), “To Imagination” (1844), “Remembrance” (1846), “No Coward Soul Is
Mine” (1846)*

11) Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage (1858)

12) Matthew Arnold, “The Forsaken Merman” (1849), “The Buried Life”
(1852), “Thyrsis” (1866), “Dover Beach” (1867)

13) Coventry Patmore, selections from The Angel in the House (1854-6)*

14) George Meredith, Modern Love (1862)

15) Dante Gabriel Rossetti, selections from The House of Life (1848-81)*

16) Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “The Blessed Damozel” (1850/70), “Mary’s Girlhood
(For a Picture)” (1848-9), “Jenny” (1848/70), “My Sister’s Sleep” (1850), “The
Woodspurge” (1856),“The Portrait” (1846/70), “After the French Liberation of
Italy” (1859), “Ballad of Dead Ladies” (1869)

17) Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market (1862)

18) Christina Rossetti, Monna Innominata (1882)*

19) Christina Rossetti, “Song” (1848), “Echo” (1854), “In an Artist’s Studio”
(1856), “A Birthday” (1857), “Uphill” (1862), “An Apple-Gathering”
(1862), “After Death” (1862), “Old and New Year Ditties” (1862), “A Bird’s-
Eye View” (1863), “ Life and Death” (1863), “Remember” (1862)

20) William Morris, The Earthly Paradise, selections (1868-70)*

21) William Morris, The Defence of Guenevere (1858)

22) Algernon Charles Swinburne, Atalanta and Calydon: “When the Hounds of
Spring” (1865)*

23) Algernon Charles Swinburne, “The Triumph of Time” (1866), “Anactoria”
(1866), “Hymn to Proserpine” (1866)

24) Thomas Hardy, “The Ruined Maid” (1866),” “Hap” (1866), “Neutral Tones”
(1867), “The Darkling Thrush” (1900), “The Milkmaid” (1901), “The Seasons
of Her Year” (1901), “George Meredith (1828-1909)” (1909), “Tess’s Lament”
(1911), “The Convergence of the Twain” (1912)

25) Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Carrion Comfort” (1855), “It Was a Hard Thing
to Undo This Knot” (1864; 1937) “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (1876/
7; 1918), “God’s Grandeur” (1877; 1895), “Pied Beauty” (1877; 1918), “The
Windhover” (1877; 1918), “Spring and Fall” (1880; 1918), “As kingfishers catch
fire” (1881-2?; 1918), “No Worst” (1885; 1918), “I Wake and Feel the Fell of
Dark” (1885?; 1918)

26) Augusta Webster, Portraits (1870)*

27) Augusta Webster, Mother and Daughter (published 1895)

28) Amy Levy, Xantippe and Other Verse (1881)*

29) Michael Field, “La Gioconda” (1892),“Drawing of Roses and
Violets”(1892), “Birth of Venus” (1892), “A Pen-Drawing of Leda”
(1892), “Death, men say, is like the sea” (1893), “An Apple Flower” (1893), “A
Spring Morning by the Sea” (1893), “It Was Deep April and the Morn”
(1893), “Noon” (1893), “Cyclamens” (1893)*

30) Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936), A Shropshire Lad (1896)*

31) W.B. Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1890); “When You are Old”
(1891); “Who Goes with Fergus?” (1893); “Adam’s Curse” (1902); “No

Second Troy” (1910); “The Second Coming” (1919); “Sailing to
Byzantium” (1926); “Leda and the Swan” (1923); “Among School Children”
(1926); “Byzantium” (1930); “Under Ben Bulben” (1938)
32) Charlotte Mew, “The Farmer’s Bride” (1916); “In Nunhead Cemetery” (1916)

33) T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1920); The Waste Land (1922)

Drama

Gilbert and Sullivan, Patience (1881)*
Arthur Wing Pinero, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893)*
Oscar Wilde, Salome (1893)
Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance (1893)
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
George Bernard Shaw, Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893)*
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)*
J.M. Barrie, Mary Rose (1920)*