I was sorting out my bookshelves the other day in a vain attempt to get some more space and, while doing so, realised that well over half my collection, if not more, could be classified as 'Classics'. Austen, Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Wharton, Zola, Trollope et al and I started to wonder how a book is classified as such.
I regard the Anne of Green Gables books by LM Montgomery as classics, also Frances Hodgson Burnett's Secret Garden and A Little Princess. But somehow I don't categorize Elizabeth von Arnim or EM Delafield as Classics (with the exception of Diary of a Provincial Lady). So what does constitute a classic? It can't just be time …. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, Catcher in the Rye by Salinger, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee are just a few examples of titles which are marketed as Modern Classics. Perhaps in a hundred years or so when they are no longer modern they will become just Classics. It is a question I have often pondered on and wondered if being named as a Classic can put off prospective readers? I have been asked by colleagues and friends on different occasions what was I reading and when I produced a Bronte or an Austen, I would see a grimace and the response would be Oh, a classic how boring.
Last year I re-read Georgette Heyer, an author consigned to the Romance section of my local library and, I daresay, in others as well. I will go so far as to say that I think her books are Classics. Not only do they qualify under the time lapse if this is a criteria, her early ones were written in the 1920s and 1930s, but her Regency novels are simply masterpieces of a particular genre and will never be bettered. The fact that they have never been out of print, save those she suppressed, is testament to this and yet she has always been spoken of rather slightingly.
When I go to my book sale in November, a regular local one in aid of charity and filled with thousands of books, I go straight to the hardback table and usually manage to find some old and neglected book which nobody is interested in, one year an entire Millennium Everyman edition of 100 classics given to schools across the UK, and which had been thrown out and never read. These superb books were selling for 50p each, yes 50p and were being totally neglected while over on the paperback tables people were filling their bags with Grisham, Brown, Steele et al for at least three times the price. Sad.
A few weeks ago those lovely people at Oxford University Press sent me the full 2010 catalogue of their World's Classics with a letter asking if I would like anything to review. Well this is like letting a child loose in Toys R Us and I spent a happy hour drooling over practically everything (on line catalogues are well and good but nothing beats a paper version). The list includes British and Irish literature, the Oxford Shakespeare, American and European Literature, Eastern Literature, philosophy, Politics, History and many more. An entire library of knowledge all ready and waiting.
In this catalogue the titles range from Seneca through to Scott Fitzgerald and OUP is publishing This side of Paradise, his first novel, for the first time alongside the Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and the Damned. There are plenty of authors I have heard of but not read and, apart from very generously sending me a lovely parcel of books the other week at my request, another book arrived the other day, Tarr by Wyndham Lewis, about which I know nothing. Now's my chance to learn.
The entire classics series is being re-marketed and issued with new covers with complete notes on the text and a chronology of the author and loads of information to help introduce the reader to each title. They all look gorgeous which I hope you can see from the picture and I am a lucky lady indeed to possess so many of these titles.
Please check out their World's Classics on their website and see what riches await you.
Ultimately, I suppose in order to qualify as a Classic, a book has to stand the test of time and fashion and still be interesting and readable for all ages. I would love to know what Random readers feel on this subject and if you have any authors, neglected or unread, that you feel should be Classics.
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