A Level
English Literature
Handbook
Private Study
Students who:
- reread texts that they are studying
- read widely for pleasure
- research additional ideas about texts
- engage in debate and conversations about literature outside of lesson time
Below is a reading list of recommended books you should be dipping into in full or in extract, to give you a wider grounding in representation of Love Through the Ages and Modern Times. We suggest you record as an aide memoire what you have read in a scrapbook.
Prose:
The Scarlett Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Sons & Lovers – DH Lawrence
We Need To Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Emma – Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
Enduring Love – Ian McEwan
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
Wise Children – Angela Carter
White Teeth – Zadie Smith
On Beauty – Zadie Smith
Howard’s End – EM Forster
Brick Lane – Monica Ali
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
Oranges are Not The Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – DH Lawrence
Maurice – EM Forster
Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
The Woodlanders – Thomas Hardy
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Madame Bovary – Flaubert
A Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
Station Eleven – Emily St John Mandel
A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf
Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
Drama:
Romeo and Juliet – Shakespeare
Antony and Cleopatra – Shakespeare
Much Ado About Nothing – Shakespeare
The Crucible – Arthur Miller
The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
A Woman of No Importance – Oscar Wilde
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – Tennessee Willams
The Rover – Aphra Behn
Tis Pity She’s A Whore – John Ford
Poetry:
The Middle Ages:
Chaucer – The Miller’s Tale, The Knight’s Tale, The Wife of Bath’s Tale
The Renaissance (1509 – 47) and The Elizabethans (1558 – 1603):
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503 – 42) dip into some sonnets
Sir Philip Sidney (1554 -86) sonnets from “Astrophil and Stella” sonnets (read a couple)
Shakespeare (1565 – 1616) sonnets, “My Mistress’ Eyes are nothing like the sun” and “The expense of spirit in a waste of Shame”
16th and 17th Century – The Metaphysicals:
John Donne (1572 – 1631) “ The Flea”, “The Sunne Rising”
Andrew Marvel (1621 – 78) “To His Coy Mistress”
18th Century – The Augustans:
Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744) “The Rape of the Lock
18th Century – The Romantics:
William Blake (1757 – 1827) “Songs of Innocence and Experience” – read a couple of each
William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850) “The Lucy Poems”, “Tintern Abbey”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1776 – 1849) “Frost at Midnight”
John Keats (1795 – 1821) “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, “Eve of St Agnes”
Lord Byron (1788 – 1824) “She walks in Beauty”
19th Century – The Victorians (1837 – 1901)
Christina Rossetti (1831 – 94) “A Birthday”, “Remember”
Emily Dickinson (1830 – 86) “My Life Closed Twice”, “Love’s Stricken Way”
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 – 92) “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal”, sections of
In Memoriam
Elizabeth Barrett Browning – “Poems for the Portugese”
William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) “When you are old and grey and full of sleep” “Prayer for my daughter”
Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928) “The Voice” ( written after the death of his wife)
20th Century – Modernism (1910 – 52)
TS Eliot (1888 – 1965) “The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock”
WH Auden (1907 – 1973) – “O Tell me what you think about love”, “Stop All The Clocks”
20th Century – Post Modernism (1952 - )
Ted Hughes (1930 – 1998) - “Birthday Letters”
Sylvia Plath (1932 – 63) – “Ariel”
Philip Larkin 1922 – 1985) – “High Windows”, “Whitsun Weddings”, "When First we Faced and Touching Showed”