Wide Sargasso Sea is excellent. I didn't like The Eyre Affair (in part for the reasons PC mentions), though I agree that without JE first, it would be even less comprehensible.

though I agree that without JE first, it would be even less comprehensible.

I hadn't read JE since high school (the aforementioned three times), so I was really, really confused about what appeared to be the ending of JE in the world of TEA for most of the book, because I thought I had misremembered what actually happened in JE. I did think it was very, very clever for the events of the book to actually end up creating the ending we know now.

I was pretty much, um, obsessed with Jane Eyre the way 12 year olds can be obsessed.

I don't think I've read it in a decade. Probably should.

I don't think I've read all of Jane Eyre, I loved Wuthering Heights when I read it in middle school but wasn't so fond of it on reread as an adult.

I LOVE Middlemarch. I read it several summers ago at the beach and it was so wonderful. I leant it to Grandma E, I was surprised she hadn't read it. She told me "It's so wonderful, her way with words. I just want to go copy down every other line."

I'd read Silas Marner in high school and loved it. I also read Frankenstein in high school and loved it. I have never finished Dracula though. I start it but it doesn't enthrall me, I'm not sure why.

I'd read Silas Marner in high school and loved it.

Me too!

I keep hearing good things about Middlemarch. What the blinking hell is it actually about ?

PC, I liked the conceit, but the execution just didn't grab me. A little too arch or something.

I have never finished Dracula though. I start it but it doesn't enthrall me, I'm not sure why.

Because huge whopping chunks of it are kinda on the dry and boring side, and I say this as someone who re-reads Dracula at least once a year. (I even keep a paperback of it in my bookbag just in case I get stuck on the bus with nothing to read.)

Part of the reason I collect editions of Dracula is because it's THE source text for every vampire novel since. I mean, I'd love to collect editions of Something Wicked This Way Comes, but there aren't as many (affordable!) editions of it.

brenda, I don't really know what "arch" means, but I'd probably agree. That whole book was a slew of "Nice concept, poor execution."

I keep hearing good things about Middlemarch. What the blinking hell is it actually about ?

It's rural life in England in the 19th century. Lots of different characters and different things happening. It has the most beautiful writing.

I think I'm handicapped by having read Jane Eyre first time as an adult, and everybody in it just made my teeth itch. Jane was a whiner, Rochester was a dolt, St. John was a self-important prig, all the women were ciphers, and the little girl was just an irritant. Maybe I'd have been able to spend an afternoon with the housekeeper. Maybe.

I'd read WH as a teen, though, and while I thoroughly despised Cathy, Heathcliff, the whosey family and practically everybody in the book, the setting suited me. I like the blasted heath. And it fit my sense of sturm and melodrama that everybody dies! Yes! Take that, stupid no-sense-making life!

... I may be slightly emotionally overinvested in my reading material.