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.

Well, St. John is a self-important prig.

P-C, if you read Middlemarch make sure you get a copy with footnotes, I believe mine is a Penguin edition. Eliot references lots of events and situations that were current to the times but you probably wouldn't know about.

I believe she wrote it originally in installments for a magazine, so you could think of it like a box set for as series.

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.

When I first read Jane Eyre, I was ten, and I *loved* it. I reread it as an older teen, and had the same reaction as your paragraph above -- I couldn't read the book fast enough to get away from these people.

I don't remember how old I was when I read Wuthering Heights, but I remember loving it at the time. More for the atmosphere and the DRAMA than for the characters.

I read both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights when I was 14 or 15. And then I reread both of them when I was in my 30s. Jane Eyre held up better, for me.

I read Jane Eyre for the first time about six years ago and I adore it.

P-C, if you read Middlemarch make sure you get a copy with footnotes, I believe mine is a Penguin edition. Eliot references lots of events and situations that were current to the times but you probably wouldn't know about.

I'd recommend that for a lot of Victorian novelists. A lot of them (Trollope also comes to mind) were very much of their time. Which grounds their work in a reality but also means they make a lot of dated references.