Read Tess of the d'Urbervilles

A provincial town in 1830, Dorothea and Lydgate marrying wrong; the novel novelists call the best.

One June day in London, a party and a shell-shocked veteran; Woolf's stream of consciousness.

A Hebridean summer house before and after the war; the "Time Passes" section.

An Englishwoman accuses an Indian doctor after the Marabar Caves; Forster on the Raj.

Two sisters, a merchant family and a clerk in Edwardian England; "only connect".

Charles Ryder, Sebastian Flyte and a teddy bear at Oxford; Waugh's Catholic elegy.

Austen's witty romance of Elizabeth and Mr Darcy (1813).

Master English language for international communication