Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

My late aunt was a solitary Miss Havisham-type figure; as the light faded on a winter’s afternoon she would sit in her armchair with her feet up re-reading Great Expectations.
This is probably my favourite Dickens novel. Although I grew to love Bleak House later on in life, Great Expectations was with me from childhood, immortalised in a black and white BBC serial on Sunday afternoons. I loved the opening scene in the graveyard, the pie missing from the larder and Pip playing cards with Estella, who calls him ‘a common, labouring boy’ under Miss Havisham’s haughty gaze. The novel stretches out far into the future, from 1812 to 1841, as Pip goes to London in anticipation of fulfilling ‘great expectations’ before returning to his roots, having grown mature and wiser through his misfortunes.
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river…the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates…

The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that instead of my running at everything, everything seemed to run at me…

She was dressed in rich materials – satins, lace and silks – all of white… But I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre long ago…Once I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress, that had been dug out of a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out if I could.
Dickens completed the novel in 1860 and was persuaded to rewrite the ending, reuniting Pip and Estella in the ruins of Satis House:
I took her hand in mine, and we went out of that ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.
I am going to sit in an armchair and read for an hour in the failing light this cold February afternoon. I owe it to my late aunt and myself to find the time to re-read Great Expectations.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

The perfect novel for Valentine’s Day. I first read this novel when I was 14; Celia Bannerman was Elizabeth Bennet and Vivian Pickles her overbearing mother in a black and white BBC adaptation. Every time I watch another adaptation, and there have been several, I go back to the novel; there is so much to re-read and savour. ‘The course of true love’ never did run smoothly but all ends happily. Mr. Darcy is redeemed as a true hero and gentleman; Elizabeth has found true happiness at last. This story is so well constructed, so satisfying in its conclusion that most contemporary romantic fiction pales into insignificance.
They walked on, without knowing in what direction. There was too much to be thought, and felt, and said, for attention to any other objects.
I love the way Jane Austen constructs happy endings; all her heroines eventually find true love to last them a lifetime, like Emma and Mr. Knightley ‘in the perfect happiness of the union’. And that is how it should be, especially on Valentine’s Day. Life is too short and much too complicated to settle for less.