Works of literature we could do without
Brigid Brophy, her husband Michael Levey, and Charles Osborne produced, in 1967, a list of the fifty works of English literature we could do without. Most were from well before our period (Beowulf, The Faerie Queen, Hamlet, etc.) Their witty and caustic comments are well worth reading. Though out of print, it is readily available second-hand. The following are, more or less, from our period. Note that several are in Cyril Connolly’s hundred key books of the Modern Movement.
George Moore: Esther Waters
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems
A E Housman: Collected Poems
Francis Thompson: The Hound of Heaven
J M Barrie: Peter Pan
Rudyard Kipling: An Habitation Enforced
H G Wells: A History of Mr Polly
John Galsworthy: The Forsyte Saga
Norman Douglas: South Wind
Somerset Maugham: The Moon and Sixpence
Virginia Woolf : To the Lighthouse
D H :Lawrence: Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Rupert Brooke: 1914 Sonnets
Edith Sitwell: Collected Poems
T S Eliot: Notes on the Waste Land
Aldous Huxley: Point Counter Point
William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury
C S Lewis: The Silver Chair
Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms