Now I’ve got back into posting, today I bring you the first of the Penguin Modern Classics.
I decided to display them by author nationality, so to start off I present English modern classics.
The first in alphabetical order are two books by Arnold Bennett set in his birth place in the “Potteries” district of Staffordshire.
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| 1967 edition - Victor Skellern – Impressions of the potteries in the 1930s | 1971 edition – Victor Skellern |
Next, the wonderfully exuberant novel about itinerant artist, Gulley Jimson, titled The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary.
1967 edition – cover “Desire” by Stanley Spencer
Two diverse novels, one by Ivy Compton Burnett – A Family and a Fortune – a domestic drama, and the other a war memoir by Keith Douglas, titled Alamein To Zem Zem
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| 1962 edition – cover by Robin Jacques | 1969 edition – cover art by Douglas “Shapes of Derelicts” |
Ford Maddox Ford’s tetralogy Parade’s End also relates to the second world war and has been called “the best fictional treatment of war in the history of the novel”. It was made into a TV series in 2012.
1982 Edition – cover “The Dispatch” (The Captain’s Dugout) by Marjorie Watherston
Next three novels by E M Forster – Where Angel’s Fear To Tread, Howard’s End and A Passage to India.
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| 1965 edition – cover by David Gentleman | 1973 edition – cover “Interior” by Edward De Bas |
1973 edition – cover “Marchesa Casati” by Augustus John
Coincidently the next two novels are about children in unusually liberating environments – Lord of The Flies by William Golding and Richard Hughes’ wonderful A High Wind In Jamaica, both with great covers.
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| 1967 edition – cover “The Transparent Ones” by Yves Tanguy | 1971 edition – cover “View of Roseau Dominica” by I T Caddy |
Aldous Huxley’s first novel was Crome Yellow in which, so I learn, there are intimations of what was become Brave New World.
1969 edition – cover “Froanna” by Wyndham Lewis
To follow, Mr Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood and Arthur Koestler’s Arrival and Departure.
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| 1973 edition – cover “Portrait of Graf” by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner | 1984 edition – cover byKevin Grey |
Two novels by women, Rosamond Lehmann’s The Echoing Grove and Olivia by Olivia, the pseudonym of Lytton Strachey’s sister Dorothy. Interestingly both these novelists had connections to the Bloomsbury Group.
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| 1981 edition – cover “The Tea Table” by Edward Le Bas | 1966 edition – cover “Le Lit” by Vuillard |
I don’t have George Orwell’s most famous novel 1984 in a Penguin Modern Classics edition, but I do have Animal Farm with a great cover illustrated by Paul Hogarth.
1968 edition – cover by Paul Hogarth
Next post – continuing Penguin Modern Classics – English authors P to W.
