Ten-Minute Book Club

KIRSTEN E. SHEPHERD is Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford. She founded LitHits in 2018.ALEXANDRA PADDOCK is a Lecturer in Old and Middle English at Keble College, Oxford. She is a lead curator of LitHits.DANIEL IBRAHIM ABDALLA is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Liverpool. He is a lead curator of LitHits.

• 1 Emily Dickinson, ‘The Brain is Wider than the Sky’ 52 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 83 Lord Byron, ‘Darkness’ 144 George Eliot, Middlemarch 195 Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, ‘At Bay St Louis’ 226 Emily Brontë, ‘Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee’ 257 William Wordsworth, The Prelude 288 Aphra Behn, The Rover 329 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales 3510 Charles Dickens, Bleak House 3811 Margaret Oliphant, ‘The Library Window’ 4212 Christina Rossetti, ‘No, thank you, John’ 4613 William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles forFreedom 4914 John Milton, Sonnet 19: ‘When I consider how my lightis spent’ 5315 Louisa May Alcott, Little Women 5616 Frederick Douglass, ‘What, to the slave, is the Fourth ofJuly?’ 6217 William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra 6418 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’ 6719 A.A. Milne, ‘Disobedience’ 7120 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick 7521 Langston Hughes, ‘Theme for English B’ 7922 Matthew Henson, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole 8223 Hans Christian Andersen, ‘The Fir-Tree’ 8524 John Donne, ‘A Valediction: of Weeping’ 9125 Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Pied Beauty’ 9426 Emily Dickinson, ‘Dear March—come in—’ 9627 Dylan Thomas, ‘Fern Hill’ 9928 William Wordsworth, ‘To Sleep’ 101W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, opening of‘The Nightmare Song’ from Iolanthe 10229 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Rhodora’ 10530 Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ 10731 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables 11232 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet 29 Sonnets from thePortuguese 11733 Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, ‘The Revolt of “Mother”’ 11934 Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt 12335 Countee Cullen, ‘The Wise’ 12736 W.B. Yeats, ‘No Second Troy’ 12937 Emily Dickinson, ‘The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually’ 13238 William Wordsworth, ‘Daffodils’ 13439 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past 13740 E.M. Forster, A Passage to India 14441 Harindranath Chattopadhyay, ‘Noon’ 14942 John Keats, ‘Ode on Melancholy’ 15143 Georgia Douglas Johnson, ‘The Heart of a Woman’ 15444 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre 15645 Sarojini Naidu, ‘In the Bazaars of Hyderabad’ 15946 Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Lantern-Bearers’ 16347 Jessie Redmon Fauset, ‘La vie c’est la vie’ 16748 Edith Wharton, ‘Mrs Manstey’s View’ 16949 William Blake, ‘London’ 17250 Vernon Lee, ‘The Doll’ 17551 Charlotte Smith, ‘On Being Cautioned Against Walkingon a Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because it wasFrequented by a Lunatic’ 17952 Otto Leland Bohanan, ‘Villanelle’ 18153 Yone Noguchi, ‘To a Sparrow’ 18354 Charlotte Mew, ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ 18555 Emily Dickinson, ‘Vegetation’s Juggler’ 18956 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Merlin and Vivien’ 19257 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Happy Prince’ 19558 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady 20059 Joseph S. Cotter Jr, ‘Rain Music’ 20360 Amy Lowell, ‘The Emperor’s Garden’ 20561 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations 20762 George Moses Horton, ‘Weep’ 21163 Karel and Josef Čapek, R.U.R. 21464 Claude McKay, ‘Subway Wind’ 21865 Djuna Barnes, ‘A Night Among the Horses’ 22066 Jean Toomer, Cane 22467 Constance Naden, ‘The Astronomer’ 22768 Kate Chopin, The Awakening 22969 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species 23270 Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain 23571 Willa Cather, My Ántonia 23972 Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South 24273 James Joyce, Ulysses 24874 E. Pauline Johnson, ‘Joe’ 25175 Riddle 57 the Exeter Book 25476 L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables 25677 Willis Richardson, ‘The After-Thought’ 26078 Margaret Marshall Saunders, Beautiful Joe 26279 Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat 26580 Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slaveand Four Years in the White House 27081 Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince 27482 Sojourner Truth, speech given at the Women’s Conventionin Akron, Ohio 27783 Wilfred Owen, ‘Arms and the Boy’ 28084 Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze’ 28385 Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol 28786 Jane Austen, Persuasion 29387 Phillis Wheatley Peters, ‘A Hymn to the Evening’ 29688 Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in theCévennes 29889 William Stanley Braithwaite, ‘Rhapsody’ 30390 Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat 305

The magic of this beautifully curated book is that you can spend ten satisfying minutes on a perfect short text – or you can be led into a lifetime of sparkling reading possibilities.