Are you a writer with a deep dark secret?

Did you, unlike all your writing friends, despise English lit class? Did you skip the reading in your college courses? Do you feel like, with some books, the movie actually was better?

Just because certain books have been designated as classics, that doesn’t mean they’re universally enjoyable. Contrary to popular belief, not all writers love Jane Austen and Ernest Hemingway.

But reading classic novels can benefit your writing. If you can go through defining novels from different eras of history, you can learn a lot about how different authors throughout time have reflected their points of view in fiction. It’s important to have an awareness of how narrative trends have changed over time and to have an understanding of how we came to this current moment in storytelling.

Luckily, for every clichéd classic taught in high school, there’s always an alternative for readers with different tastes.

If you hated Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen suffers from a lot of misogynistic slander, but if you simply don’t care for her style and want to read books about women struggling with their assigned societal roles, there are plenty of other options.

Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope also follows women through their courtships and marriages, reflecting on the immense weight these choices had in nineteenth-century women’s lives. Early in the novel, one of the characters asks, “What should a woman do with her life?” This question frames the following stories of suitors and marriages and love as what they truly are: the only agency women had over their lives and safety.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South has the enemies-to-lovers dynamic of Pride and Prejudice but focuses more on social issues around the working poor, the havoc wreaked by the Industrial Revolution, and the cultural differences between nineteenth-century aristocratic England and nouveau-riche industrial entrepreneurs. Much of the novel centers on organized labor strikes, and the romance between the hero and heroine reflects the ways in which managers and laborers must learn to respect and understand each other’s needs.

If it’s the nineteenth-century novel itself that puts you to sleep, try nonfiction.

George Eliot’s famous, anonymously published essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” details her criticisms of nineteenth-century popular culture. Despite what the title suggests, Eliot did not turn her nose up at other women writers. Instead, she was deeply critical of the kinds of books women authors were encouraged to write and the kinds of stories that were marketed to women at the time. If you’re sick of gorgeous, perfect heroines who happen to fall for dazzlingly rich suitors, this essay is for you.

If you love sci-fi, fantasy, and horror—just not Asimov, Tolkien, and King

Horror lovers who are put off by Stephen King’s signature door stoppers need to pick up Shirley Jackson. Her iconic novel The Haunting of Hill House is quite slim, but it’s so frightening that if it were any longer, it might be too scary to read. The Haunting of Hill House follows a mismatched group of people who gather at a haunted house to see if they can identify and measure paranormal activity. The story centers on Eleanor Vance, an insecure woman who has spent most of her adult life caring for her sick mother. The longer Eleanor stays in Hill House, the less tethered she is to reality. Jackson is a great choice for horror lovers who prefer tension, anticipation, and terror to outright gore.

Of course, the obvious response to anyone who is not a fan of male science fiction authors like Asimov is to read Mary Shelley, but there’s an even stranger female-authored cornerstone of science fiction that you likely haven’t heard of. The Blazing World was written by Margaret Cavendish in 1666 and is possibly one of the first portal stories ever published. In it, a woman in the North Pole finds a bizarre world of talking animals who make her their empress. While hailed mostly as an early example of science fiction, Cavendish’s work also melds into fantasy, adventure, and even autobiography.

If you think you might like epic fantasy a bit more if it didn’t require reading an entire series of dense, deeply footnoted books like the ones written by the likes of J. R. R. Tolkien and George R. R. Martin, don’t worry. There is such a thing as a standalone epic fantasy novel.

Samantha Shannon describes her 2019 novel The Priory of the Orange Tree as a “feminist retelling of St. George and the Dragon.” While the book itself is huge, it is not part of a series. But if you fall in love with it, there is a separate standalone prequel that Shannon published in 2023.

If The Handmaid’s Tale hits too close to home

Maybe you watched the acclaimed TV show and got spooked by the intense violence. Or maybe Margaret Atwood’s famous depiction of an America overrun by Christian fundamentalists feels a little too close to reality.

Another modern classic work of feminist writing is Naomi Alderman’s The Power, which is now also a streaming TV series on Amazon Prime.

Alderman’s novel is set in a fictional future where society is built around matriarchal power after women, five thousand years earlier, developed strange electrical powers. Alderman explores how one gender having the ability to cause physical pain and injury to members of another gender, with little consequences, might work to shape cultural norms and power dynamics. And while it’s not exactly breezy reading, it might feel more cathartic than The Handmaid’s Tale, and it definitely speaks to similar themes of brutal misogyny.

What makes a classic?

No one should feel any shame in owning their reading taste. Just because you didn’t like a book that some people call a classic doesn’t make you a shallow reader or a bad writer.

But remember, the first book on your old high school English syllabus was not the be-all and end-all of the genre, author, or period of history your teacher wanted it to represent. So don’t write off an entire century of writing, a genre, or a set of themes just because you don’t connect with its most famous novel.

There are so many books to read and so little time to read them. You're sure to find something that speaks to you.