A Little Princess
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Sara Crewe loses everything and holds onto her kindness anyway. I loved it fiercely as a kid, and it still gets me.
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★ 5Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
One of my favorites, forever. Small, fierce Jane refuses to be anything but herself.
Truth & Beauty
Ann Patchett
Patchett's memoir of her fierce, complicated friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy. One of the great books about platonic love.
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
My favorite Austen, obviously. I reread it whenever I want to feel better about everything.
★ 5Samuel Johnson Is Indignant
Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis can do more in two sentences than most writers manage in twenty pages. Tiny, strange, razor-sharp stories.
★ 5The Georges' wife
Elizabeth Jolley
The last of Elizabeth Jolley's Vera Wright trilogy, about a young woman who becomes maid to one sibling and mistress to another. Spare, tender, and quietly devastating — it swept the Australian book prizes for a reason.