Classics Without All the Class discussion

Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life was mentioned in The Age of Innocence for example.

I've noticed that the russian writers like to mention Pushkin [not really with the name of a book, often a verse...]

Alex wrote: "Karena wrote: "Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life was mentioned in The Age of Innocence for example."

Also in Newland Archer's box of books in The Age of Innocence were a book of stories of A..."

You're right, Alex. Jeane mentioned him. Nice plug of the podcast too. ;) hehe

Don Quixote is mentioned in The first chapter of the Three Musketeers. Dumas says, " A young man, -- we can sketch his portrait at a dash. Imagine to yourself a Don Quixote of eighteen;" he proceeds to describe D'Atagnan in relation to qualities lacking in Don Quixote and ten items of clothing in addition to the picture one might imagine of Don Quixote.

Judy writes about reading several classic books in Daddy-Long-Legs, after being separated from the outside world in the orphan asylum for so long. She mentions that she had never read the Sherlock Holmes novels (very relevant this month!) or Little Women before she went to college, and she admires the imagination of Emily Bronte for coming up with a story like Wuthering Heights.

In "A Study In Scarlet", Holmes and Watson talk about Edgar Allen Poe's Dupin. No specific story, just discussing his merits (or lack of them) as a detective.

David Copperfield is mentioned in Gone With the Wind

The Pilgrim's Progress is mentioned in The Grapes of Wrath.

The Portrait of a Lady is mentioned in The Virgin Suicides. (I don't know if the latter is considered as a classic, though.)

In The Stand King mentions War of the Worlds Water ship Down The Time Machine and probably a couple others along the way.

Just about every major Shakespeare play is referenced in Brave New World.

The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith

I read it because it was mentioned in Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow, as one of the books owned (and presumably read) by Martha Washington.

I also read about it and its author, and according to Wikipedia:
"The novel is mentioned in George Eliot's Middlemarch, Jane Austen's Emma, Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins, Charlotte Brontë's The Professor and Villette, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, as well as his Dichtung und Wahrheit.[citation needed]".

The book is loaded with classic themes, such as
- the mother who lives to see her daughters marry well
- the fortune lost, and then.... (spoiler alert) regained at the end
- the good guy who is really a bad guy
- debtors prison ("gaol").

So it certainly influenced Austen and Dickens! And my reading made me feel just a little closer to Martha Washington.

David Copperfield and A Farewell to Arms in The Catcher in the Rye.