Books like Twelfth Night

If Twelfth Night stayed with you, these share its feel: love, joy and identity. Each comes with a real page, so you can tell in a minute.

About Twelfth Night · William Shakespeare

1.Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë, 1847

Also identity and freedom. An orphan with no money, no beauty and a ferocious sense of her own worth takes a job at a strange house. A first-person voice that still feels startlingly direct.

No sooner did I see that his attention was riveted on them, and that I might gaze without being observed, than my eyes were drawn involuntarily to his face; I could not keep their lids under control: they would rise, and the irids would fix on him. I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking,—a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless.
2.The Enchanted April

Elizabeth von Arnim, 1922

Also freedom and joy. Four Englishwomen answer an advertisement for a castle in Italy and swap grey London for a month of wistaria, freesias and unaccountable happiness.

She pulled her wrap closer round her with a gesture of defence, of keeping out and off. She didn’t want to grow sentimental. Difficult not to, here; the marvellous night stole in through all one’s chinks, and brought in with it, whether one wanted them or not, enormous feelings—feelings one couldn’t manage, great things about death and time and waste; glorious and devastating things, magnificent and bleak, at once rapture and terror and immense, heart-cleaving longing. She felt small and dreadfully alone. She felt uncovered and defenceless. Instinctively she pulled her wrap closer. With this thing of chiffon she tried to protect herself from the eternities.
3.Sense and Sensibility

Jane Austen, 1811

Also love. Two sisters, one who feels everything and one who shows nothing, discover what each kind of restraint costs and conceals.

Such behaviour as this, so exactly the reverse of her own, appeared no more meritorious to Marianne, than her own had seemed faulty to her. The business of self-command she settled very easily:—with strong affections it was impossible, with calm ones it could have no merit. That her sister’s affections were calm, she dared not deny, though she blushed to acknowledge it; and of the strength of her own, she gave a very striking proof, by still loving and respecting that sister, in spite of this mortifying conviction.
4.Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems

Christina Rossetti, 1862

Also longing and love. Poems of goblin fruit, ghostly visitors and stubborn refusals, by a Victorian who made longing sound like a nursery rhyme.

God strengthen me to bear myself;That heaviest weight of all to bear,Inalienable weight of care.All others are outside myself,I lock my door and bar them outThe turmoil, tedium, gad-about.I lock my door upon myself,And bar them out; but who shall wallSelf from myself, most loathed of all?If I could once lay down myself,And start self-purged upon the raceThat all must run! Death runs apace.
5.Little Women

Louisa May Alcott, 1868

Also love and joy. Four sisters, one thin purse and a long war, learning to work, quarrel, write and love in a New England town that feels like your own street.

Jo could not speak; and for several minutes there was no sound but the sigh of the wind and the lapping of the tide. A white-winged gull flew by, with the flash of sunshine on its silvery breast; Beth watched it till it vanished, and her eyes were full of sadness. A little gray-coated sand-bird came tripping over the beach, “peeping” softly to itself, as if enjoying the sun and sea; it came quite close to Beth, looked at her with a friendly eye, and sat upon a warm stone, dressing its wet feathers, quite at home. Beth smiled, and felt comforted, for the tiny thing seemed to offer its small friendship, and remind her that a pleasant world was still to be enjoyed.
6.The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde, 1890

Also identity and longing. A beautiful young man wishes his portrait would age in his place. It is a sharp, funny, then frightening study of vanity, charm and moral drift, still uncomfortably current.

“I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!” The hot tears welled into his eyes; he tore his hand away and, flinging himself on the divan, he buried his face in the cushions, as though he was praying.
7.Middlemarch

George Eliot, 1872

Also identity and love. A provincial town, a clever woman married to the wrong scholar, an ambitious doctor, and the slow, comic, devastating work of learning that other people are real.
8.Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman, 1855

Also joy and identity. A big, boastful, tender American voice that talks directly to you across time, celebrating bodies, cities and ordinary people. Dip in anywhere and find yourself addressed.
9.Far from the Madding Crowd

Thomas Hardy, 1874

Also longing and love. A woman inherits a farm and runs it herself — hiring, harvesting, weathering storms — while the men around her mistake her independence for an invitation.
10.Gitanjali

Rabindranath Tagore, 1910

Also longing and love. Short devotional songs that read like love letters to something unnamed. A way to spend an hour with longing, humility and joy, in English prose the poet shaped himself.
11.Poetry

John Donne, 1633

Also love and longing. The poet who argued with God, mapped the body, and made a flea a seduction speech—read him for wit that still draws blood.
12.Lamia

John Keats, 1820

Also love and longing. A serpent becomes a woman, a philosopher refuses to look away, and a feast is conjured out of nothing: Keats's late poem of magic against analysis.