Books: Bedside Reading

GREAT ENGLISH SHORT NOVELS (879 pp.)—Edited by Cyril Connolly—Dial ($6).

This book belongs to the cozy tradition of bedside belles-lettres. The selections, picked well off the main highroad of English literature, range from stormy thrillers to sunny farce, from the thunder of Samuel Johnson's prose to the lightning of Aldous Huxley's. They include little-known works by little-read writers as well as little read works by well-known writers: Maria Edgeworth, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Mrs. Gaskell, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, George Meredith, Thomas Love Peacock, William Hazlitt, Virginia Woolf. Few readers will like all of these stories, but almost everybody will be entertained...