Bleak House
Dickens at his structural peak — a double-narrated novel built around Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, a Chancery suit so old the original litigants are forgotten and the costs have eaten the entire estate. Esther Summerson's first-person chapters alternate with an anonymous third-person voice closer to documentary than fiction. T.S. Eliot called it the greatest of Dickens's novels; Harold Bloom put it among the dozen greatest in English. Sprawling, furious, and structurally daring.
Esther Summerson narrates half the novel, forever reporting compliments she swears she cannot account for, a coyness that grates across nine hundred pages. Krook dies of spontaneous combustion, junk science even in 1853. Jo's death scene milks every tear twice. The Chancery satire is immortal; the plot that resolves it runs on coincidence.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
