Last night, while watching The Notebook, I tearily texted my friend. "Most romantic movie ever," I wrote, to which she replied "Yeah - but doesn't it remind you of The Great Gatsby?" Much to my embarrassment I had to admit that I have not in fact read The Great Gatsby, nor have I seen the movie. 

As someone who considers herself to be reasonably well-read - I am, afterall, an English major - that I have not read F Scott Fitzgerald's seminal work is a source of shame for me. Indeed, as I lay in bed last night, I realised that I have not read a great many of those books we consider "Classics".

Part of the problem, I think, lies in the great difficulty in defining just what precisely a classic novel is. That faithful stalwart for defintions, the Oxford English Dictionary, defines the classic as a novel (or indeed, any art form) which has been "judged over a period of time to be of the highest quality and outstanding of its kind."

But judged by whom?

The various attempts to define the Western Canon have been riddled with difference. "Dr Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf", a fifty-one volume anthology compiled and edited by Harvard University President Charles W. Eliot in 1909 included such works as Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, which - to the non-American observer - seems a rather odd inclusion. Dr Eliot's shelf - better known as "The Harvard Classics - also includes The Confessions of St Augustine and The Origin of Species among its ranks; classics to be sure, but literature?

"The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction" is perhaps a better indicator of just what an aspiring grown-up should be reading. The twenty volumes include David Copperfield, The Potrait of a Lady and Vanity Fair. Writings by female authors are conspicuously absent - Jane Austen does not make the list, and nor do any of the Brontes.

Having read all of Austen's oeuvre - with the exception of the unfinished Sandition or the works of her juvenilia - and both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, I take exception to Eliot's exclusion. Surely a thorough knowledge of both Austen and the Brontes would equate to a thorough knowledge of the classics?

Apparently not. The Brontes are missing from "Great Books" while only Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Emma make the cut. It seems I am going to compile my own Five-Foot Shelf - but what should it include?