The Pilgrim's Progress

A man named Christian, weighed down by a burden he cannot remove, flees the City of Destruction and sets out for the Celestial City. The road runs through places whose names have entered the language: the Slough of Despond, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle and its owner Giant Despair. Every person he meets is a quality walking about, Faithful, Hopeful, Mr Worldly Wiseman, and the whole journey is presented as a dream the narrator has in a den. A second part, published six years later, sends Christian's wife Christiana and their sons along the same road with the guide Greatheart, and it is gentler and more companionable than the first.

Do not let the allegory put you off. Bunyan was a tinker's son writing in plain spoken English, and the book moves like an adventure story: monsters, trials, escapes, a river to cross at the end. The personifications are blunt by design, but the terrors are real, and the Slough of Despond remains one of the most accurate pictures of depression in older English writing. It runs as one continuous dream narrative without chapter divisions, which sounds forbidding and in practice pulls you forward.

Bunyan wrote it in prison, jailed for preaching outside the established church under the Conventicle Act, and the first part was published in 1678. Whatever a reader's beliefs, this is one of the foundation stones of English narrative, and it costs nothing to check: the trail from this book to Little Women runs in a straight line.