"Never heard of it."
I read Erewhon sometime during college, maybe after reading Utopia. Somehow I had heard of it before its mention in my Evil in Lit class. Maybe only seeing "A Room with a View" was reason enough for me to look up Samuel Butler.
Anyway, including this book on the Modern Library list is cheating a little: it was written well before 1901, and Butler belongs as thoroughly to the 19th century as do Dickens and Eliot. The list is the list and I assigned it to myself knowing it was stupid and chauvinist and omitted To Kill a Mockingbird, but of the 100 books, the only two not set in the 20th century are nonetheless clearly of the 20th, I, Claudius and Wide Sargasso Sea. I might disagree with the presence or placement of certain books but this is the only one that feels like it violates the list's own rules, not just mine. But this is not the book's fault.
About a third of the way through, a resemblance to Of Human Bondage occurred to me. Because of their coming from about the same era? I just googled Somerset Maugham, not daring to google "Of Human Bondage," because I didn't know its date: 1915. Way of All Flesh was begun in 1874. There is my tendency to conflate the late 19th century into the early 20th, and vice versa, e.g. trains in D.H. Lawrence startling me and never keeping straight in my head that Isabel Archer was born during the Civil War instead of, say, between Cleveland's administrations. Mostly it is the hostile parentage, Ernest Pontifex's own parents and Phillip Carey's uncle, and the self-serving and hypocritical Christianity these people profess. And the two heroes' foolish first romantic connections.
I learned the word laches: negligence in the observance of duty or opportunity; specifically: undue delay in asserting a legal right or privilege.