I think not pushing is key and properly introducing things. It's the same for literally everything, you start small and learn, but for some reason a lot of people just are thrown in the deep end of literature and hate it because they got pushed.

I think my love of classic lit is because I had an amazing 75 year old high school teacher who taught British Lit. He was super chill, it was all he taught, he was a great teacher and you knew he loved it. He did a great job explaining and introducing things so Shakespeare wasn't just reading it to read it.

It's a world of difference being introduced to something by someone who can explain, is excited and can answer questions vs my junior year English teacher who just assigned books and spent 50% of class talking about his old high school sports achievements (no joke, I hated him) and no one cared at all about anything we read.

I also taught ESL in NYC and I had my class read a simplified version of Frankenstein and they loved it. I was really surprised how well they took to it. They though the simplified Dr. J and Mr. Hyde was just okay in comparison.