Classic Drama and Romance novels

Classic Drama and Romance novels in the public domain, free to read on NovelCult.

Middlemarch

“ George Eliot” was the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans, one of the greatest of English novelists of the Victorian era. Her long novel Middlemarch, subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, is generally considered to be her finest work. Published in eight installments between 1871 and 1872, Middlemarch tells the intertwined stories of a variety of people living in the vicinity of the (fictional) midlands town of Middlemarch during the early 1830s, the time of the great Reform Act.

George Eliot · Drama · 88 ch

The Red and the Black

An ambitious young man of humble birth tries to rise in Restoration France by talent, love affairs, and calculated hypocrisy. A sharp portrait of desire colliding with a society built to contain it.

Stendhal · Drama · 76 ch

North and South

By the mid-nineteenth century, the transition of textile production in England from a cottage craft to mechanized factories was complete. Still, the effects of the industrial revolution remain distant from the idyllic rural parish in the New Forest where Margaret Hale grows up. But with her father’s crisis of conscience in ministry, the country lanes of Hampshire give way to the crowded urban streets of the industrial North of England.

Elizabeth Gaskell · Drama · 52 ch

Villette

Charlotte Brontë’s last novel, Villette, is thought to be most closely modelled on her own experiences teaching in a pensionnat in Brussels, the place on which the fictional town of Villette is based. In the novel, first published in 1853, we follow the protagonist Lucy Snowe from the time she is fourteen and lives with her godmother in rural England, through her family tragedies and departure for the town of Villette where she finds work at a French boarding school. People from her past reappear in dramatic ways, she makes new connections, and she learns the stories and secrets of the people around her.

Charlotte Brontë · Drama · 42 ch