Romance Web Novels Featuring Classic

Romance web novels featuring Classic, with public chapters on NovelCult.

New here? Start with Villette by Charlotte Brontë

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

Persuasion

Anne Elliot is the under-valued daughter of a vain and improvident English baronet, Sir Walter Elliot. Some years previously, at the urging of a family friend, Anne had rejected a marriage proposal from a young but impoverished naval captain. When she unexpectedly encounters him again, she is filled with regrets.

Jane Austen · Romance · 24 ch

Mansfield Park

At the age of 10, Fanny Price, the daughter of a poor Portsmouth family, is sent to live with her wealthy uncle’s family, the Bertrams, at the country estate of Mansfield Park. The Bertrams treat her cruelly at first, and Fanny has trouble fitting in. Her female cousins, Maria and Julia, are fashionable and vapid, and her elder male cousin, Tom, is a drunk.

Jane Austen · Romance · 48 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

Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice may today be one of Jane Austen’s most enduring novels, having been widely adapted to stage, screen, and other media since its publication in 1813. The novel tells the tale of five unmarried sisters and how their lives change when a wealthy eligible bachelor moves in to their neighborhood.

Jane Austen · Romance · 61 ch

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

Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey is the coming-of-age story of Catherine Morland, a seventeen-year-old girl who’s entering society for the first time. Despite her naivete, she quickly gains two potential suitors. We follow Catherine as she tries to navigate the difficulties of romance, friendship, and responsibility—problems amplified by the fact that Catherine views her world through the lens of the dramatic Gothic novels she loves to read.

Jane Austen · Romance · 32 ch

The Blue Castle

L. M. Montgomery is perhaps best known as an author of youth fiction, especially her Anne of Green Gables series.

L. M. Montgomery · Romance · 45 ch

Emma

Emma is one of Jane Austen’s best-loved novels. Its eponymous heroine, Emma Woodhouse, has lived a pampered, protected life and consequently is somewhat unrealistic when she sets her sights on becoming a matchmaker for a young friend. The novel provides a light-hearted insight into the distinctions of the rigid class structure of England in the Regency period, and the social barriers to marriage between persons considered to be of superior and inferior rank.

Jane Austen · Romance · 55 ch

Sense and Sensibility

When her husband dies and leaves his estate to his son from a former marriage, Mrs. Dashwood and her three daughters are offered a cottage on the estate of a distant relative. The two oldest daughters fall in love, only to find that the objects of their affection have secrets that throw their lives into an uproar. The reserved oldest daughter and impetuous, fiery middle daughter will take very different journeys to discovering the true worth of their respective beaus.

Jane Austen · Romance · 50 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

Wuthering Heights

Returning from Liverpool, Mr. Earnshaw brings with him a dirty, ragged, black-haired child called Heathcliff, and sets into motion a tale of destructive passions. The book’s two locations, the genteel Thrushcross Grange and the wild Wuthering Heights, serve as matching backgrounds to the characters of their occupants, as they struggle to gain the upper hand in marriage and power. All the while, the ghosts of the past seem to drive revenge more than inspire forgiveness.

Emily Brontë · Romance · 34 ch

Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre experienced abuse at a young age, not only from her aunt—who raised her after both her parents died—but also from the headmaster of Lowood Institution, where she is sent away to. After ten years of living and teaching at Lowood Jane decides she is ready to see more of the world and takes a position as a governess at Thornfield Hall. Jane later meets the mysterious master of Thornfield Hall, Mr. Rochester, and becomes drawn to him.

Charlotte Brontë · Romance · 40 ch