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The Hound of the Baskervilles

It would be hard to nominate a more well-known character in English literature than that of the austere analytical detective Sherlock Holmes, created by Arthur Conan Doyle in the late 1880s. Holmes, alongside his friend and biographer Dr. John Watson, appeared in two initial novels and dozens of short stories serialized in popular magazines, attracting a devoted, almost fanatical following which continues to this day. The Hound of the Baskervilles, serialized in 1901–1902, was the third novel featuring Holmes and Watson.

Arthur Conan Doyle · Mystery · 15 ch

The Secret Garden

Mary’s parents fall ill and die, forcing her to be transplanted from India to the English countryside. She arrives at a strange and foreign country manor, where she discovers a long-neglected garden and hears strange sobbing noises at night. Thus begins The Secret Garden, a children’s book with an unusually dense collection of themes, symbols, and motifs.

Frances Hodgson Burnett · Drama · 27 ch

The Jungle Book

The Jungle Book is a short collection of stories published by Kipling in various magazines between 1893 and 1894. Kipling spent both his early years and his late teenage years in India, and that upbringing is front and center in these stories—despite them being written while he was living in Vermont, in the United States. The stories are fable-like, with most of them centering on the lives of anthropomorphised jungle animals and a few focused on human characters in India.

Rudyard Kipling · Fantasy · 7 ch

The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe is one of the most popular books ever written in the English language, published in innumerable editions and translated into almost every language of the world, not to mention the many versions created in film, television and even radio. First published in 1719, it can also claim to be one of the first novels ever written in English. Written in the form of an autobiography, it describes the life of the eponymous narrator Robinson Crusoe.

Daniel Defoe · Adventure · 20 ch

Gulliver’s Travels

Gulliver’s Travels was published in 1726 and is probably the most famous work by Jonathan Swift. It was an instant hit—selling out within a week—and has never been out of print, as well as having been adapted many times. Lemuel Gulliver, an English surgeon on the Antelope, is shipwrecked and washed up on the island of Lilliput, where the inhabitants are less than six inches tall.

Jonathan Swift · Comedy · 41 ch

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The irrepressible Tom Sawyer drives his Aunt Polly to distraction; she can’t decide whether to cry or laugh at his antics. He fights, falls in love, and finds adventure with two of his friends, one of whom will later become famous in his own right. Along the way he attends his own funeral, wins the girl by falsely confessing to something she did, and, most famously, convinces most of the boys in town to pay him for the privilege of painting his aunt’s fence.

Mark Twain · Adventure · 37 ch

The Call of the Wild

Jack London spent nearly a year in Alaska and the Klondike, mining for gold and braving the Alaskan winter. There he was inspired to write what would become The Call of the Wild, one of his most famous novels. The Call of the Wild tells the tale of a domesticated dog stolen from his California family and sold to sledders in Alaska.

Jack London · Adventure · 7 ch

The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850; it was one of the first books to be mass-produced in America, which helped ensure its immediate popularity and ubiquitous presence on contemporary shelves. Its first printing of 2,500 books sold out in ten days. The novel is set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony between the years 1642 and 1649.

Nathaniel Hawthorne · Historical · 26 ch

Heart of Darkness

A steamboat captain journeys up the Congo in search of a celebrated ivory trader whose reputation has curdled into rumor. Told by a sailor waiting out the tide on the Thames, it is a story about what empire does to the men who carry it out.

Joseph Conrad · Adventure · 3 ch

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

A celebrated naturalist joins an expedition to hunt a sea monster and discovers a captain, a crew, and a machine beyond anything he imagined. An undersea voyage through wonders, wrecks, and the limits of freedom.

Jules Verne · Sci Fi · 46 ch

Around the World in Eighty Days

Jules Verne’s most-acclaimed novel remains a cultural cornerstone to this day. The story of Phileas Fogg’s spectacular journey by then-novel technologies is a fast-paced, colorful, and thoroughly enjoyable portrait of the British empire at the height of its power. Originally published as a serial so believable that readers at the time placed bets on whether Fogg would succeed or not, Verne’s adventure epic continues to inspire travelers and adventurers even in modern times.

Jules Verne · Adventure · 37 ch

The Phantom of the Opera

“When I die and am in Heaven,” Christine Daaé’s father said, “I will send the Angel of Music to you.” It is with these words still in her ears years later that Christine accepts the disembodied voice that speaks to her to claim that divine title, and to give her singing lessons within her dressing room at the Paris Opera, as the fulfillment of her beloved father’s promise. And when those lessons lead her to a performance that astonishes the whole city, who could doubt but that the Angel had indeed come? Yet there is another, more sinister presence stalking about the Opéra Garnier: the Opera Ghost.

Gaston Leroux · Mystery · 28 ch

Ulysses

James Joyce’s most celebrated novel, and one of the most highly regarded novels in the English language, records the events of one day—Thursday the 16th of June, 1904—in the city of Dublin. The reader is first reintroduced to Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce’s previous novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen is now living in a rented Martello tower and working at a school, having completed his B.A.

James Joyce · Drama · 40 ch

Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary, often ranked among the greatest novels of all time, is Flaubert’s first novel, and considered to be both his masterpiece and one of the most influential works in literary history, with authors from Henry James to Proust to Nabokov heaping it with praise. The novel tells the story of Emma Bovary, a commoner wife of a country doctor, and her attempts to escape the drudgery of day-to-day mediocrity by engaging in adulterous affairs and overspending on luxuries. She remains unsatisfied even though her husband adores her and they want for little, and her shallowness eventually leads to their ruin.

Gustave Flaubert · Drama · 36 ch

The Invisible Man

Griffin, a scientist, has devoted his life to the study of optics. As his work progresses, he invents a method of making a person invisible. After testing the experiment on himself, he comes to realize that while the experiment was a complete success, he has no way of reversing his invisibility.

H. G. Wells · Sci Fi · 29 ch

A Study in Scarlet

A Study in Scarlet is the novel which first introduced Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic characters Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. It was published in 1887 in a popular magazine, Beeton’s Christmas Annual. It attracted little public attention at the time, but interest in Holmes continued to build with the subsequent series of short stories Doyle wrote featuring the austere, analytical detective—now one of the most well-known characters in all of English literature.

Arthur Conan Doyle · Mystery · 15 ch

The Wind in the Willows

The Wind in the Willows, the story of four animals and their adventures in the idyllic English countryside, started out as bedtime stories Grahame would tell his son. He eventually started writing them down, and finally produced this much-loved childrens classic. In continuous print since 1908, The Wind in the Willows has been illustrated countless times and adapted to stage, radio, and screen.

Kenneth Grahame · Fantasy · 12 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

Mrs. Dalloway

Probably Virginia Woolf’s best-known novel, Mrs. Dalloway, originally published in 1925, is a glorious, ground-breaking text. On the surface, it follows Clarissa Dalloway, an Englishwoman in her fifties, minute by minute through the June day on which she is having a party. At a deeper level, however, the novel demonstrates, through an effortless stream of consciousness, the connections formed in human interaction—whether these interactions are fleeting, or persist through decades.

Virginia Woolf · Drama · 11 ch

Journey to the Center of the Earth

A classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne, this work is one of the most well-known subterranean fictions to this day. It inspired many similar works and adaptations. First published in 1864 in French as Voyage au centre de la Terre, it was quickly translated to English by several different publishers in the 1870s.

Jules Verne · Sci Fi · 45 ch