Philammon is a young monk living in an isolated Egyptian monastery circa 400 AD. He feels a longing to see the world, so he embarks on a trip to Alexandria, a city teeming with culture and learning. On his way he meets Pelagia, a beautiful courtesan traveling up the Nile with a band of Goths in search of Asgard.
Charles Kingsley · Historical · 32 ch
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, a fictional autobiography of the eponymous narrator, contains—perhaps surprisingly—little about either his life or opinions, but what it does have is a meandering journey through the adventures of his close family and their associates. The book is famous for being more about the explanatory diversions and rabbit-holes that the narrator takes us down than the actual happenings he set out to describe, but in doing so he paints a vivid picture of the players and their personal stories. Published two volumes at a time over the course of eight years, Tristram Shandy was an immediate commercial success although not without some confusion among critics.
Laurence Sterne · Comedy · 322 ch
Published in 1860, The Mill on the Floss was the second novel published by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans). Set in the late 1820s or early 1830s, it tells the story of two young people, Tom and Maggie Tulliver, from their childhood into early adulthood. Their father, Jeremy Tulliver, owns Dorlcote Mill on the river Floss, and the children grow to adolescence in relative comfort.
George Eliot · Drama · 59 ch
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
Initially published throughout 1819 and 1820, The Sketchbook is a collection of 34 essays and short stories, collected and ordered according to the Author’s Revised Edition published in 1848. The Sketchbook is the first publication to use Irving’s pseudonym Geoffrey Crayon, which he would carry into later works. The stories vary in nature, from the comical “The Mutability of Literature” to the eerie and seemingly supernatural “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” but the personality of their narrator, Geoffrey Crayon, connects the stories and attracts their readers.
Washington Irving · Fantasy · 35 ch
Hard Times (originally Hard Times—For These Times ) was published in 1854, and is the shortest novel Charles Dickens ever published. It’s set in Coketown, a fictional mill-town set in the north of England. One of the major themes of the book is the miserable treatment of workers in the mills, and the resistance to their unionization by the mill owners, typified by the character Josiah Bounderby, who absurdly asserts that the workers live a near-idyllic life but they all “expect to be set up in a coach and six, and to be fed on turtle soup and venison, with a gold spoon.” The truth, of course, is far different.
Charles Dickens · Drama · 37 ch
In search of an occupation after the end of the Civil War, the Baltimore Gun Club undertakes the design and construction of a cannon capable of launching a projectile to the Moon. The three main protagonists—Impey Barbicane, president of the Gun Club, Captain Nicholl, Barbicane’s rival and then collaborator, and Michel Ardan, a French scientist—board the hollow cannonball en route to the Moon. The story concludes in Autour de la Lune, the sequel published four years later.
Jules Verne · Sci Fi · 28 ch
Jude the Obscure was first published in its complete form in 1895, just after finishing its serial run in Harper’s Magazine. At the time, its unconventional and somewhat scandalous themes earned it widespread criticism and condemnation. In the 1912 “Wessex Edition,” Hardy appended a postscript to the book’s preface in which he stated that the outrage ultimately abated with no lingering effect other than “completely curing me of further interest in novel-writing.” Indeed, Jude was to be Hardy’s last novel.
Thomas Hardy · Tragedy · 60 ch
The House on the Borderland is unique in several ways. The narrative itself is a double-frame narrative: the editor of the volume is presenting a manuscript he found under mysterious circumstances, describing the account of two fishermen who themselves discovered a hand-written account of the cosmic haunting of a recluse’s remote home. Additionally, the novel is one of the earliest examples of the departure of horror fiction from the Gothic style of supernatural, psychological hauntings, to more realist, science-fiction/cosmic horror themes.
William Hope Hodgson · Horror · 31 ch
The place is London, and the time is the late 1800s. Mr. Verloc appears to be an unassuming owner of a bric-a-brac store, but he’s actually a spy for an unnamed country. When he’s summoned by his superiors and ordered to plant a bomb to foment unrest in English politics and society, he finds himself stuck in a more-than-uncomfortable situation.
Joseph Conrad · Thriller · 14 ch
In 1840s St. Petersburg the ageing copyist Makar Dievushkin is, with various degrees of subtlety, trying to woo Barbara Dobroselova, a young woman who has had a swift fall in fortunes. Told in alternating letters to each other, their past stories and current hopes play out in raw and personal detail, as the daily realities of an uncaring and expensive town take hold. Poor Folk was Fyodor Dostoevsky’s first novel and was written to try and cover his escalating debts from his expensive lifestyle and gambling addiction.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Drama · 55 ch
The Mysteries of Udolpho is Ann Radcliffe’s fourth novel, first published in four volumes in 1794. It’s a typical gothic novel: set in a large castle which experiences supposedly supernatural events, a cruel and cunning villain is opposed by a young, virtuous heroine, who experiences great terror in the hands of her adversary. Emily St. Aubert, the novel’s protagonist, loses her parents and is placed in the care of her aunt, who unwittingly puts her in great danger.
Ann Radcliffe · Horror · 57 ch
The House of Mirth is Edith Wharton’s biting critique of New York’s upper classes around the end of the 19th century. The novel follows socialite Lily Bart as she struggles to maintain a precarious position among her wealthy friends in the face of her own diminished finances and fading youth. Lily has resolved to gain social and financial security by marrying into wealth, but callous rivals and her own second thoughts undermine Lily’s plans.
Edith Wharton · Drama · 29 ch
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
Our Mutual Friend is the last of Charles Dickens’ novels, published serially between 1864 and 1865. Like many of Dickens’ works, it addresses social concerns like how the poor and destitute are treated, but tempers these more serious themes with humor and satire. The novel opens with the retrieval of the body of a drowned man from the Thames river—a body which is identified as that of John Harmon, heir to his father’s huge fortune.
Charles Dickens · Drama · 68 ch
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
The Castle of Otranto is considered to be the first “Gothic” novel—that is, containing a combination of tropes, like hidden passages, haunted paintings, mysterious sounds, skeletal ghosts, ancestral curses, and unexplained deaths, that essentially invented the genre later made famous by authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, or Henry James. Walpole made a point of creating a novel that blends supernatural elements with more realistic depictions of characters and events. The plot centers around Manfred, the lord of Otranto Castle, who has just witnessed the death of his son under mysterious circumstances, just as his son was about to be married.
Horace Walpole · Horror · 8 ch
Last and First Men is an extended think piece about the possible future history of humankind, extending from the 1930s into the extreme far future, hundreds of millions of years from now. It’s supposedly narrated by one of the “Last Men,” and dictated to a modern-day “First Man” by a kind of time-travel telepathy. As time moves further and further into the future, Stapledon switches to overviews of vast stretches of time rather than detailing the events in the lives of individual people.
Olaf Stapledon · Sci Fi · 18 ch
The Princess and the Goblin is a children’s fantasy novel in the vein of the best classic fairy tales. The simple narrative follows Princess Irene as she discovers a ghostly relative living in a castle tower only she can access. During a walk outside one day, she encounters the threat of the lair of goblins living near the castle—and meets a new friend, a young miner named Curdie.
George MacDonald · Fantasy · 32 ch
Written in the style of a memoir, My Ántonia chronicles Jim Burden’s friendship with the daughter of a Czech immigrant family. Recently orphaned, he moves west to Nebraska to live with his grandparents. Riding the same train is the Shimerda family, who are also on their way to settle in the area.
Willa Cather · Drama · 46 ch