The Law and the Lady by Wilkie Collins was published in 1875. As in many of Collins’ novels, it deals with themes considered sensational or scandalous by Victorian society, and features a strong-willed, intelligent woman unwilling to be bound by society’s conventional attitudes. It also treats the subject of disability with some compassion, featuring a man born without legs as a major character.
Wilkie Collins · Drama · 51 ch
Confident of a son, Sir Philip and Lady Anna Gordon plan to name their first child Stephen. Instead they receive a daughter—but they decide to keep the name anyway. Young Stephen Gordon continues to surprise her parents with her boisterous play, demands for shorter hair, and insistence on riding her horse astride.
Radclyffe Hall · Drama · 214 ch
Not content with having hollowed out the center of the Earth in his earlier novels At the Earth’s Core and Pellucidar, in The Moon Maid Edgar Rice Burroughs has his hero voyage to the Moon, which also turns out to be hollow and inhabited on the inside by human-like creatures. The hero and his companion have a series of adventures there, and discover both the sophisticated Va-gas and the malevolent Kalkars. Time passes, and we turn to following the hero’s descendants as they fight against an invasion of the Earth by the Kalkars.
Edgar Rice Burroughs · Sci Fi · 15 ch
The titular Vathek is a powerful caliph who, though intelligent and capable, has a tendency to indulge in sensuality. A mysterious traveler arrives in his kingdom and mesmerizes Vathek with a promise of dark powers and hedonism beyond imagination. Vathek becomes obsessed with the supernatural possibilities, and, goaded on by his power-hungry mother, embarks on a journey of blasphemy and debauchery.
William Beckford · Fantasy · 6 ch
Doctor Thorne is the third book in Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire series, which is set in the fictional county of Barsetshire, somewhere in England’s West Country. Unlike the two earlier novels in the series, Doctor Thorne isn’t set in the cathedral city of Barchester, but in the small village of Greshamsbury and the estate of the local squire, Greshamsbury Park. Doctor Thorne is a middle-aged medical practitioner in Greshamsbury, a friend of the local squire Mr. Gresham, who is deeply in debt because of ill-advised attempts to gain a seat in Parliament.
Anthony Trollope · Drama · 48 ch
A Sicilian Romance begins when a tourist meets a local monk at the crumbling ruins of the castle Mazzini. The monk invites her to the monastery to view a manuscript that records the mysterious happenings that occurred hundreds of years ago in the once-great castle. The manuscript tells of the plight of two sisters, Julia and Emilia Mazzini, who, after the return of their tyrannical father, witness supernatural phenomena around the castle’s neglected southern wing.
Ann Radcliffe · Drama · 17 ch
An ancient Roman hilltop fort proves an irresistible draw to Lucian Taylor, but what awaits at the top isn’t just a view of the surrounding Welsh landscape but a bacchal experience his young soul isn’t ready for. This experience sets his path as he attempts to transcribe his increasingly elaborate visions into the perfect book; the book that will actually mean something more than the banal novels he sees the publishing houses push out. The Hill of Dreams is a semi-autobiographical work, with Arthur Machen following a similar physical journey to the novel: a childhood in rural Wales followed by attempts to become an author in London.
Arthur Machen · Drama · 8 ch
No Name is set in England during the 1840s. It follows the fortunes of two sisters, Magdalen Vanstone and her older sister Norah. Their comfortable upper-middle-class lives are shockingly disrupted when, after the sudden deaths of their parents, they discover that they are disinherited and left without either name or fortune.
Wilkie Collins · Drama · 114 ch
Charlie Chan of the Honolulu Police Department makes his second appearance when a Honolulu widow is forced to sell her pearl necklace. She persuades Charlie to convey the necklace to its new owner, a famous businessman. Chan teams up with the son of a prominent jeweler handling the sale.
Earl Derr Biggers · Adventure · 22 ch
Published in 1924, The Three Hostages is the fourth of John Buchan’s novels to feature Richard Hannay. Following the conclusion of the Great War, Hannay has retired from British intelligence. He is coaxed from retirement to aid in the rescue of three prominent hostages held by an international criminal organization bent on controlling the disturbed minds of those affected by the Great War.
John Buchan · Adventure · 24 ch
Pellucidar, the sequel to At the Earth’s Core, was published in 1915. It continues the adventures of David Innes as he returns to the hollow interior of the Earth in search of his friend Perry and his lost love Dian the Beautiful. He takes with him many tools and weapons, intent on bringing civilization to the savage world within, which is populated with dinosaurs and neolithic creatures.
Edgar Rice Burroughs · Sci Fi · 16 ch
Tono-Bungay, published in 1909, is a semi-autobiographical novel by H. G. Wells.
H. G. Wells · Drama · 96 ch
In Sylvie and Bruno, the titular characters serve as the connection between the novel’s two settings: Outland, a fictional land in which the children’s father is the Warden, and the real world, Victorian England. After their father is betrayed by their uncle, the family leaves their home and travels to different places to meet interesting and unusual characters. The part of the story set in England is social commentary, with the characters discussing philosophy, religion, morals, and economics.
Lewis Carroll · Fantasy · 26 ch
Higgs has made his fortune with sales of his original travelogue Erewhon. When his wife dies, his long-held desire to return to the country overwhelms him, and even his friends agree that a change of scenery would be a good idea. Soon after his departure he returns back home to England unexpectedly early and deeply unwell, and so it’s down to his son John to piece together what happened during his fleeting visit to Erewhon.
Samuel Butler · Comedy · 29 ch
The Last Chronicle of Barset is the sixth, and as its title would suggest, final novel in Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire. Like the earlier books, it was serialized in Cornhill Magazine, with a hardcover edition coming out in 1867. It brings together many of the characters who had appeared in series’ earlier novels, and rounds off a number of story threads that those novels began.
Anthony Trollope · Drama · 84 ch
George F. Babbitt is a middle-aged realtor, family man, and resident of Zenith, a fictitious Midwestern city. His main preoccupation is to climb the social ladder by conforming to the norms of his environment.
Sinclair Lewis · Drama · 135 ch
Polly Burton, a journalist, sits at the same table as an old man over tea. He has an interest in the sensational local crimes that have left the police baffled. Over the course her visit, the old man explains his crime-solving methods, which are based primarily on reading newspaper accounts, crime scene visits, courtroom observation, and logical deduction.
Baroness Orczy · Adventure · 36 ch
No More Parades is the second in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End series. The book, released just a few years after the close of the war, is based on Ford’s combat experiences as an enlisted man in World War I, and continues the story first begun in Some Do Not …. Christopher Tietjens, after recovering from the shell shock he suffered in Some Do Not …, has returned to the edge of the war as a commanding officer in charge of preparing draft troops for deployment to the front.
Ford Madox Ford · Drama · 14 ch
Sartor Resartus was a strange and new book when it was first published in 1833, and in many ways it remains a strange and new book today. The bulk of the novel takes the form of the a commentary on the life and works of the fictional Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, a sort of renaissance-man German philosopher who develops a “Philosophy of Clothes.” The commentary is composed by a fictional English commentator, known only as the “Editor”; the Editor claims to have translated many of Teufelsdröckh’s ideas and quotes from German. As the commentary progresses, the Editor receives a bag of paper scraps on which are written various autobiographical fragments from Teufelsdröckh’s life.
Thomas Carlyle · Drama · 34 ch
During the Great War, German U-boat officer Conrad von Belke possesses the bravery, intellect, and facility in English for him to undertake intelligence work in the far north of Scotland. His mission is to provide information on movements of the British fleet in support of an audacious German submarine attack on their enemy. He’s not acting alone, however; his actions are guided locally by the experienced professional spy Adolph Tiel, who is in turn abetted by a most alluring and winsome “sister.” German strategy made substantial use of U-boats in attacking merchant shipping, believing this would rapidly and decisively weaken the Allied forces.
J. Storer Clouston · Drama · 28 ch