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Mary, Mary

Sixteen-year-old Mary Makebelieve shares a small room with her mother, a charwoman, in the tenements of early twentieth-century Dublin. While Mrs. Makebelieve is at work cleaning the houses of the wealthy, Mary wanders around the city and its parks absorbed in daydreams. Her encounter with a policeman who appears to signal romantic interest in her is the beginning of Mary’s coming-of-age story, which combines elements of folk- or fairytale with a complex vision of human psychology and the relations between various social groups: mothers and daughters, men and women, the rich and the poor, the young and the old.

James Stephens · Drama · 36 ch

The Rise of Silas Lapham

Silas Lapham’s long-lasting paint, made with minerals found on his family’s farm in Vermont, has helped make him a millionaire—as has hard work, ambition, and tough business sense. Now that he’s reached late middle age, he’s a success. A newspaper is writing him up in its “Solid Men of Boston” series, his family goes to seaside resorts in the summer, the scion of the aristocratic Covey family has joined his firm, his daughters have made inroads into 1880s society, and he’s even having a lavish house built in the newly fashionable Back Bay.

William Dean Howells · Drama · 27 ch

The Clue of the New Pin

Tab Holland, newspaper reporter and a friend of a local police investigator, is surprised to discover that his roommate’s uncle Jesse Transmere, a wealthy miser, has been found murdered in a cellar vault locked from the inside. More surprising is the fact that Ursula Ardfern, a famous actress and new acquaintance of Tab’s, has had her plays backed by the murder victim in the past. Although he has been regularly reporting on the case for the newspaper, Tab’s interest in the case intensifies after both his own apartment and the murdered man’s house are ransacked.

Edgar Wallace · Mystery · 41 ch

Huntingtower

Published in 1922, Huntingtower is the first of John Buchan’s novels to feature Dickson McCunn. McCunn, recently retired, embarks upon a walking tour of southwestern Scotland and encounters a poet and former soldier on his travels. They spend the evening in a small village, and when they investigate a large empty house nearby, they hear a woman singing from within.

John Buchan · Adventure · 18 ch

Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry isn’t suited to be a lawyer, so he becomes a preacher instead. Although he experiences a variety of failures, and even more successes, Gantry ultimately finds this new career path suits him very well indeed—despite his drinking and womanizing. Throughout his time as a preacher Gantry progresses through the hierarchies of the Baptist and Methodist churches, dabbles in revivalism and “New Thought,” and even experiments with politics, all the while emerging from scandals relatively unscathed and ready to move onward and upward once again.

Sinclair Lewis · Drama · 197 ch

The Story of Ivy

Published in the United Kingdom in 1927, The Story of Ivy is a melodramatic murder mystery centered on a young woman, Ivy Lexton, who is caught up in the lifestyle of fashionable London during the Roaring Twenties. Having run through her late husband’s fortune after only a few years, Ivy chances upon a millionaire whom she seems to be able to charm—at least at first, before he refuses her further advances. Meanwhile, Ivy must also untangle herself from her devoted lover, a poor but handsome doctor.

Marie Belloc Lowndes · Mystery · 25 ch

The Sport of the Gods

The Sport of the Gods is a novel set in the United States in the late nineteenth century. It chronicles the tribulations of the Oakleys, an African American family of four, as they struggle to survive and maintain their integrity in a Southern town and then in New York City. Prejudice, provincialism, and temptation take their tolls, and the justice system stands ever ready to grab the losers.

Paul Laurence Dunbar · Drama · 20 ch

Riceyman Steps

Riceyman Steps, first published in 1923, is set in “dingy and sordid” Clerkenwell, in central London, where “existence was a dangerous and difficult adventure in almost frantic quest of food, drink and shelter.” It’s there that Henry Earlforward runs a gloomy, dusty store full of secondhand books. He eats less and less with every day, keeps his young servant Elsie working long hours for minimal pay, and never lights a candle when darkness will do. One day he takes notice of Violet, a middle-aged widow who owns a confectionary shop nearby, and they become husband and wife soon after.

Arnold Bennett · Drama · 50 ch

Sanine

Vladimir Sanine has arrived back to the family home where his mother and younger sister live, after several years away. While deciding what to do with his life, he meets up with a circle of friends and acquaintances, old and new, and spends his time as many carefree young adults do: in a whirl of parties, politics, picnics, and philosophical talk. But the freedoms of early twentieth century Russia are still held back by the structures of historical conduct, and their carefree attitudes erode when put in conflict with society’s expectations.

Mikhail Artsybashev · Drama · 51 ch

Pimpernel and Rosemary

Rosemary, the former love of Peter Blakeney, is about to be married to one of Peter’s friends. A famous journalist, she is asked to come to Transylvania and report on the Romanian occupation following the First World War, having travelled there many times in her childhood with Peter’s mother. She agrees to move up her wedding so that her fiancé can travel with her.

Baroness Orczy · Adventure · 50 ch

Clotel

The first published novel by a black American author combines real-life stories, including his own story of escaping slavery and recollections he heard while helping others escape, with abolitionist agitprop, revealing ephemera from the newspapers of the time, and sympathetic (if somewhat melodramatic) characters. What emerges from this collage is an indictment of slavery and of American hypocrisy about liberty that found an enthusiastic and enraged audience when it was published in 1853. Clotel has a complex publishing history, with four separate editions published between 1853 and 1867.

William Wells Brown · Drama · 30 ch

William—An Englishman

William Tully is an unremarkable English clerk, passing his mundane and well-ordered life by doing what others tell him and trying to live up to their expectations. But when his mother passes away suddenly, William finally decides to take control of his own life and discover his purpose in the world. Inspired by a coworker’s advice, William becomes immersed in political activism and eventually meets Griselda Watkins, a young suffragette.

Cicely Hamilton · Drama · 7 ch

Rachel Ray

Both Rachel Ray’s mother and elder sister are widows. They live a quiet life in their rural village, under the shadow of the nearby town of Baslehurst. When Rachel’s attractions catch the eye of Luke Rowan—a young man recently arrived in town to develop a brewery in which he has a commercial interest—reactions are varied.

Anthony Trollope · Drama · 31 ch

The Getting of Wisdom

Twelve-year-old Laura and her three younger siblings live in rural Victoria, Australia. Their father has died, and their mother supports the family through sewing and embroidery. With financial support from her godmother, Laura is sent to the prestigious Ladies’ College, a girls’ boarding school in the state’s capital city of Melbourne.

Henry Handel Richardson · Drama · 25 ch

The American Senator

When John Morton returns to his rural English estate from a diplomatic posting in Washington, he returns not only with an American senator seeking to understand England, but also with a fiancée, the aristocratic beauty Arabella Trefoil. Morton’s return also brings him back into contact with his slightly older and estranged cousin, Reginald, who still resides in Dillsborough, their ancestral town. Out of these elements, Trollope constructs a “chronicle of a winter at Dillsborough”—as the Senator of the title does not, in fact, take pride of place, which instead goes to the goings-on among residents of the town and its environs.

Anthony Trollope · Drama · 79 ch

Phoebe, Junior

As Salem Chapel concludes, a new minister has arrived, quickly paired off with his leading deacon’s daughter, the pink and plump Phoebe Tozer. She has her own ambitions, and as Phoebe, Junior begins, twenty years have passed since the family left Carlingford. They have risen in the “connection,” and in London society.

Margaret Oliphant · Drama · 45 ch

The Wrong Letter

While in his office, Superintendent Sinclair receives a phone call from an unknown caller, who claims that they murdered the Home Secretary in his home. Together with Sylvester Collins, an eccentric sleuth, Sinclair goes to the Home Secretary’s house to investigate the truth of the call, only to discover the body of the victim in a locked room. Is this a bizarre suicide, or is it a skillfully executed murder?

Walter S. Masterman · Mystery · 18 ch

The Mercy of Allah

The Mercy of Allah is a humorous, satirical novel on the methods by which the merchant Mahmoud rises from humble beginnings to massive wealth. The setting in a fictionalized Middle East provides deeply Catholic author Hilaire Belloc a “far-off land” in which to attack what he saw as the rapacious nature of the British businessmen, industrialists, and bankers of his day. Each episode of Mahmoud’s life satirizes greed, from small frauds and outright theft, to market manipulation, money-printing, and funding both sides in a long war.

Hilaire Belloc · Comedy · 15 ch

Cousin Henry

As an old squire approaches his death, he vacillates over how to leave his substantial property: to the niece he loves, or to the nephew he despises? A will is made in favor of the nephew, following the squire’s sense of duty. But during the young man’s visit to the estate, the squire’s revulsion makes him produce a new will in favor of his niece.

Anthony Trollope · Drama · 24 ch

The Turmoil

Bibbs is the dreamy, sensitive son of Mr. Sheridan, a cigar-chomping, larger-than-life businessman in the turn-of-the-century American Midwest. Sheridan made his fortune in the rapid industrialization that was overtaking the small towns and cities of America, but Bibbs—named so “mainly through lack of imagination on his mother’s part”—is too sickly to help his father in Sheridan’s relentless quest for “Bigness.” The Sheridan family moves to a house next door to the old-money Vertrees family, whose fortunes have declined precipitously in this new era’s thirst for industry. Bibbs makes fast friends with Mary, Vertrees’ daughter; but as he tries to make a life for himself as a poet and writer, away from the cutthroat world of business, he must face off against the relentless drum of money, growth, and Bigness that has consumed American small-town life.

Booth Tarkington · Drama · 33 ch