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Through the Looking-Glass

Alice dreams herself into a mirror version of Wonderland, a whimsical land of talking flowers, and chess pieces, and a fighting lion and unicorn, and crosses sections of a life-size chess board. Upon reaching the Eighth Square, she is crowned a queen and the Red and White Queens throw her her very own dinner party to celebrate. Through the Looking-Glass is a sequel to the wildly popular Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where Alice finds herself in a mirror image of Wonderland, instead based on a chess board rather than a deck of cards, meeting mirror copies of her old friends.

Lewis Carroll · Fantasy · 15 ch

Tarzan of the Apes

The baby of an English aristocratic family becomes orphaned in the equatorial African jungle, and is raised by apes. As he grows up he discovers he is human, and very different from his anthropoid companions. He learns and develops human traits, yet retains his primitive skills and physical prowess.

Edgar Rice Burroughs · Adventure · 28 ch

The Adventures of Pinocchio

The Adventures of Pinocchio is a story that has reached many people across the globe since it was first penned by Carlo Collodi in 1883. The adventures were originally published in serial format in an Italian weekly magazine for children. In 1940, Disney released an animated film adaptation of the story that has solidified the fable in popular culture.

Carlo Collodi · Fantasy · 36 ch

Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair is perhaps Thackeray’s most famous novel. First serialized over the course of 19 volumes in Punch Magazine and first printed as a single volume in 1849, the novel cemented Thackeray’s literary fame and kept him busy with frequent revisions and even lecture circuits. The story is framed as a puppet play, narrated by an unreliable narrator, that presents the story of Becky Sharp and Emmy Sedley and the people in their lives as they struggle through the Napoleonic Wars.

William Makepeace Thackeray · Comedy · 68 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

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is Joyce’s first novel, published after the previous success of his short story collection Dubliners. The novel is written in a modernist style, with dialog and narration blending together in a kind of stream-of-consciousness meant to invoke the blurriness of memory. Joyce originally planned writing a realist autobiographical novel of 63 chapters titled Stephen Hero.

James Joyce · Drama · 13 ch

The Awakening

The Awakening charts Edna Pontellier’s journey of self-discovery. The time spent with a younger friend on a summer holiday on Grand Isle in Lousiana unlocks a feeling in her that she can’t close away again. On returning to her family home in New Orleans, she starts to transition from unthinking housewife and mother into something freer and more confident, although this doesn’t meet with the full approval of the society she’s a part of.

Kate Chopin · Drama · 39 ch

The Red Badge of Courage

Henry Fleming has joined the Union army because of his romantic ideas of military life, but soon finds himself in the middle of a battle against a regiment of Confederate soldiers. Terrified, Henry deserts his comrades. Upon returning to his regiment, he struggles with his shame as he tries to redeem himself and prove his courage.

Stephen Crane · Drama · 24 ch

King Solomon’s Mines

King Solomon’s Mines was published in September 1885, becoming an immediate best seller by tapping into people’s excitement for the unknown: in this case, the unexplored regions of Africa. Haggard wrote the novel in a very short period, between six and sixteen months, on a bet with his brother to try to match Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. In the process he created a new literary genre known as the “Lost World” genre, which would later influence other writers like Arthur Conan Doyle and H.

H. Rider Haggard · Adventure · 22 ch

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

One of the most controversial novels of the twentieth century, Lady Chatterley’s Lover follows the story of Lady Constance Chatterley, unhappily married to disabled World War I veteran and coal tycoon Sir Clifford Chatterley, as she takes as a lover the gamekeeper of her estate, Oliver Mellors, a working class man of the earth. Constance struggles with the guilt of her infidelity, but realizes that her marriage is over and wants to get more out of her life. Oliver, a veteran himself with some education, enjoys her company but worries about his own position in society.

D. H. Lawrence · Drama · 21 ch

The Sign of the Four

The Sign of the Four, initially titled just The Sign of Four, is the second of Doyle’s novels to feature the analytical detective Sherlock Holmes and his faithful companion and chronicler Dr. Watson. The action takes place not long after the events in A Study in Scarlet, the first Holmes novel, and that prior case is referred to frequently at the beginning of this one. Holmes is consulted by a young woman about a strange communication she has received.

Arthur Conan Doyle · Mystery · 12 ch

A Little Princess

Sara Crewe, the daughter of a widowed officer stationed in India, has come to London to attend a boarding school. A thoughtful and serious child, she is blessed with both an abundance of kindness and imagination, and her father’s wealth. But not everyone in her new life appreciates Sara for who she is, as she discovers when her circumstances abruptly change.

Frances Hodgson Burnett · Drama · 21 ch

Notes from Underground

Notes from Underground is a fictional collection of memoirs written by a civil servant living alone in St. Petersburg. The man is never named and is generally referred to as the Underground Man. The “underground” in the book refers to the narrator’s isolation, which he described in chapter 11 as “listening through a crack under the floor.” It is considered to be one of the first existentialist novels.

Fyodor Dostoevsky · Psychological · 22 ch

The Woman in White

The Woman in White tells the story of Walter Hartright, a young and impoverished drawing teacher who falls in love with his aristocratic pupil, Laura Fairlie. He cannot hope to marry her, however, and she is married off against her will to a baronet, Sir Percival Glyde, who is seeking her fortune. The terms of her marriage settlement prevent Glyde accessing her money while she lives, so together with his deceptively charming and cunning friend, Count Fosco, they hatch an unscrupulous deception to do so nonetheless.

Wilkie Collins · Mystery · 59 ch

Bleak House

Bleak House, completed by Dickens in 1853, tells several interlocking story-lines and features a host of colorful characters. Though very difficult to summarise, the novel centers around the decades-long legal case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, involving the fair distribution of assets of a valuable estate. The case is mired in the legal quagmire of the Court of Chancery, whose byzantine and sluggish workings Dickens spares no effort to expose and condemn.

Charles Dickens · Drama · 68 ch

The Moonstone

The “Moonstone” of the title is a large but flawed diamond, looted from India at the time of the Mutiny by an unscrupulous British officer. Many years later, estranged from his family due to his licentious lifestyle, the officer bequeaths the diamond to his sister’s daughter, Rachel Verrinder, to be given to her on her 18th birthday. Due to the ill-omens surrounding the gem, this may have been an act of revenge rather than reconciliation.

Wilkie Collins · Mystery · 55 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

Dubliners

Dubliners is a collection of picturesque short stories that paint a portrait of life in middle-class Dublin in the early 20th century. Joyce, a Dublin native, was careful to use actual locations and settings in the city, as well as language and slang in use at the time, to make the stories directly relatable to those who lived there. The collection had a rocky publication history, with the stories being initially rejected over eighteen times before being provisionally accepted by a publisher—then later rejected again, multiple times.

James Joyce · Drama · 17 ch

Ethan Frome

Ethan Frome is a young man whose nascent ambitions were thwarted by illness and privation. Now his daily toils wring only the most meager living from his fading farm, and his marriage is as frigid as the winter that has beset his home in Starkfield, MA. Yet despite the swirling snows, a flame of passion sparked by the recent arrival of his wife’s cousin, Mattie Silver, burns desperately within him.

Edith Wharton · Drama · 12 ch

The Lost World

Even though Doyle is most famous for his Sherlock stories, he was also a prolific novelist, and The Lost World is one of his more famous non-Sherlock novels. Like many novels of the day, it was first published serially. In it we meet a group of adventurers who head to a deep South American jungle to explore rumors of long-lost dinosaurs.

Arthur Conan Doyle · Adventure · 17 ch