Faced with the possibility of financial ruin, slave owner Arthur Shelby decides to sell two of his slaves: Uncle Tom and a young boy named Harry. Eliza, Harry’s mother, makes the decision to run away while Uncle Tom decides that his moral duty is to submit to his master and cooperate with the sale. The story follows the diverging lives of these two slaves—Eliza’s flight to Canada and Uncle Tom’s journey into the deep south.
Harriet Beecher Stowe · Drama · 45 ch
Acclaimed by the 20th-century Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin for its “polyphony” (a literary concept introduced by Bakhtin to describe a plurality of voices within a narrative), The Idiot is regarded by modern critics as one of Dostoevsky’s most experimental and artistically uneven novels. The novel follows the entrance of the epileptic Prince Muishkin—a character Dostoevsky meant to represent a “positively good and beautiful man”—into a circle of Russian high society characterized by vanity, greed, and social ambition. Thanks to his epileptic condition and his simplicity, earnestness, and kindness of heart, Muishkin is frequently branded by his newfound social circle as the titular “idiot”; but in reality, he’s a man of extraordinary sensitivity and insight.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Psychological · 50 ch
Set in 12th-century England, Prince John rules while his brother King Richard is away during the Crusades. During his reign, Prince John and others of Norman nobility abuse their power over the Saxons, forcing Saxons off their lands and many Saxon nobles into serfdom. Ivanhoe, a man disowned by his own Saxon father for going to war alongside the Norman King Richard, returns from the Crusades in disguise and appears in a tournament at Ashby.
Walter Scott · Historical · 46 ch
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
At the height of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, a mysterious daredevil rescues French aristocrats from execution and smuggles them out of France. This secretive escape artist is known to the French authorities only by the drawings of a flower, the scarlet pimpernel, that he leaves as his calling card. Marguerite St. Just has avoided the worst of the revolutionary turmoil.
Baroness Orczy · Adventure · 31 ch
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 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
Written in 1886, Kidnapped is an adventure novel set in Scotland in the mid-1700s, not long after the Jacobite rebellion in the Highlands which had attempted to set Bonnie Prince Charlie on the throne. This rebellion was put down brutally and afterwards the Government imposed strict controls on Highlanders, outlawing many clan leaders. The protagonist of Stevenson’s novel is young David Balfour, who is in his late teens.
Robert Louis Stevenson · Adventure · 33 ch
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 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 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 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
Judah and Massala are close friends growing up, though one is Jewish and the other Roman. But when an accident happens after Massala returns from five years in Rome, Massala betrays his childhood friend and family. Judah’s mother and sister are taken away to prison, and he is sent to a galley-ship.
Lew Wallace · Historical · 89 ch
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 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
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, 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
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 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 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