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, 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
Betty Zane, published in 1903, was Zane Grey’s first novel. It tells the romanticized story of Grey’s great-great-aunt, who made a miraculous dash under fire to save a frontier fort from Indian attack. Fort Henry sat on the site of present-day Wheeling, West Virginia.
Zane Grey · Historical · 18 ch
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
Having been invalided out of the British navy, Davy Llewellyn plies his trade as a fisherman on the south coast of Wales. Investigating the wreck of a boat during a wild storm, he discovers an infant girl—the eponymous “maid of Sker”—whom he adopts. Her beauty and wit win a place in his heart that his own orphaned granddaughter can’t compete with.
R. D. Blackmore · Drama · 69 ch
John Lexham, a famous mystery writer, finds himself with money problems after an investment goes poorly. His problems multiply when a confrontation leads to a dead creditor, and John quickly finds himself convicted of the crime and given a lengthy prison sentence. Kara, a rich friend with a shady past, helps John break out of prison and escape abroad.
Edgar Wallace · Adventure · 23 ch
John Minute, formerly an unscrupulous African mining magnate, has flown to England, but can’t escape his past. Constantly threatened by blackmailers, he fears death and financial ruin. At the suggestion of the commissioner of police, “The Man Who Knows” is hired to assist in determining the source of these threats.
Edgar Wallace · Adventure · 17 ch
In the Dauphiné area of France, soldiers have come to arrest some local aristos as part of the French Revolution’s anger and revenge on anyone with money. A young woman rescues the family’s papers and money from their house after their arrests, and persuades a childhood friend to hide the valuables. The friend is soon arrested for the theft, so the young woman seeks to go to where he has been taken in order to defend him.
Baroness Orczy · Adventure · 39 ch
Dink Stover was introduced to readers in earlier volumes of the Lawrenceville Stories as a brash young newcomer whose biggest ambition is to play football for his school. At the start of Stover at Yale he seems much the same, arriving at the prestigious university determined to captain the football team, earn a place in the most prestigious secret society, and generally become the hero of a much less interesting novel. Gradually, though, the novel shifts its focus, as both Stover and the novel move outside the comfortable world of Stover’s prep school chums and examine the ways in which the school fails to live up to its “democratic” ideals.
Owen Johnson · Drama · 28 ch