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Victory

Joseph Conrad’s Victory tells the story of Axel Heyst, a reclusive Swedish man who lives a solitary life on the island of Samburan in Southeast Asia. During a stay at a hotel on the nearby island of Java, Heyst encounters Lena, a young musician traveling with an orchestra. Witnessing Lena’s mistreatment by the orchestra’s conductor and his wife, as well as the sexual threats by the hotel’s owner, Schomberg, Heyst decides to help Lena escape the orchestra and brings her to his island, where they fall in love.

Joseph Conrad · Drama · 41 ch

Under Western Eyes

Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov is a student in St. Petersburg, applying himself to his studies and harboring ambitions of rising in Russian society. But his plans are shattered when a fellow student, Victor Haldin, assassinates a high-ranking Russian minister before turning to Razumov for help. Razumov is deeply conflicted, but in the moment acts to preserve his own self-interest rather than assist his friend.

Joseph Conrad · Drama · 12 ch

Washington Square

Catherine Sloper is a shy, plain, and not very clever young lady. She lives with her widowed father, a respected doctor, in Washington Square, a fairly new neighborhood in Greenwich Village. Catherine has a sizable income left by her mother, and stands to inherit a fortune from her father.

Henry James · Drama · 36 ch

Tarzan the Untamed

Tarzan the Untamed continues the adventures of Tarzan, the orphaned child raised by apes in the African jungle. It is the seventh book in the Tarzan series and was first published as a six-part serial in The Red Book Magazine from March through August, 1919, with the story continued as “Tarzan and the Valley of Luna” in a five-part serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly in March and April, 1920. The novel was later compiled and published as a complete book in 1920 by A.

Edgar Rice Burroughs · Adventure · 24 ch

The House Without a Key

Published in 1925, The House Without a Key introduces the kindly detective Charlie Chan, conceived by Earl Derr Biggers as a counter to the “Yellow Peril” stereotypes common in the era’s society. John Quincy Winterslip, having been sent by his family to convince his aunt to return to Boston, arrives in Honolulu to find that a rich family member with a shady past has been murdered. Detective Charlie Chan of the Honolulu Police Department recruits John to aid in the investigation.

Earl Derr Biggers · Adventure · 23 ch

The Story of the Amulet

In this conclusion to the Psammead Trilogy, Cyril, Anthea, Robert, and Jane are reunited with the cantankerous Sand-fairy. While the old creature can’t grant them wishes anymore, it points them towards an old Egyptian amulet that can grant their hearts’ desire—in this case the return of their parents and baby brother. While their amulet is only half of a whole, it still acts as a time portal which they use to visit locales like Ancient Egypt, Babylon, Atlantis, and even a utopian future in search of the missing other half.

E. Nesbit · Fantasy · 14 ch

Arrowsmith

Martin Arrowsmith, the titular protagonist, grows up in a small Midwestern town where he wants to become a doctor. At medical school he meets an abrasive but brilliant professor, Gottlieb, who becomes his mentor. As Arrowsmith completes his training he begins a career practicing medicine.

Sinclair Lewis · Drama · 195 ch

Summer

Edith Wharton’s controversial novel Summer is the story of Charity Royall, an ambitious young woman trapped in a stifling small town by both her gender and her social class. When a visiting stranger arrives in town, Charity is awakened to a wider world of possibilities and to the realities that constrain her. Published in 1917, the novel was both attacked and ignored for openly acknowledging female sexuality and its many inequities.

Edith Wharton · Drama · 18 ch

The Sundering Flood

Young Osberne seems destined for greatness. As a fearless boy, he shows a willingness to fight. He’s helped at key times in his life by a mysterious friend who appears briefly to give aid or to provide magical gifts.

William Morris · Fantasy · 68 ch

Manalive

A man of unusually large stature and dexterity arrives at a boardinghouse on the wind—literally—while its unsuspecting lodgers look on in shock. The man, Innocent Smith, performs comic, eccentric, and dastardly acts which are examined and put to trial by the residents and renowned experts. Lawyers on both sides of the question of Innocent Smith’s guilt bring revelatory correspondence to the trial.

G. K. Chesterton · Comedy · 10 ch

The Vicar of Wakefield

Though published in 1766, The Vicar of Wakefield was one of the most popular and widely read books of the Victorian era. References to Vicar in Victorian literature abound: George Eliot, Austen, Dickens, Mary Shelly, Charlotte Brontë, Alcott, Goethe, and many more famous writers all mention Vicar in their books. The plot concerns the titular vicar, Charles Primrose, a mild-mannered and forgiving man who lives with his family in a country parish.

Oliver Goldsmith · Drama · 33 ch

Catriona

Robert Lewis Stevenson continues the story of David Balfour, starting directly where Kidnapped left off. Compared to Kidnapped, Catriona is much more of a comedy of manners, politics, and romance than a simple action-adventure story, but it still has several of Stevenson’s trademark escapades, imprisonments, and daring escapes. The title character David Balfour attempts to navigate, to his own peril, his apparent role in the Appin murder, the subsequent trial of James of the Glens, life among high society, and the machinations of James Macgregor Drummond, the father of David’s great love, Catriona.

Robert Louis Stevenson · Adventure · 33 ch

Riders of the Purple Sage

In a small Mormon community in southern Utah, Jane Withersteen, a young, unmarried Mormon woman faces growing pressure to marry a local elder of her church. Elder Tull, a polygamist, already has two wives and seeks to marry Jane not just for her beauty, but to take control of the ranch her late father passed on to her. Jane’s resistance to marriage only serves to increase the mounting resentment against “Gentiles” (non-Mormons) in the area.

Zane Grey · Adventure · 23 ch

One of Ours

Claude Wheeler is the son of a successful Nebraskan farmer and a very devout mother. He’s sent to a private religious college because his mother feels it’s safer, but he yearns for State college where he might be able expand his knowledge of the real world. Claude doesn’t feel comfortable in any situation, and almost every step he takes is a wrong one.

Willa Cather · Drama · 72 ch

Three Lives

In Three Lives are the stories of three working-class woman from Bridgepoint—a town loosely based on Baltimore—in the early twentieth century. Each story tells of the hopes, loves, romances and sadnesses of the women as they live their lives. Written in a unconventional style, the lives of the three women are uncovered through their layered conversations and interactions more than through detailed depictions.

Gertrude Stein · Drama · 14 ch

The Law and the Lady

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

The Well of Loneliness

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

The Moon Maid

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

Vathek

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

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