James Joyce’s most celebrated novel, and one of the most highly regarded novels in the English language, records the events of one day—Thursday the 16th of June, 1904—in the city of Dublin. The reader is first reintroduced to Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce’s previous novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen is now living in a rented Martello tower and working at a school, having completed his B.A.
James Joyce · Drama · 40 ch
Madame Bovary, often ranked among the greatest novels of all time, is Flaubert’s first novel, and considered to be both his masterpiece and one of the most influential works in literary history, with authors from Henry James to Proust to Nabokov heaping it with praise. The novel tells the story of Emma Bovary, a commoner wife of a country doctor, and her attempts to escape the drudgery of day-to-day mediocrity by engaging in adulterous affairs and overspending on luxuries. She remains unsatisfied even though her husband adores her and they want for little, and her shallowness eventually leads to their ruin.
Gustave Flaubert · Drama · 36 ch
Griffin, a scientist, has devoted his life to the study of optics. As his work progresses, he invents a method of making a person invisible. After testing the experiment on himself, he comes to realize that while the experiment was a complete success, he has no way of reversing his invisibility.
H. G. Wells · Sci Fi · 29 ch
A Study in Scarlet is the novel which first introduced Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic characters Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. It was published in 1887 in a popular magazine, Beeton’s Christmas Annual. It attracted little public attention at the time, but interest in Holmes continued to build with the subsequent series of short stories Doyle wrote featuring the austere, analytical detective—now one of the most well-known characters in all of English literature.
Arthur Conan Doyle · Mystery · 15 ch
The Wind in the Willows, the story of four animals and their adventures in the idyllic English countryside, started out as bedtime stories Grahame would tell his son. He eventually started writing them down, and finally produced this much-loved childrens classic. In continuous print since 1908, The Wind in the Willows has been illustrated countless times and adapted to stage, radio, and screen.
Kenneth Grahame · Fantasy · 12 ch
Probably Virginia Woolf’s best-known novel, Mrs. Dalloway, originally published in 1925, is a glorious, ground-breaking text. On the surface, it follows Clarissa Dalloway, an Englishwoman in her fifties, minute by minute through the June day on which she is having a party. At a deeper level, however, the novel demonstrates, through an effortless stream of consciousness, the connections formed in human interaction—whether these interactions are fleeting, or persist through decades.
Virginia Woolf · Drama · 11 ch
Like many of Dickens’ works, David Copperfield was published serially, then as a complete novel for the first time in 1850. Dickens himself thought of it as his favorite novel, writing in the preface that of all his works Copperfield was his favorite child. This isn’t surprising, considering that many of the events in the novel are semi-autobiographical accounts from Dickens’ own life.
Charles Dickens · Drama · 66 ch
Esmeralda is a breathtaking beauty and attracts the attention of men all around her, including an actor, a captain, and an archdeacon, to whom she is of course forbidden. But because of a kindness she paid to him, there is one whose love for her is pure: the archdeacon’s bellringer. The actions of the archdeacon, who cannot control his lust for the young woman, ultimately draws all four men into her orbit, and his, with tragic consequences.
Victor Hugo · Historical · 61 ch
A classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne, this work is one of the most well-known subterranean fictions to this day. It inspired many similar works and adaptations. First published in 1864 in French as Voyage au centre de la Terre, it was quickly translated to English by several different publishers in the 1870s.
Jules Verne · Sci Fi · 45 ch
Tess of the d’Urbervilles is said to be Thomas Hardy’s fictional masterpiece and is considered to be an important nineteenth century novel. It explores themes of love, sex, class and morality in an aching love story. It initially appeared in a censored, serialised version in The Graphic in 1891 and was published in a single volume the following year.
Thomas Hardy · Tragedy · 60 ch
One of the most famous ghost stories in literature, The Turn of the Screw earned its place in the annals of influential English novellas not for its qualities as a gothic ghost story, but rather for the many complex and subtle ways the reader can come to opposing conclusions as to tale’s very nature. Are the ghosts the governess sees real, or are they figments of her quiet insanity? The Turn of the Screw was originally published as a serial, and later went through many revisions by James himself.
Henry James · Horror · 25 ch
The best-selling novel Black Beauty by Anna Sewell was published in 1877. The story is a first person narrative told from the perspective of the horse Black Beauty. This unique narrative perspective enables readers to empathize with the lives of working horses and to reflect upon the cruel treatment that has been inflicted upon them.
Anna Sewell · Drama · 49 ch
The Last of the Mohicans is one of the most famous tales of pioneer American adventure. Set during the French and Indian War, Mohicans tells the tale of the journey of two daughters to meet their father, a colonel, at Fort William Henry. The road is long and dangerous, and they, along with their American and Native guides, encounter adventure at each step.
James Fenimore Cooper · Adventure · 34 ch
Set on an island off the Scottish coast, To the Lighthouse minutely examines the fleeting impressions of a large cast of family, friends, lovers, and hangers-on. Who can we be, Virginia Woolf invites us to ask, if no one can ever know our hearts—if they’re unknowable even to ourselves? To the Lighthouse remains one of the most important Modernist novels, exquisitely composed by one of the most gifted writers of the Modernist movement.
Virginia Woolf · Drama · 42 ch
The Island of Doctor Moreau is the narration of Edward Prendick, a shipwrecked man who finds himself on a mysterious island full of humanoid animal creatures. He comes to find that these creatures are the work of Dr. Moreau, a man who experiments in vivisection, and his assistant Montgomery. The story of Dr. Moreau’s island began as an article in the January, 1895 issue of Saturday Review.
H. G. Wells · Sci Fi · 23 ch
White Fang is Jack London’s companion novel to The Call of the Wild. In The Call of the Wild we follow a dog’s journey from domestication to wilderness, but in White Fang we see the opposite: a wild wolf-dog captured by men and eventually domesticated. White Fang’s journey isn’t an easy one; both the wild and civilization have their share of brutal violence.
Jack London · Adventure · 25 ch
Candide is the picaresque tale of the titular character’s fantastical journey from an insular, idealized life in a picturesque castle through the difficulties and evils of the real world. Satirical, comical, witty, and cutting, Candide was widely banned in its day for containing blasphemous and seditious concepts. Despite that, it survived controversy to become an important book in the Western literary heritage.
Voltaire · Comedy · 31 ch
Upper-class New York gentleman Newland Archer is set to wed May Welland in a picture-perfect union when the bride’s cousin, Ellen Olenska, returns from a failed marriage overseas. As Newland endeavors to help Countess Olenska be reinstated into the family’s good graces, his affections for her grow. Newland soon finds himself torn between his desire to conform to the society he knows and his new-found passion for the forbidden Countess.
Edith Wharton · Drama · 34 ch
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