In The Pickwick Papers, the wealthy and amiable Mr. Pickwick and his friends—calling themselves the “Pickwick Club”—wander around England out of curiosity and an interest in human nature. On the way, they have many loosely related comic adventures. Mr. Pickwick eventually employs a cockney man-servant, Sam Weller, whose fractured language and forthright attitude adds a great deal of amusement.
Charles Dickens · Comedy · 58 ch
At the height of belle époque Europe, an American couple—the narrator John Dowell and his wife Florence–and a British couple–Leonora and the titular “good soldier” Edward Ashburnham—meet and become firm friends. Travelling and socialising together, it’s a full nine years before the cracks start to show, but when they do the whole edifice starts tumbling to reveal the secrecy and lies concealed within. The Good Soldier is a classic example of the unreliable narrator genre.
Ford Madox Ford · Drama · 19 ch
After the success of Robinson Crusoe and its follow-ups, Daniel Defoe published Moll Flanders in 1722. It’s an episodic, picaresque novel that recounts Moll’s long life of misadventures. It has a journalistic, plain style, with unadorned, prosaic speech that flows naturally from story to story.
Daniel Defoe · Drama · 24 ch
A naive law student lodges in a shabby Paris boarding house beside a mysterious old man who has given everything to his daughters. A story about money, ambition, and what family costs in the big city.
Honoré de Balzac · Drama · 12 ch
Originally published as a serial, Nostromo is set in a fictional South American country where the outbreak of civil war puts the mining town of Sulaco in turmoil. Giovanni Battista Fidanza, known as Nostromo, is given the task of smuggling out a large amount of silver to keep it from the revolutionaries. Conrad was inspired to write the book when he read, in a sailor’s memoir, the tale of a man who singlehandedly stole a boatload of silver.
Joseph Conrad · Adventure · 32 ch
The Rainbow is an epic tale spanning three generations of Brangwens, a family of farmers living in Nottinghamshire around the time of the Industrial Revolution. The tale begins with Tom Brangwen, the very epitome of a rural English farmer leading the old way of life. We follow him as a youth easing in to the rhythm of rural existence.
D. H. Lawrence · Drama · 29 ch
Hepzibah Pyncheon is a dignified but destitute woman residing in the House of the Seven Gables—a manor with a dark history, and her ancestral home. She lives with her brother Clifford, who has completed a thirty-year sentence for murder, and a lodger named Holgrave, who is writing a book about the history of her family. Long ago, Matthew Maule owned the land that the titular house was later built on; but the scheming Colonel Pyncheon, founder of the Pyncheon family, wrongfully seized the land from him, and Maule was accused of witchcraft and condemned to death.
Nathaniel Hawthorne · Drama · 22 ch
Winesburg, Ohio, is set in a fictional town in early 1900s America based on Anderson’s boyhood memories of his hometown of Clyde, Ohio. The novel is actually a series of interconnected short stories, with each one focusing on the life of a different resident of the sleepy, pre-industrial town. Though each story peers into the personal life of a different character, the common threads running through all of them are George Willard, the young reporter for the Winesburg Eagle —and a pervasive sense of loneliness, even despair.
Sherwood Anderson · Drama · 25 ch
Martin Eden is a young, hard working man of the working class. After a chance encounter with a beautiful woman of the bourgeoisie, he finds himself in love. In order to win this woman’s approval he decides to educate himself: He corrects his speech, he learns proper manners, and he reads the classics of literature, philosophy, and science.
Jack London · Drama · 46 ch
The King of Upmeads has four sons who are tired of living in the peaceable kingdom, and yearn to adventure abroad. Three are sent out, but the fourth, Ralph, is chosen to stay home. He can’t stand being left behind, and so he runs away, wandering to the many lands beyond Upmeads.
William Morris · Fantasy · 119 ch
Dorothy Gale, accompanied by her cat, Eureka, is traveling to visit her Uncle Henry and her other relatives in California, when she encounters her second cousin, Zeb. While en route in a horse-drawn buggy, an earthquake strikes, creating a vast crevasse into which Dorothy, Zeb, Eureka, and a cab-horse named Jim fall. While underground, they encounter the Wizard, who was last seen flying off in a balloon at the end of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
L. Frank Baum · Fantasy · 21 ch
A baby is deposited in the bed of Squire Allworthy, a wealthy widower in Georgian England. The baby is given the name of Tom Jones and given to Allworthy’s live-in sister to raise. She soon marries and has her own son, and the two boys are raised together, with the usual household rivalries and jealousies.
Henry Fielding · Comedy · 213 ch
Anne Shirley, now 16, is moving from childhood into adulthood. As she begins teaching at Avonlea school she is determined to treat the children as she wishes she had been treated, and has many theories as to how that should be accomplished. She also enters the grown-up world of Avonlea in typical Anne fashion by working to beautify the landscape, and helping to form the Avonlea Village Improvement Society.
L. M. Montgomery · Drama · 30 ch
In this first full-length Arsène Lupin novel the gentleman-thief remains a shadowy figure for most of the novel, working two steps beyond the law with a hidden aim. To fight against this anti-hero, Leblanc introduces Isidore Beautrelet, the prodigious school-boy detective. Also making an appearance are old foes Detective Ganimard and (in a copyright-defeating name change) Herlock Sholmes.
Maurice Leblanc · Mystery · 10 ch
Dead Souls is Nikolai Gogol’s last novel, and follows the tale of Pavel Chichikov, a down-on-his-luck gentleman determined to improve his lot in life. The story charts his scheme to purchase dead souls—the titles of deceased serfs—from wealthy landowners. The novel’s satirical take on the state of Russian society at the time leads Chichikov into increasingly difficult circumstances, in his attempts to cheat both the system and the cavalcade of townspeople he meets along the way.
Nikolai Gogol · Comedy · 20 ch
Dangerous Liaisons ( Les Liaisons dangereuses ) is an early French novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, first published in four volumes in 1782. At the time of its publication novels were a new literary form, and Laclos chose to present his story in an epistolary style, composing the novel solely of a series of letters written by the major characters to each other. It was first translated into English in 1812 and has since become universally regarded as one the most significant early French novels.
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos · Drama · 179 ch
In a desire for better sheep-farming land on an unnamed British colony, Higgs decides to traverse the distant mountain range. On the other side he discovers not the empty rolling plains of his imagination but an entirely new civilization: the land of Erewhon. Inducted into the ways of their culture, he attempts to transcribe as best he can their thoughts on birth, death, machines, the production of food, their financial system, and many more subjects that on first glance seem absurd to the narrator but often end up revealing absurdity in his own thinking.
Samuel Butler · Comedy · 32 ch
The wealthy Bengali zamindar Nikhil has spent his last nine years of marriage trying to modernize and westernize his wife Bimala. But when he invites his friend Sandip, a fiery pro-Swadeshi activist fighting for Indian independence, to his home, Bimala becomes enraptured by the nationalist cause—and by the fascinating figure himself. The Home and the World is a complex exploration of the contradictions of the anti-British Swadeshi movement in the early 1900s.
Rabindranath Tagore · Drama · 12 ch
In her third novel, Virginia Woolf departs from conventional narrative and explores storytelling through discordant scenes and impressions. Jacob Flanders’ life story is told through the perspectives of the people in his life. In Jacob’s Room, we see Jacob grow from a young boy to an ardent student of Classical culture while the world around him moves closer to an impending war.
Virginia Woolf · Drama · 14 ch
Agnes Grey, published in the month of December, 1847, is the debut novel of Anne Brontë, writing under the pen name of Acton Bell. Written largely based on Anne’s own personal experiences as a governess, the novel tries to highlight what a governess’ work entailed in the 1800s and the consequences it had on the protagonist. Agnes, an eager young woman, tired of being treated as the youngest and filled with overwhelming ambition, takes on work as a governess for the rich and cruel Bloomfields.
Anne Brontë · Drama · 25 ch