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The Sign of the Four

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

A Little Princess

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

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

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

Bleak House

Bleak House, completed by Dickens in 1853, tells several interlocking story-lines and features a host of colorful characters. Though very difficult to summarise, the novel centers around the decades-long legal case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, involving the fair distribution of assets of a valuable estate. The case is mired in the legal quagmire of the Court of Chancery, whose byzantine and sluggish workings Dickens spares no effort to expose and condemn.

Charles Dickens · Drama · 68 ch

The Moonstone

The “Moonstone” of the title is a large but flawed diamond, looted from India at the time of the Mutiny by an unscrupulous British officer. Many years later, estranged from his family due to his licentious lifestyle, the officer bequeaths the diamond to his sister’s daughter, Rachel Verrinder, to be given to her on her 18th birthday. Due to the ill-omens surrounding the gem, this may have been an act of revenge rather than reconciliation.

Wilkie Collins · Mystery · 55 ch

Mansfield Park

At the age of 10, Fanny Price, the daughter of a poor Portsmouth family, is sent to live with her wealthy uncle’s family, the Bertrams, at the country estate of Mansfield Park. The Bertrams treat her cruelly at first, and Fanny has trouble fitting in. Her female cousins, Maria and Julia, are fashionable and vapid, and her elder male cousin, Tom, is a drunk.

Jane Austen · Romance · 48 ch

Dubliners

Dubliners is a collection of picturesque short stories that paint a portrait of life in middle-class Dublin in the early 20th century. Joyce, a Dublin native, was careful to use actual locations and settings in the city, as well as language and slang in use at the time, to make the stories directly relatable to those who lived there. The collection had a rocky publication history, with the stories being initially rejected over eighteen times before being provisionally accepted by a publisher—then later rejected again, multiple times.

James Joyce · Drama · 17 ch

Ethan Frome

Ethan Frome is a young man whose nascent ambitions were thwarted by illness and privation. Now his daily toils wring only the most meager living from his fading farm, and his marriage is as frigid as the winter that has beset his home in Starkfield, MA. Yet despite the swirling snows, a flame of passion sparked by the recent arrival of his wife’s cousin, Mattie Silver, burns desperately within him.

Edith Wharton · Drama · 12 ch

The Lost World

Even though Doyle is most famous for his Sherlock stories, he was also a prolific novelist, and The Lost World is one of his more famous non-Sherlock novels. Like many novels of the day, it was first published serially. In it we meet a group of adventurers who head to a deep South American jungle to explore rumors of long-lost dinosaurs.

Arthur Conan Doyle · Adventure · 17 ch

Orlando

Originally published in 1928, Orlando, one of Virginia Woolf’s better-known novels, provides a splendid example of Modernist experimentation with genre and storytelling. Orlando is a young Elizabethan nobleman who loves writing poetry as much as he does hunting, wrestling with the household dogs, and indulging in a fine night’s carouse. After being favored by Queen Elizabeth herself, he falls tragically in love.

Virginia Woolf · Fantasy · 11 ch

Far from the Madding Crowd

Far from the Madding Crowd was Thomas Hardy’s fourth novel and was completed in 1874. It was originally serialized in Cornhill Magazine and was quickly published in a successful single volume. Hardy described Wessex as “a merely realistic dream country” and so it is in Far from the Madding Crowd, where an idyllic view of the countryside is interrupted by the bitter reality of farming life.

Thomas Hardy · Drama · 58 ch

The Decameron

In the time of a devastating pandemic, seven women and three men withdraw to a country estate outside Florence to give themselves a diversion from the death around them. Once there, they decide to spend some time each day telling stories, each of the ten to tell one story each day. They do this for ten days, with a few other days of rest in between, resulting in the 100 stories of the Decameron.

Giovanni Boccaccio · Comedy · 113 ch

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was the second novel written by Anne Brontë, the youngest of the Brontë sisters. The novel begins with the arrival of a young widow, Mrs. Graham, in a rural neighborhood. She brings with her her five year old son Arthur and takes up residence in the partly ruined Wildfell Hall.

Anne Brontë · Drama · 54 ch

Quo Vadis

In Nero’s Rome, a young Roman officer falls in love with a Christian hostage while the early Church faces persecution. Their story unfolds against the intrigues of the imperial court and the burning of the city.

Henryk Sienkiewicz · Historical · 75 ch

The Thirty-Nine Steps

Published in 1915, The Thirty-Nine Steps is a thriller set in Britain on the eve of the First World War. The novel’s protagonist, Richard Hannay, is an expatriate Scot who has just returned to London after many years in South Africa working in the mining industry. He finds England extremely dull and is just considering returning to South Africa when he is accosted by another inhabitant of the block of flats where he is living.

John Buchan · Thriller · 11 ch

A Princess of Mars

In A Princess of Mars, John Carter is transported to a Mars inhabited by strange civilizations and embarks on various adventures on his quest home. Often held up as a seminal example of pulp science fiction, A Princess of Mars is the first entry in Burroughs’ epic Martian series, and the first to feature the character of John Carter. Though often categorized as just a pulp adventure tale, A Princess of Mars was hugely influential on many budding science fiction writers, professional scientists, and explorers of the day.

Edgar Rice Burroughs · Sci Fi · 29 ch

The Railway Children

The Railway Children is Edith Nesbit’s most well-known and well-loved book for young readers. Since its first book publication in 1906, it has been made into movies, radio plays and television series several times, dramatised in the theatre, performed in actual railway stations, and even turned into a musical. It tells the story of three children: Roberta, Peter and Phyllis, who with their mother are forced to leave their comfortable suburban home and go to live in a small cottage in the country, after their father is taken away from them for what at first seem inexplicable reasons.

E. Nesbit · Drama · 14 ch

Silas Marner

In Silas Marner, author George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans) introduces an embittered linen weaver who withdraws from society after a betrayal of trust. He retreats to work his loom or count and re-count his accumulated gold and silver. The abrupt theft of his money sends Marner into despair, which is interrupted just as suddenly by the appearance of an abandoned infant on his hearth.

George Eliot · Drama · 22 ch

The House of the Arrow

After the apparently natural death of wealthy widow Madame Harlowe, a blackmailer accuses her niece of murder by poison—an accusation he knows to be false. The famous French detective Inspector Hanaud is called in, with Madame Harlowe’s death only an excuse to investigate a series of anonymous blackmailings the local police have been helpless to solve. The police exhume Madame Harlowe’s body and find no trace of poison, defeating the blackmailer—yet there’s a treatise on untraceable poison in the house library.

A. E. W. Mason · Mystery · 26 ch