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Elmer Gantry

Elmer Gantry isn’t suited to be a lawyer, so he becomes a preacher instead. Although he experiences a variety of failures, and even more successes, Gantry ultimately finds this new career path suits him very well indeed—despite his drinking and womanizing. Throughout his time as a preacher Gantry progresses through the hierarchies of the Baptist and Methodist churches, dabbles in revivalism and “New Thought,” and even experiments with politics, all the while emerging from scandals relatively unscathed and ready to move onward and upward once again.

Sinclair Lewis · Drama · 197 ch

Emily of New Moon

Emily of New Moon, like Anne of Green Gables, follows the life of an orphan, Emily Byrd Starr, who was raised by her relatives after her father’s death. Emily, with her vivid imagination, lives on a farm on Prince Edward Island called New Moon. There, she befriends the children Ilse, Teddy, and Perry, each possessing special talents.

L. M. Montgomery · Drama · 31 ch

Emma

Emma is one of Jane Austen’s best-loved novels. Its eponymous heroine, Emma Woodhouse, has lived a pampered, protected life and consequently is somewhat unrealistic when she sets her sights on becoming a matchmaker for a young friend. The novel provides a light-hearted insight into the distinctions of the rigid class structure of England in the Regency period, and the social barriers to marriage between persons considered to be of superior and inferior rank.

Jane Austen · Romance · 55 ch

Erewhon

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

Erewhon Revisited

Higgs has made his fortune with sales of his original travelogue Erewhon. When his wife dies, his long-held desire to return to the country overwhelms him, and even his friends agree that a change of scenery would be a good idea. Soon after his departure he returns back home to England unexpectedly early and deeply unwell, and so it’s down to his son John to piece together what happened during his fleeting visit to Erewhon.

Samuel Butler · Comedy · 29 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

Evelina

Evelina is an epistolary novel that follows the titular Evelina Anville as she navigates the challenging (and sometimes absurd) nuances of 18th-century English society. The novel begins as Evelina is invited to London by the Mirvan family, marking her first true exposure to English high society. She soon encounters a series of misunderstandings, social embarrassments, and would-be suitors.

Fanny Burney · Comedy · 88 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

Fathers and Children

Arkady, a university graduate, returns from St. Petersburg to his father’s estate with his mentor Bazarov—a nihilist. Fathers and Children (also known as Fathers and Sons ) is a novel written in 1862 by Russian writer Ivan Turgenev and published in Moscow by The Russian Messenger. The main theme of the novel is the conflict between two generations—the “fathers,” the liberal serf owners, and the “children,” nihilists who reject their authority and traditions.

Ivan Turgenev · Drama · 28 ch

Five Children and It

Initially published in The Strand Magazine, which explains its episodic nature, Five Children and It was later collected into a book. Like many of E. Nesbit’s works, it has proven popular with children and adults to this day.

E. Nesbit · Fantasy · 11 ch

Framley Parsonage

Framley Parsonage is the fourth novel in Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire series. Originally a serial, it was first published as a book in 1861, and it has since been praised for its unsentimental depiction of the lives of middle-class people in the mid-Victorian era. As with the other books in the series, Framley Parsonage is set in the fictious English county of Barsetshire, and deals with the doings of a variety of families and characters who live in the region, several of whom have appeared in the previous books; but it primarily concerns the young Reverend Mark Robarts.

Anthony Trollope · Drama · 48 ch

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley (then Godwin) and Percy Bysshe Shelley were visiting their friend Lord Byron in Geneva one rainy summer. With the weather against them, they decided to spend their time writing ghost stories for each other. Frankenstein is Mary Shelley’s submission to their contest, later published anonymously in 1818.

Mary Shelley · Horror · 30 ch

Freckles

The titular Freckles is an orphan missing his right hand who runs away from the future the orphanage set for him in favor of making his own. After finding his way to the Limberlost, an area of swamp land in Indiana, he finds a job, conducts himself with honor, and finds love, family, and joy. The swamp, however, is not without its dangers, and he must stay vigilant to protect those who are dear to him.

Gene Stratton-Porter · Drama · 21 ch

From the Earth to the Moon

In search of an occupation after the end of the Civil War, the Baltimore Gun Club undertakes the design and construction of a cannon capable of launching a projectile to the Moon. The three main protagonists—Impey Barbicane, president of the Gun Club, Captain Nicholl, Barbicane’s rival and then collaborator, and Michel Ardan, a French scientist—board the hollow cannonball en route to the Moon. The story concludes in Autour de la Lune, the sequel published four years later.

Jules Verne · Sci Fi · 28 ch

Germinal

Germinal, named after the spring month in the French Republican Calendar, is often considered to be Zola’s masterpiece. The book follows Étienne Lantier, a young man whose career as a railway worker is abruptly cut short after he attacks a superior. He arrives in Montsou, a coal mining town in the north of France, to begin a new life in a different industry.

Émile Zola · Drama · 41 ch

Great Expectations

Charles Dickens was a British author, journalist, and editor whose work brought attention to the struggles of Victorian England’s lower classes. His writings provided a candid portrait of the era’s poor and served as inspiration for social change. Great Expectations, Dickens’ thirteenth novel, was first published in serial form between 1860 and 1861 and is widely praised as the author’s greatest literary accomplishment.

Charles Dickens · Drama · 59 ch

Greenmantle

Greenmantle is the second of John Buchan’s novels to feature Richard Hannay, a Scottish intelligence office in the British army, and as such is the sequel to The Thirty-Nine Steps. The book gives the account of Hannay and his associate’s separate journeys through war-torn Europe to Constantinople to thwart an uprising that is poised to throw the Middle East, India, and North Africa into disarray, changing the course of the war. The book was popular when first published and although it has never been made into a film, the director Alfred Hitchcock was said to prefer Greenmantle to The Thirty-Nine Steps, and considered filming it on several occasions.

John Buchan · Adventure · 23 ch

Gullible’s Travels

Published in The Saturday Evening Post between 1916 and 1917, the stories that make up Gullible’s Travels follow the comical misadventures of a long-suffering husband and his aspiring socialite wife. The unnamed protagonists and their hapless attempts to climb the social ladder serve as a canvas for Ring Lardner to satirize marriage, social dynamics, and the newly emerging middle class of the late 1910s. In 1917, the first five stories about the unnamed narrator and his “Missus” were compiled in book form as Gullible’s Travels, Etc.

Ring Lardner · Comedy · 7 ch

Gulliver’s Travels

Gulliver’s Travels was published in 1726 and is probably the most famous work by Jonathan Swift. It was an instant hit—selling out within a week—and has never been out of print, as well as having been adapted many times. Lemuel Gulliver, an English surgeon on the Antelope, is shipwrecked and washed up on the island of Lilliput, where the inhabitants are less than six inches tall.

Jonathan Swift · Comedy · 41 ch

Hadrian the Seventh

George Arthur Rose aspired to the priesthood, but after being much abused and taken advantage of for many years by his Catholic brothers, he finds himself disillusioned with humanity. But just as the secret conclave in Rome is deadlocked in the election of the next Pope, he finds himself rediscovered. A compromise in the election results in Rose being chosen for the office, and he styles himself as Hadrian the Seventh.

Frederick Rolfe · Drama · 13 ch