A doctor is released from the Bastille after being falsely imprisoned for almost eighteen years. A young woman discovers the father she’s never known is not dead but alive, if not entirely well. A young man is acquitted of being a traitor, due in part to the efforts of a rather selfish lout who is assisting the young man’s attorney.
Charles Dickens · Historical · 46 ch
Anne of Green Gables established the career of Canadian writer Lucy Maude Montgomery. When Matthew Cuthbert sends away for an orphan boy to help on his farm, he is surprised to instead meet the captivatingly imaginative Anne Shirley. What ensues is one of the most enduringly popular coming-of-age stories, bringing the pastoral beauty of Prince Edward Island to the world.
L. M. Montgomery · Drama · 38 ch
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
Anna Karenina is certainly somewhat unhappy in her life, but presents a strong and vivacious character when called in to smooth over a major crack that’s appeared in her brother’s marriage. Unfortunately, the very visit designed to help her brother introduces her to Count Alexei Vronsky and sets in motion a chain of events that will ripple through families and the unforgiving society of wealthy Moscow and St. Petersburg. Initially serialized over five years in The Russian Messenger, Anna Karenina was first published as a two-volume novel in 1878.
Leo Tolstoy · Drama · 239 ch
An aging gentleman, drunk on romances of chivalry, renames himself Don Quixote and rides out with his neighbor Sancho Panza to right wrongs across Spain. Their misadventures pit heroic fantasy against everyday life in what is often called the first modern novel.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · Comedy · 139 ch
Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo has been described as one of literature’s greatest novels. The first two volumes were published in French in March 1862 and translated into English later the same year. Since then it has been translated by numerous others and has been adapted for film, television, radio, animation and the stage.
Victor Hugo · Historical · 371 ch
Peter Pan, a young boy who refuses to grow up, takes Wendy to the lost boys on the fantasy island of the Neverland to be their mother. Wendy’s two brothers, John and Michael, accompany them on their many adventures, including skirmishes with the Native Americans who reside there, and battles with pirates, led by Pan’s nemesis Captain Hook, who is said to be feared even by Captain Flint and Long John Silver. Peter and Wendy, J.
J. M. Barrie · Fantasy · 17 ch
H. G. Wells’ classic tale of alien invasion has to this day never been out of print.
H. G. Wells · Sci Fi · 27 ch
It would be hard to nominate a more well-known character in English literature than that of the austere analytical detective Sherlock Holmes, created by Arthur Conan Doyle in the late 1880s. Holmes, alongside his friend and biographer Dr. John Watson, appeared in two initial novels and dozens of short stories serialized in popular magazines, attracting a devoted, almost fanatical following which continues to this day. The Hound of the Baskervilles, serialized in 1901–1902, was the third novel featuring Holmes and Watson.
Arthur Conan Doyle · Mystery · 15 ch
The Three Musketeers is the first of three adventure novels written by Alexandre Dumas featuring the character of d’Artagnan. The young d’Artagnan leaves home in Gascony for Paris to join the King’s Musketeers. On his way to Paris, the letter which will introduce him to the commander of the Musketeers is stolen by a mysterious man in the town of Meung.
Alexandre Dumas · Adventure · 69 ch
Oliver Twist, or The Parish Boy’s Progress was Charles Dickens’ second novel, following The Pickwick Papers, and was published as a serial in the magazine Bentley’s Miscellany between 1837 and 1839. It details the misadventures of its eponymous character, Oliver Twist, born in a Victorian-era workhouse, his mother dying within minutes of his birth. He is raised in miserable conditions, half-starved, and then sent out as an apprentice to an undertaker.
Charles Dickens · Drama · 53 ch
Mary’s parents fall ill and die, forcing her to be transplanted from India to the English countryside. She arrives at a strange and foreign country manor, where she discovers a long-neglected garden and hears strange sobbing noises at night. Thus begins The Secret Garden, a children’s book with an unusually dense collection of themes, symbols, and motifs.
Frances Hodgson Burnett · Drama · 27 ch
The Jungle Book is a short collection of stories published by Kipling in various magazines between 1893 and 1894. Kipling spent both his early years and his late teenage years in India, and that upbringing is front and center in these stories—despite them being written while he was living in Vermont, in the United States. The stories are fable-like, with most of them centering on the lives of anthropomorphised jungle animals and a few focused on human characters in India.
Rudyard Kipling · Fantasy · 7 ch
Robinson Crusoe is one of the most popular books ever written in the English language, published in innumerable editions and translated into almost every language of the world, not to mention the many versions created in film, television and even radio. First published in 1719, it can also claim to be one of the first novels ever written in English. Written in the form of an autobiography, it describes the life of the eponymous narrator Robinson Crusoe.
Daniel Defoe · Adventure · 20 ch
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
The irrepressible Tom Sawyer drives his Aunt Polly to distraction; she can’t decide whether to cry or laugh at his antics. He fights, falls in love, and finds adventure with two of his friends, one of whom will later become famous in his own right. Along the way he attends his own funeral, wins the girl by falsely confessing to something she did, and, most famously, convinces most of the boys in town to pay him for the privilege of painting his aunt’s fence.
Mark Twain · Adventure · 37 ch
Jack London spent nearly a year in Alaska and the Klondike, mining for gold and braving the Alaskan winter. There he was inspired to write what would become The Call of the Wild, one of his most famous novels. The Call of the Wild tells the tale of a domesticated dog stolen from his California family and sold to sledders in Alaska.
Jack London · Adventure · 7 ch
When her husband dies and leaves his estate to his son from a former marriage, Mrs. Dashwood and her three daughters are offered a cottage on the estate of a distant relative. The two oldest daughters fall in love, only to find that the objects of their affection have secrets that throw their lives into an uproar. The reserved oldest daughter and impetuous, fiery middle daughter will take very different journeys to discovering the true worth of their respective beaus.
Jane Austen · Romance · 50 ch
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
The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850; it was one of the first books to be mass-produced in America, which helped ensure its immediate popularity and ubiquitous presence on contemporary shelves. Its first printing of 2,500 books sold out in ten days. The novel is set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony between the years 1642 and 1649.
Nathaniel Hawthorne · Historical · 26 ch