Subject: Classic Fiction | Page #7
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The Sorrows of Satan Marie Corelli
A Faustian novel and bestseller of its time, focused on Geoffrey, a starving author. The post delivers three letters, the first from a friend who offers to help with an introduction. The second advises him he has inherited money. The third has been written by Lucio, an aristocrat purporting to know the best way to... read more »
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The Sorrows of Young Werther Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Visiting an idyllic German village, Werther, a sensitive and romantic young man, meets and falls in love with sweet-natured Lotte. Although he realizes that Lotte is to marry Albert, he is unable to subdue his passion for her, and his infatuation torments him to the point of absolute despair. The first great... read more »
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The Sweet Cheat Gone Marcel Proust
Albertine has finally escaped her 'imprisonment' from Marcel's Paris apartment... Not only is Marcel quite unprepared for the effect her flight has on him, but also soon he is devastated by news of an even more irreversible loss. read more »
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The Titan Theodore Dreiser
In this sequel to Dreiser's novel The Financier, the author continues his exploration of the social and economic forces at play in the rise of the new class of super-rich capitalists in early twentieth-century America. Protagonist Frank Cowperwood attempts to leave his shameful past behind and settles in Chicago... read more »
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The Trail of the Hawk Sinclair Lewis
The Trail of the Hawk, by Sinclair Lewis, is the chronicle of an inveterate Rolling Stone. Carl Ericson, a born rebel against conventions, finds himself from boyhood up at war with the combined forces of family, school and society, all three of which unite in trying to mould him into the average colourless human... read more »
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The Trumpet-Major Thomas Hardy
Hardy distrusted the application of nineteenth-century empiricism to history because he felt it marginalized important human elements. In The Trumpet Major, the tale of a woman courted by three competing suitors during the Napoleonic wars, he explores the subversive effects of ordinary human desire and conflicting... read more »
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The Unfortunate Happy Lady Aphra Behn
A very English rendering of the classic Spanish novel La burlada Aminta y venganza del honor (Mocked Aminta and honor's vengence). Behn's story has a somewhat different beginning and a completely altered ending. Aminta, in her very early teens, becomes a rich orphan of Segovia. Her uncle, following her fathers will... read more »
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The Valley of Decision Edith Wharton
This two part romance chronicles the rise to power of Odo Valsecca during the intellectual and political tumult which preceded the French Revolution. During his childhood and early manhood, Odo comes in close contact with all the major factions the peasantry, the clergy, the liberal freethinkers, and the nobility... read more »
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The Valley of the Moon Jack London
"The Valley of the Moon" traces the odyssey of Billy and Saxon Roberts from the labor strife of Oakland at the turn of the century through Central and Northern California in search of land they can farm independently - a journey that echoes Jack London's own escape from urban poverty. As London lost hope in the... read more »
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The Warden Anthony Trollope
The Warden centers on Mr. Harding, a clergyman of great personal integrity who is nevertheless in possession of an income from a charity far in excess of the sum devoted to the purposes of the foundation. On discovering this, young John Bold turns his reforming zeal to exposing what he regards as an abuse of... read more »
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The Watchers A. E. W. Mason
The Watchers is a novel by A. E. W. Mason (author of At the Villa Rose, The Prisoner in the Opal, etc.), first published in 1899 by the Frederick A. Stokes Company. read more »
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The Way of All Flesh Samuel Butler
Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as "one of the summits of human achievement," Butler's autobiographical account of a harsh upbringing and troubled adulthood satirizes Victorian hypocrisy in its chronicle of the life and loves of Ernest Pontifex. Along the way, it offers a powerful indictment of 19th-century England's... read more »
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The White Peacock D. H. Lawrence
Focusing on three relationships - one destructively stillborn, one disastrously unfulfilling and one passionately unspoken - Lawrence exploits the language and conventions of the rural tradition to foreground man's alienation from the natural world. His evocation of the vanishing countryside of the English midlands... read more »
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The Wings of the Dove Henry James
Of the three late masterpieces that crown the extraordinary literary achievement of Henry James, The Wings of the Dove is at once the most personal and the most elemental. James drew on the memory of a beloved cousin who died young to create one of the three central characters, Milly Theale, an heiress with a short... read more »
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The Younger Brother Aphra Behn
Mirtilla, the Amorous Jilt, who had once been attached to George Marteen, the Younger Brother, married for a convenience the clownish Sir Morgan Blunder. Prince Frederick, who had seen and fallen in love with her during a religious ceremony in a Ghent convent, follows her to England. They meet accidentally and she... read more »
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Time Regained Marcel Proust
The final volume of In Search of Lost Time chronicles the years of World War I, when, as M. de Charlus reflects on a moonlit walk, Paris threatens to become another Pompeii. Years later, after the war's end, Proust's narrator returns to Paris, where Mme. Verdurin has become the Princesse de Guermantes. He reflects... read more »
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Toilers of the Sea Victor Hugo
Hugo's story unfolds the life of a reclusive fisherman, Gilliat, who lives on the Isle of Guernsey, where Hugo himself was exiled for a large portion of his life. When Gilliat becomes a young man, he falls in love with Déruchette, the beautiful niece of wealthy ship-owner Lethierry. When Lethierry's steamship... read more »
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Tom Jones Henry Fielding
A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr. Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neighboring squire—though he sometimes succumbs to the charms of the local girls. When Tom is banished to make his own... read more »
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Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne
At once endlessly facetious and highly serious, Sterne's great comic novel contains some of the best-known and best-loved characters in English literature--including Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Parson Yorick, and Dr. Slop--and boasts one of the most innovative and whimsical narrative styles in all literature. A... read more »
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Typee Herman Melville
Typee was Herman Melville's first novel. Originally published in 1846, it was partially based on Melville's own experiences as a beachcomber in the South Pacific Marquesas Islands. A romanticized travelogue of the Pacific island paradise Nuku Hiva, it is the story of Tommo, a Yankee sailor and his four month stay on... read more »
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Ulysses James Joyce
Ulysses, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, has had a profound influence on modern fiction. In a series of episodes covering the course of a single day, 16 June 1904, the novel traces the movements of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through the streets of Dublin. Each episode has its own literary... read more »
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Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe was appalled by slavery, and she took one of the few options open to nineteenth-century women who wanted to affect public opinion: she wrote a novel, a huge, enthralling narrative that claimed the heart, soul, and politics of pre-Civil War Americans. An overtly moralistic work of unabashed... read more »
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Under the Greenwood Tree Thomas Hardy
One of the most popular of Hardy's novels, this charming pastoral idyll is a lightly humorous depiction of life in an early Victorian rural community. The story delicately balances the concerns of the Mellstock parish choir with a romance between a member of the choir and the village schoolmistress. read more »
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Vendetta Marie Corelli
Imagine friends and family believed you were dead from the Cholera- Imagine being buried alive and awakening in your coffin - Now, imagine a frantic escape from the rotting crypt only to discover something worse waiting in store.... Thus begins Marie Corelli's suspense-thriller, Vendetta. Awakening to find he has... read more »
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Virgin Soil Ivan Turgenev
Turgenev was the first writer who was able, having both Slavic and universal imagination enough for it, to interpret modern Russia to the outer world, and Virgin Soil was the last word of his greater testament. It was the book in which many English readers were destined to make his acquaintance about a generation... read more »
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Vivian Grey Benjamin Disraeli
Originally published anonymously, ostensibly by a so-called "man of fashion", the first part caused a considerable sensation in London society. Contemporary reviewers, suspicious of the numerous solecisms contained within the text, eventually identified the young Disraeli (who did not move in high society) as the... read more »
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War and Peace Leo Tolstoy
The most famous—and perhaps greatest—novel of all time, Tolstoy’s War and Peace tells the story of five families struggling for survival during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.Among its many unforgettable characters is Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, a proud, dashing man who, despising the artifice of high society... read more »
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Washington Square Henry James
Washington Square follows the coming-of-age of its plain-faced, kindhearted heroine, Catherine Sloper. Much to her father’s vexation, a handsome opportunist named Morris Townsend woos the long-suffering heiress, intent on claiming her fortune. When Catherine stubbornly refuses to call off her engagement, Dr... read more »
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What Maisie Knew Henry James
What Maisie Knew represents one of James's finest reflections on the rites of passage from wonder to knowledge, and the question of their finality. The child of violently divorced parents, Maisie Farange opens her eyes on a distinctly modern world. Mothers and fathers keep changing their partners and names, while... read more »
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Where Angels Fear to Tread E. M. Forster
When attractive, impulsive English widow Lidia takes a holiday in Italy, she causes a scandal by marrying Gino, a dashing and highly unsuitable Italian twelve years her junior. Her prim, snobbish in-laws make no attempts to hide their disapproval, and when Lidia’s decision eventually brings disaster, her English... read more »