The Head of the House of Coombe is a 1922 novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The Head of the House of Coombe follows the relationships between a group of pre–World War One English nobles and commoners. It also offers both some interesting editorial commentary on the political system in prewar Europe that Burnett feels bears some responsibility for the war and some surprisingly pointed social...
Oliver Twist, subtitled The Parish Boy's Progress, is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens, published byRichard Bentley in 1838. The story is about an orphan, Oliver Twist, who endures a miserable existence in a workhouse and then is placed with an undertaker. He escapes and travels to London where he meets the Artful Dodger, leader of a gang of juvenile pickpockets. Naïvely...
Madame Bovary (1856) is the French writer Gustave Flaubert's debut novel. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel's true art lies in its details and hidden patterns. Flaubert was a notorious...
The Arrow of Gold is a novel by Joseph Conrad, published in 1919. It was originally titled "The Laugh" and published serially in Lloyd's Magazine from December 1918 to February 1920. The story is set in Marseille in the 1870s during the Third Carlist War. The characters of the novel are supporters of the Spanish Pretender Carlos, Duke of Madrid.
The narrator of The Arrow of Gold has considerable...
Eugénie Grandet is an 1833 novel by Honoré de Balzac about miserliness, and how it is bequeathed from the father to the daughter, Eugénie, through her unsatisfying love attachment with her cousin. As is usual with Balzac, all the characters in thenovel are fully realized. Balzac conceived his ambitious project, The Human...
The Picture of Dorian Gray is an 1891 philosophical novel by Irish writer and playwright Oscar Wilde. It was first published as aserial story in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. As submitted by Wilde to the magazine, the editors feared the story was indecent, and deleted five hundred words before publication - without Wilde’s knowledge. Despite that censorship, The...
The Home and the World (in the original Bengali, ঘরে বাইরে Ghôre Baire, lit. "At home [and] outside") is a 1916 novel by Rabindranath Tagore. The book illustrates the battle Tagore had with himself, between the ideas of Western culture and revolution against the Western culture. These two ideas are portrayed in two of the main characters, Nikhil, who is rational and opposes...
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, better known simply as Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), is a novel by Anglo-Irish writer and clergymanJonathan Swift, that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of the "travellers' tales" literary sub-genre. It is Swift's best known full-length...
Man and Superman is a four-act drama written by George Bernard Shaw in 1903. The series was written in response to calls for Shaw to write a play based on the Don Juantheme. Man and Superman opened at The Royal Court Theatre in London on 23 May 1905, but omitted the 3rd Act. A part of the act, Don Juan in Hell (Act 3, Scene 2), was performed when the drama was staged on 4 June 1907 at the Royal...
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (French: Vingt mille lieues sous les mers: Tour du monde sous-marin, literally Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: An Underwater Tour of the World) is a classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne published in 1870. It tells the story of Captain Nemo and his submarine Nautilus, as seen from the perspective of Professor Pierre Aronnax after...
Candide, ou l'Optimisme (/ˌkænˈdiːd/; French: [kɑ̃did]) is a French satire first published in 1759 by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. The novella has been widely translated, with English versions titled Candide: or, All for the Best (1759); Candide: or, The Optimist (1762); and Candide: or, Optimism (1947). It begins with a young man, Candide, who is living a...
Master of the World (French: Maître du monde), published in 1904, is one of the last novels by French pioneer science fiction writer, Jules Verne, and is a sequel to Robur the Conqueror. At the time Verne wrote the novel, his health was failing, and Master of the World is a "black novel," filled with the fear of the coming of tyrants like the novel's villain, Robur, and totalitarianism.
A...