Fiction

Mrs Craddock is a novel by William Somerset Maugham first published in 1902. Set in the final years of the 19th century, Mrs Craddock is about a young and attractive woman of independent means who marries beneath her. As he had written about a subject that was considered daring at the time, Maugham had some difficulty finding a publisher. Completed in 1900, the novel was eventually published in...

Emma, by Jane Austen, is a novel about youthful hubris and the perils of misconstrued romance. The novel was first published in December 1815. As in her other novels, Austen explores the concerns and difficulties of genteel women living in Georgian-RegencyEngland; she also creates a lively comedy of manners among her characters.  Before she began the novel, Austen wrote,...

The Hero is a little known masterpiece of W Somerset Maugham. It is much more clinical and less romantic than his two great novels, “The Moon and Sixpence” and “The Razor’s Edge”, the latter having foretold of the mass interest in Eastern religions and metaphysics that would follow. The Hero is essentially an acerbic look at the roots of English society at...

The Brothers Karamazov (Russian: Бра́тья Карама́зовы, Brat'ya Karamazovy, pronounced [ˈbratʲjə kərɐˈmazəvɨ]), sometimes also translated as The Karamazov Brothers, is the final novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky spent nearly two years writing The Brothers Karamazov, which was published as...

Pride and Prejudice is a novel of manners by Jane Austen, first published in 1813. The story follows the main character, Elizabeth Bennet, as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of theBritish Regency. Elizabeth is the second of five daughters of a country...

The Magician is a novel by British author W. Somerset Maugham, originally published in 1908. In this tale, the magician Oliver Haddo, a caricature of Aleister Crowley, attempts to create life. Crowley wrote a critique of this book under the pen name Oliver Haddo, where he accused Maugham of plagiarism. Maugham wrote The Magician in London, after he had spent some time living in Paris, where he...

The Rainbow is a 1915 novel by British author D. H. Lawrence. It follows three generations of the Brangwen family living in Nottinghamshire, particularly focusing on the individual's struggle to growth and fulfilment within the confining strictures of English social life.  The Rainbow tells the story of three generations of the Brangwen family, a dynasty of farmers and...

Mansfield Park is the third novel by Jane Austen, written at Chawton Cottage between February 1811 and 1813. It was published in May 1814 by Thomas Egerton, who published Jane Austen's two earlier novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. When the novel reached a second edition in 1816, its publication was taken over by John Murray, who also...

The Man Who Would Be King (1888) is a novella by Rudyard Kipling. It is about two British adventurers in British India who become kings of Kafiristan, a remote part of Afghanistan. The story was inspired by the exploits of James Brooke, an Englishman who became the first White Rajah of Sarawak in Borneo; and by the travels of American adventurer Josiah Harlan, who was granted the title Prince of...

Of Human Bondage (1915) is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. It is generally agreed to be his masterpiece and to be strongly autobiographical in nature, although Maugham stated, "This is a novel, not an autobiography, though much in it is autobiographical, more is pure invention." Maugham, who had originally planned to call his novel Beauty from Ashes, finally settled on a title taken from a...

Lady Susan is a short epistolary novel by Jane Austen, possibly written in 1794 but not published until 1871.  This epistolary novel, an early complete work that the author never submitted for publication, describes the schemes of the main character—the widowed Lady Susan—as she seeks a new husband for herself and one for her daughter. Although the...

Rewards and Fairies is a historical fantasy book by Rudyard Kipling published in 1910. The title comes from the poem "Farewell, Rewards and Fairies" by Richard Corbet. The poem is referred to by the children in the first story of the preceding book Puck of Pook's Hill. Rewards and Fairies is set one year later chronologically although published four years afterwards. The book consists of a...

The Merry-Go-Round, an early and largely forgotten novel from W. Somerset Maugham is not considered his best, but it’s one of my favourites. The Merry-Go-Round was written in 1904 following Mrs Craddock (another great favourite) in 1902. The main character in Mrs Craddock is Bertha Ley, and she’s the niece of Miss Mary Ley, the main character in The Merry-Go-Round. Set in Edwardian...

Carmen is a novella by Prosper Mérimée, written and first published in 1845. It has been adapted into a number of dramatic works, including the famous opera by Georges Bizet. The novella comprises four parts. Only the first three appeared in the original publication in the October 1, 1845 issue of the Revue des Deux Mondes (Robinson 1992); the fourth first appeared in the book...

The Sorrows of Young Werther (German: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers) is an epistolary and loosely autobiographical novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, first published in 1774; a revised edition of the novel was published in 1787. Werther was an important novel of the Sturm und Drang period in German literature, and influenced the...

"The sea was very calm. There was no ship in sight, and the seagulls were motionless upon its even greyness. The sky was dark with lowering clouds, but there was no wind. The line of the horizon was clear and delicate. The shingly beach, no less deserted, was thick with tangled seaweed, and the innumerable shells crumbed under the feet that trod them. The breakwaters, which sought to prevent the...

Aaron's Rod is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, started in 1917 and published in 1922.  The protagonist of this picaresque novel, Aaron Sisson, is a union official in the coal mines of the English Midlands, trapped in a stale marriage. He is also an amateur, but talented, flautist. At the start of the story he walks out on his wife and two children and decides on impulse...

The Story of the Gadsbys is a story by Rudyard Kipling. It was originally published as no. 2 of the Indian Railway Library in 1888. The Story of the Gadsbys is written in dramatic form, consisting of eight short scenes (listed below). This short pamphlet, of 100 pages, was later collected in book form as the second part of Soldiers Three. "Poor Dear Mamma" "The World Without" "The Tents of...

Liza of Lambeth (1897) was W. Somerset Maugham's first novel, which he wrote while working as a doctor at a hospital in Lambeth, then a working class district of London. It depicts the short life and death of Liza Kemp, an 18-year-old factory worker who lives together with her ageing mother in the fictional Vere Street off Westminster Bridge Road (real) in Lambeth. All in all, it gives the...

Sense and Sensibility is a novel by Jane Austen, and was her first published work when it appeared in 1811 under the pseudonym "A Lady". A work of romantic fiction, better known as a comedy of manners, Sense and Sensibility is set in southwest England,London and Kent between 1792 and 1797, and portrays the life and loves of the Dashwood...