“I think I could be a good woman, if I had five thousand a year,” observes beautiful and clever Becky Sharp, one of the wickedest—and most appealing—women in all of literature. Becky is just one of the...
The disregard of a dying woman's bequest, a girl's attempt to help an impoverished clerk, and the marriage of an idealist and a materialist — all intersect at an estate called Howards End. The fate of this...
he story of Henry Esmond, a colonel in the service of Queen Anne of England, begins in his youth, as the illegitimate and orphaned cousin of the Viscount and Lady of Castlewood. The Jacobite family gradually...
Catherine: A Story was the first full-length work of fiction produced by William Makepeace Thackeray. It first appeared in serialized installments in Fraser's Magazine between May 1839 and February 1840. Thackeray's...
This Edwardian social comedy explores love and prim propriety among an eccentric cast of characters assembled in an Italian pensione and in a corner of Surrey, England.A charming young Englishwoman, Lucy Honeychurch,...
Set in 19th century London, England, this novel features a young English gentleman Arthur Pendennis born in the country who sets out to seek his place in life and society. In line with other Thackeray's works,...
Hanney, an expatriated Scot, returns from a long stay in South Africa to his flat in London. One night he is buttonholed by an American who appears to know of an anarchist plot to destabilise Europe, and claims...
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ is a novel by Lew Wallace published on November 12, 1880 by Harper & Brothers. Wallace's work is part of an important sub-genre of historical fiction set among the characters of...
Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up and Peter and Wendy are the stage play and novel (respectively) which tell the story of Peter Pan, a mischievous little boy who can fly, and his adventures on the island...
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (French: Vingt mille lieues sous les mers) is a classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne, published in 1870. It is about the fictional Captain Nemo and...
When Tarzan is orphaned as a baby deep in the African jungle, the apes adopt him and raise him as their own. By the time the boy is ten, he can swing through the trees and talk to the animals. By the time he...
Shocking his stodgy colleagues at the exclusive Reform Club, enigmatic Englishman Phileas Fogg wagers his fortune, undertaking an extraordinary and daring enterprise: to circumnavigate the globe in eighty days....
Dracula is an 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, featuring as its primary antagonist the vampire Count Dracula. Dracula has been attributed to many literary genres including vampire literature, horror fiction,...
This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain's to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying the experiment upon only one man...
The story of a man named Erik, an eccentric, physically deformed genius who terrorizes the Opera Garnier in Paris. He builds his home beneath it and takes the love of his life, a beautiful soprano, under his...
The War of the Worlds (1898), by H. G. Wells, is an early science fiction novel which describes an invasion of England by aliens from Mars. It is one of the earliest and best-known depictions of an alien invasion...
Dorothy is a young girl who lives on a Kansas farm with her Uncle Henry, Aunt Em, and little dog Toto. One day the farmhouse, with Dorothy inside, is caught up in a tornado and deposited in a field in the country...
This is Metropolis, the novel that the film's screenwriter -- Thea von Harbou, who was director Fritz Lang's wife, and a collaborator in the creation of the film -- this is the novel that Harbou wrote from her...