Sir Walter Scott based his novel The Bride of Lammermoor, second in his Tales of My Landlord series, on a true tragic love story about a Scottish family named Dalrymple, supported by fictional accounts, poetry, and popular ballad versions. He… Read More ›
William Makepeace Thackeray’s first novel, The Luck of Barry Lyndon: A Romance of the Last Century by Fitz-Boodle [The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.], appeared in Fraser’s Magazine as a monthly serial in 1844. It was later revised and released… Read More ›
Unlike Sir Walter Scott’s heroic adventure novels, The Antiquary, third in his series of Waverley novels and his declared favorite, follows the foibles of a character named Jonathan Oldbuck who studies historic times. As his name symbolizes, and his title… Read More ›
Thomas Hope’s Anastasius, or Memoirs of a Greek, reached instant popularity. The anonymously published three-volume novel was at first credited to George Gordon, Lord Byron, who had written popular accounts of the Near East; Hope later claimed authorship in Blackwood’s… Read More ›
James Morier based his satire of Persian life on firsthand knowledge of the culture. Born in Smyrna (later Izmir), Turkey, Morier acted as attaché to two diplomats to Iran, Sir Harford Jones and Sir Gore Ouseley, from 1807 to 1814…. Read More ›
Sarah Fielding described David Simple as a “moral romance.” The episodic novel took a timely approach to the romance genre, moving away from the traditional chivalric tales to a story based on codes of middle-class ideology. Modern critics note that… Read More ›
George Eliot’s first full-length novel, Adam Bede, testifies to her skill in crafting a narrative of domestic realism. Although published in 1859, the story looks back nostalgically to the end of the previous century before railroads and factories had transformed… Read More ›
E. L. Doctorow’s (January 6, 1931 – July 21, 2015) work is concerned with those stories, myths, public figures, and literary and historical forms that have shaped public and political consciousness. Even when his subject is not overtly political—as in… Read More ›
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