Jonathan Swift likely began writing Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships five years before its publication. Later known simply as Gulliver’s Travels,… Read More ›
Charles Reade, a playwright as well as a novelist, became well known for his attacks against human injustice and his pleas for compassion through his fiction, of which Griffith Gaunt became a strong example. Reade’s fiction proved melodramatic and dealt… Read More ›
When Robert S. Hichens published his roman à clef, or novel with a key, The Green Carnation, he joined others in mimicking the famous style of Oscar Wilde, arguably England’s best-known writer at the end of the 19th century. Wilde,… Read More ›
Emily Lawless’s fourth novel, Grania: The Story of an Island, published in two volumes, was eagerly awaited by her readership. Like her third novel, Hurrish (1886), Grania focused on a poor Irish family and was intent on leading its readers… Read More ›
The story of the events that led Mary Shelley to write her Frankenstein story is now almost as well known as the plot itself. The tale began to take shape in 1816 as a result of ghost-story-telling sessions held among… Read More ›
First published in The Cornhill Magazine from January 1860 through April 1861, Anthony Trollope’s Framley Parsonage was the fourth in his Barsetshire novels sequence. That sequence had opened in 1855 with The Warden and would conclude with The Last Chronicle… Read More ›
When Robert Buchanan wrote Foxglove Manor, he had experienced years of poverty, worsened by the illness of his wife. Her death in 1881 followed the failure of his journal, Light, leaving him penniless and desperate for funds. In order to… Read More ›
Also known as rhetorical criticism and New Criticism, formalism constitutes one of the many lenses through which critics view and interpret literature. A formalist critic pays attention to the form of a literary work, including aspects such as plot, character,… Read More ›
The Forest Lovers was the first of several romance novels by Maurice Hewlett, who began writing of knights in medieval settings at a time when such books were at the height of popularity. He prepared readers for all the hallmarks… Read More ›
Thomas Hardy’s fourth novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, became his first commercially successful venture, allowing him to leave his vocation of architecture and write full time. First published as a serial in The Cornhill Magazine from January through December… Read More ›
Marmion Savage’s first novel, The Falcon Family; or, Young Ireland, satirized parasitic socialites, traditionalists within the Church of England, and the Young Ireland Party, a group of extremists who campaigned for Ireland’s independence. Published anonymously, the novel proved popular, although… Read More ›
George Moore’s melodramatic romance novel Evelyn Innes is replete with characters based on real people. The author fashioned Evelyn’s father after the French-born musician Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940), who studied Renaissance music and the instruments that produced it in London. A… Read More ›
Fanny Burney published her first work, Evelina, anonymously, basing it on a piece of juvenilia titled The History of Caroline Evelyn, which she had destroyed on the advice of her stepmother. As an account of the unhappy life of Evelina’s… Read More ›
The third in his sequence of Palliser novels, The Eustace Diamonds represents one of Anthony Trollope’s darkest tales. He departs from his gently ironic presentations of everyday human relationships with their small but important emotional battles. This novel focuses on… Read More ›
An example of Newgate fiction, in which writers based novels on true criminal accounts, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Eugene Aram established him as the most popular novelist of England during the same year Sir Walter Scott, to whom Bulwer-Lytton dedicated the book’s… Read More ›
George Moore’s novel Esther Waters proved his most successful work. The novel’s realistic portrayal of the hardships of a servant girl departed from the oversentimentality by which much Victorian fiction, and some of Moore’s earlier works, were marked. According to… Read More ›
Samuel Butler’s Erewhon took its place in an honored tradition as satire against what Butler perceived as the intellectual, emotional, and moral stagnation of English society and human nature in general. Revolting against the Victorian values that negatively affected English… Read More ›
Like all Charlotte Smith’s novels, her first, Emmeline, contained strong autobiographical elements. Through fiction, Smith found a way to protest her situation as mother to a large brood of children with a profligate husband who had abandoned the family. According… Read More ›
George Meredith indulged himself with a comedic presentation in his 1879 novel, The Egoist: A Comedy in Narrative. It allowed him to engage in his favored approach of satirizing bourgeois stupidity. In doing so, he satirized himself. He felt he… Read More ›
East Lynne represents prototypical 19th-century sensation fiction, extremely popular with English readers. The novel was the second for Mrs. Henry (Ellen Price) Wood, who had begun publishing highly moralistic fiction at the age of 41. It became an immediate hit… Read More ›
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