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 ›
Just as writers before her sought to expose abuses against the working class, Anna Sewell, in her enduring children’s novel Black Beauty, exposed abuses against animals. Although ostensibly written for children ages nine through twelve, adults also loved the book…. Read More ›
Like most fiction written for boys in the late 19th century, Richard Jefferies’s Bevis, the Story of a Boy is an adventure novel. Its main characters enjoy their own quest, as its plot mimics that of adult adventure novels in… Read More ›
George Meredith’s 1876 novel, Beauchamp’s Career, appeared serially in The Fortnightly Review between August 1874 and December 1875, becoming notable for its keen insight into the politics of England at the century’s end. It features the life of a politician,… 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 ›
Barchester Towers was Anthony Trollope’s second in a group of novels, following The Warden (1855), later called the Barsetshire sequence. Published in 1857, it featured Trollope’s trademark interest in religion as politics. In his focus on who would receive the… Read More ›
Called by critics a confessional “novel in verse,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh represented a sustained cry for human intellectual and creative freedom, more specifically, for women’s independence. A Künstlerroman, or story of the maturation of a young writer, the… 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 ›
Henry James published The American first as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly between June 1876 and May 1877, then as a volume in 1877. Born an American, James made his first extended visit to Europe at age 26, returned… Read More ›
The last of George Meredith’s novels, The Amazing Marriage resembles his previous works in its defense of women against men’s errors. In his fiction and real life, Meredith declared man to be in need of woman, who could educate and… Read More ›
Charles Kingsley’s second novel, Alton Locke, guaranteed his fame as a writer about controversial topics. A clergyman, Kingsley regularly attacked social injustice and supported laborers’ rights. Like other socially conscious writers including George Gissing, Kingsley publicized inexcusable conditions in which… Read More ›
Henry Rider Haggard wrote Allan Quatermain as a sequel to his popular first novel, King Solomon’s Mines (1885). An instant best-seller, it appeared as a serial in Longman’s Magazine between January and August of 1887. As a young fan, Winston… Read More ›
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Underground, later published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, fascinated Victorian audiences from the moment of its appearance. Ostensibly classified as children’s literature, focusing on the initiation/coming-of-age of its protagonist, seven-year-old Alice, the book also caught the… Read More ›
Anne Brontë’s autobiographical novel about a young woman governess features themes of social injustice, class consciousness, education, and isolation. Brontë’s first-person narrative alerts readers in its opening sentence that, by presenting a “history,” it intends to instruct and will be… 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 ›
When Amelia Opie (1769-1853), the most popular novelist of her day, decided to write Adeline Mowbray, based loosely on the tumultuous public relationship of her acquaintances William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, she signaled readers with her subtitle that the female… 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 ›
The term Gothicism in its literary meaning derives not from the Goths, an ancient Germanic tribe, but from the sense of Gothic as medieval. This literary movement may be seen as a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and… Read More ›
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