In this roman à clef, the author contrasts Victorian repression with the freer attitudes, values, and behaviors of the 1920s. The novel’s protagonist is Willie Ashenden, a representation of Maugham himself. Ashenden, a writer, is friends with another writer, Alroy… Read More ›
Tobias Smollett’s first novel reflected both the reading interests of the day and Smollett’s own attitude toward fiction. As a picaresque with first-person narration, the novel offered readers an action-centered story with a rogue main character, but Roderick Random could… Read More ›
George Meredith’s fourth novel, Rhoda Fleming, dealt with a familiar theme: the pressure society places on both genders—but especially women—to conform to unrealistic expectations. That his culture governed love relationships with laws, such as those relating to marriage and divorce,… Read More ›
Of Anthony Hope’s many short stories and various novels, The Prisoner of Zenda remains his best known and enjoyed, praised by contemporaries such as Robert Louis Stevenson, followed by its less successful sequel, Rupert of Hentzau (1898). The novel offers… Read More ›
In what critics label Joseph Conrad’s first accomplished work, he produces a text at once revered and criticized. Conrad asked W. E. Henley, poet and editor of The New Review, to publish the novel in his magazine. Conrad hoped that… Read More ›
George Gissing’s tendency to see life as catastrophe is apparent in his most popular and critically acclaimed novel, New Grub Street. Gissing’s personal experience, marked by brief imprisonment, two disastrous marriages, and a lifelong struggle to embody the ideals he… Read More ›
The most tragic novel by George Eliot, this story is also her most autobiographical. It was published after her highly successful first novel, Adam Bede (1859), and it proved to be another great success, helping to establish Eliot’s reputation as… 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 ›
A fiction subgenre of a realistic nature that focuses on the home scene, domestic realism evolved from the reaction against Romanticism that occurred in the mid-19th century. Following the preoccupation of the Romantic writers (1789–1837) with the superiority of intuition… Read More ›
Anthony Trollope produced the best-selling novel of its time in this, the third book in his Barsetshire sequence, Doctor Thorne, published in three volumes. He departed from his normal village setting in this novel to consider county characters, focusing on… Read More ›
Charles Reade’s popular historical romance, The Cloister and the Hearth: A Tale of the Middle Ages, represented the labor of two years. Reade was hired in 1859 by the publishers of Once a Week to help that periodical compete with… 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 ›
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