Geraldine Jewsbury’s first novel, Zoe: The History of Two Lives, was one of the first Victorian novels to interrogate religious skepticism. Jewsbury could not rush through such an important topic, as she explained to her lifelong friend and correspondent Jane… Read More ›
Often referred to as George Gissing’s first novel, Workers in the Dawn is actually his first published novel, one Gissing himself supported with a £150 investment. Not at all popular with reviewers, who criticized its excessive pessimism, attacks on organized… Read More ›
Thomas Hardy first published The Woodlanders as a serial in Macmillan’s Magazine between May 1886 and April 1887. It emphasizes themes of marriage and adultery, faith and duplicity, and, a favorite element for Hardy, unrequited love and the human propensity… Read More ›
Elizabeth Gaskell never completed her final novel, Wives and Daughters, due to her early death in 1865. It appeared serially in The Cornhill Magazine between August 1864 and January 1866. Her last work is considered her best, representing the pinnacle… Read More ›
Charles Kingsley wrote his most popular work, the patriotic Westward Ho!, for adults, although it quickly fell into the category of children’s literature. While Kingsley had long been a political radical, the onset of the Crimean War, which many British… Read More ›
Anthony Trollope wrote The Way We Live Now to study what he termed “the commercial profligacy of the age,” and he succeeded in publishing the most savage attack on human nature since William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848). He viewed… Read More ›
Anthony Trollope’s first installment in his Barsetshire sequence, The Warden, is a quiet novel. Its story of the Reverend Septimus Harding and his struggle with conscience is masterfully presented, without need for grandiose action. When Harding’s income as warden of… Read More ›
Frances Trollope wrote many novels, but most critics agree The Vicar of Wrexhill is her best. Framed in her normally intrusive, authorial didactic voice, the novel focuses on corruption in the Church of England. Her combined themes of religious and… Read More ›
William Makepeace Thackeray first published his novel Vanity Fair as a serial between January 1847 and July 1848. He subtitled the book “A Novel Without a Hero,” signaling a new type of novel. Having suffered bitterly himself due to what… Read More ›
Thomas Hardy at last attracted public notice as a novelist with his tale of pastoral simplicity, Under the Greenwood Tree, or the Mellstock Quire. It was his third novel. He had destroyed the first and written a second, Desperate Memories… Read More ›
George Meredith based his novel The Tragic Comedians on an account of a love affair that became famous in social circles of his day. In the opinion of later critics, his use of the true account stifled the ingenuity apparent… Read More ›
In Tom Brown’s School Days, Thomas Hughes established a long-lasting model for stories about the education of the young. The novel is highly autobiographical, demonstrating how much Hughes enjoyed and benefited from his years attending Rugby, made famous by the… Read More ›
H. G. Wells had written the basis for his brief novel The Time Machine in a series of stories published in The Science Schools Journal in 1888. Labeled a dystopia by some critics, the story acts as a warning to… Read More ›
Lewis Carroll wrote the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and continued to alter forever children’s literature by omitting any moralizing from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, just as he had in the original Alice book…. Read More ›
By the time Anthony Trollope published his autobiographical The Three Clerks, he had established himself as a novelist who resisted the didactic fiction on which his mother, Frances Trollope, had made her name. He did not shy away from tales… Read More ›
Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles, originally subtitled A Pure Woman, is about Tess d’Urberville’s tragic dilemma between her seducer, Alec, and her named husband, Angel, both of whom intrude into her life. In epic form, Hardy describes Tess’s… Read More ›
The fifth novel in Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire sequence, The Small House at Allington introduced Lily Dale, the protagonist who would become his readers’ favorite. It is a sad tale, for which Trollope makes no excuse, although he acts more tenderly… Read More ›
First published as a serial in Macmillan’s Magazine between May and December 1870, Anthony Trollope’s Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite differs from much of his fiction. Rather than constructing a large number of “portraits” as he normally did, Trollope sought… Read More ›
Generations of readers continue to enjoy the appealing story of an old miser who regains his humanity through the love of a lost child in George Eliot’s Silas Marner. In typical Eliot fashion, the novel reveals the tensions in a… Read More ›
Elizabeth Gaskell’s second novel, Ruth, focused, as had her first, Mary Barton (1848), on a young working-class woman. However, in Ruth she makes a heroine of an unlikely figure in a seamstress who bears an illegitimate child. While other novels… Read More ›
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