William Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) is best known as the innovator of the English detective novel, whose sensational novels, plays, and short stories were hugely popular in the Victorian Era. Today, readers enjoy Collins' intricate and suspenseful plots, and his penetrating social commentary on the plight of women and domestic issues of the time. «No Name», one of Collins' best-known works, takes place at Combe-Raven in West Somersetshi ...
Thomas Hardy's 1887 novel «The Woodlanders» takes place in the woodland village of Little Hintock and concerns the story of Giles Winterborne, an honest woodsman who wishes to marry his childhood sweetheart, Grace Melbury. While the two are informally betrothed to each other, when Grace gains an education through her father's persistent financial sacrifices he feels that his daughter is too good for a simple woodsman and pushes her int ...
"A Raw Youth (The Adolescent)" is Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1875 novel which tells the story of the life of a 19-year-old intellectual, Arkady Dolgoruky, who is the illegitimate child of the controversial and womanizing landowner Versilov. The novel focuses primarily on the conflict that arises between Arkady and Versilov, when Arkady rejoins his family in St. Petersburg. Arkady who has been away at boarding school hardly knows his family a ...
One of the patriarchs of the science fiction genre, H. G. Wells (1866-1946) produced a vast collection of important works on the topics of scientific progress, politics, history and social commentary. One work in particular marked a watershed moment in the English author's career. With the publication of «When the Sleeper Wakes» in 1899, later republished under the title «The Sleeper Awakes,» Wells gave the world its first dystopia novel. T ...
Louisa May Alcott's most famous novel, «Little Women», is the story of four sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March. Central to the theme of the novel is the issue of overcoming ones character flaws. For Meg it is vanity; Jo, temper; Beth, shyness; and Amy, selfishness. Through the various activities of the four sisters told throughout the novel lessons are learned of the consequences of these particular flaws. A classic novel, «Little Women» ...
One of the most important, though controversial, French novelists of the late nineteenth century, and founder of the Realist movement, was Emile Zola (1840-1902). In 1871 Zola began to his most notable series of novels, the «Rougon-Macquart Novels,» that relate the history of a fictional family under the Second Empire. As a strict naturalist, Zola was greatly concerned with science, especially the problems of evolution and heredity vs. environme ...
Originally published in serial format, «A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,» is the semi-autobiographical portrayal of James Joyce's early upbringing as an Irish Catholic in late 19th century and early 20th century Dublin. At the center of the novel is the protagonist Stephen Dedalus whose life is depicted from its various stages starting in childhood and moving through early adulthood. The language of the novel changes throughout the ...
"Uncle Silas" is J. Sheridan Le Fanu's classic gothic novel narrated by the teenage character Maud Ruthyn who lives with her reclusive father Austyn Ruthyn in their mansion at Knowl. From her father Maud comes to learn of her Uncle Silas, an infamous rake and gambler and the suspicious suicide of a man to whom Silas owes an enormous gambling death. Mystery surrounds this suicide as the man is found dead in a locked room. While Austyn i ...
George Gissing (1857-1903) was an English novelist of the late-Victorian era. Gissing's career as a novelist, at least until the late twentieth century, has been assessed in the framework of the nineteenth century realism and naturalism. Like many writers at the end of the nineteenth century, he was caught between the sociological realists with reform instincts and the adherents of an aesthetic movement with their emphasis on the attainment ...
