Library
She: A History of Adventure
H. Rider Haggard
Horace Holly, an irritable Cambridge don, raises the orphan Leo Vincey on the letter of his dead ancestor: a two-thousand-year-old charge to avenge the murder of Kallikrates in a lost African kingdom. Following the sherd of pottery into the ruins of Kor, the two men and their servant Job encounter Ayesha, 'She-who-must-be-obeyed' - white-robed, veiled, and possessed of the secret of undying life. She has waited twenty centuries for Kallikrates to return, and Leo is his living image. Haggard's tale of despotic love and immortality sold enormously well and fascinates writers and critics still.
Silas Marner
George Eliot
A weaver in the fictional village of Raveloe, Silas Marner is a man embittered by a false accusation that cost him his faith and his place in a Dissenting congregation, who for fifteen years hoards his guineas as his only companions. When the gold is stolen by Dunstan Cass, the squire's dissolute son, it seems the final theft. Instead a golden-haired toddler wanders in through the snow, her opium-addicted mother dead at the door, and Silas's hoard is replaced by something he never expected to want. Eliot's shortest novel is her gentlest study of how love re-makes a dried-up life.
Sister Carrie
Theodore Dreiser
Caroline Meeber, eighteen, takes the train to Chicago in August 1889 with four dollars and a sister's address, and is noticed on the train by Charles Drouet, a drummer with easy manners. What follows is America's first honest city novel: Carrie's drift from collar-work to comfort, Drouet's easy generosity, the restaurant manager George Hurstwood who steals ten thousand dollars for her and spends the rest of his life paying for it, downward, one small compromise at a time. Suppressed, pirated and forgotten, Dreiser's first novel resurfaced as an American classic: the money, the desire, and the rocking chair at the end.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience
William Blake
William Blake's illuminated masterpiece, the two great poem-plates of 1789 and 1794 that contain 'The Lamb' and 'The Tyger', 'London' and 'The Chimney Sweeper'. Blake engraved, printed and coloured the books himself, pairing poems to show 'the two contrary states of the human soul': innocence that does not yet know the world, and experience that can no longer imagine another one. This is the plate text — the poems that made Blake a central poet of the English language, mystic, prophet and nursery-rhyme genius at once.
Sons and Lovers
D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence's 1913 novel, and the most autobiographical of his books. In the mining village of Bestwood, Gertrude Morel marries a collier she cannot respect and pours her intensity into her sons; Paul, the third, grows up between the pit and the drawing-room, torn between a mother who will not let him go and two women who want him — Miriam, reaching for the spiritual, and Clara, unhappily married. Lawrence wrote his own Nottinghamshire, his own mother and his own knot of filial love into it, and English fiction never quite recovered its composure.
Stillwater
Ellis Wren
A young nanny, Nora Hale, comes to Stillwater, a summer estate on a Hudson Valley lake, to care for two orphaned children whose uncle wants nothing to do with them. The house is quiet, and the children, Eliot and Fern, are beautiful, well-mannered, and strange. Then she starts to see the dead caretaker at the window and the drowned nanny by the water. The children refuse to see anything, and their silence is the point. By summer's end Nora must decide what the dead want with the living, what the children are protecting, and how much of what she sees is real. This is her letter, four months later, to the only person who was never there.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy
Hardy's tragedy of a country girl, subtitled 'A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented' — the subtitle alone was enough to scandalise 1891. Tess Durbeyfield is the daughter of a poor Wessex carter who learns that his family descends from the ancient d'Urbervilles; sent to claim kinship, she is seduced by the son of the family that bought the name. What follows is not one ruin but a long series of them, as Victorian England punishes in Tess what it forgives in the men who wrong her. Against the vast indifferent landscape of Wessex, Hardy builds his case that the universe, and society with it, is not just.
The Adam Trial
Ellis Wren
Boston scientist Elias Ward sets out to answer medicine's oldest question: where does a human being end and death begin. Denied approval, he builds a man alone in a basement and starts him whole—then runs at the sight of him, leaving the door unbarred. The being learns language and kindness watching a farm family through a wall, and is answered with fists, a bullet, and exile. Then comes the reckoning: a strangled boy, an executed innocent, a second creation destroyed before her first breath, and a promise kept on a wedding night. Told from an icebound ship, it is the story of what a maker owes—and of the truth as the only payment left.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle
The first and most famous collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, from the Strand Magazine of 1891-92. A scandalous photograph that blackmails a king; a red-headed pawnbroker and a copying job; a man who arrives to ask about a goose; a twist that hinges on what a dog did in the night-time. Twelve stories — 'A Scandal in Bohemia', 'The Red-Headed League', 'The Speckled Band' — that made Holmes a worldwide phenomenon and defined the detective story for every writer who followed.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain
Mark Twain's 1876 classic of boyhood on the Mississippi. Tom Sawyer — fence-whitewasher, pirate, Sunday-school fraud, and hero of the village — traps his way through a Missouri summer: love for Becky Thatcher, an adventure in a graveyard that witnesses a murder, treasure in a haunted house, and Injun Joe in the caves. Written out of Twain's own childhood, it is nostalgic without being soft — the book that fixed the American boy in the world's imagination.
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
Wharton's Pulitzer Prize novel of 1920 — the first awarded to a woman — and the most elegant autopsy ever performed on Old New York. On a January evening of the 1870s, Christine Nilsson sings in Faust, and Newland Archer, comfortably engaged to the lovely and conventional May Welland, catches sight of May's cousin, the Countess Olenska, lately escaped from an unhappy European marriage. What begins as a gesture of family protection becomes the one passion of his life, and the small decencies of his circle prove stronger than it. A novel of manners in which nothing is ever said aloud, and everything is understood.
The Awakening
Kate Chopin
Kate Chopin's 1899 novel of a woman who wakes up — and the scandal it caused. On Grand Isle, off the Louisiana coast, Edna Pontellier is a comfortable wife and mother who cannot say why her life feels like a role she is playing. What begins as a friendship with a young man at the resort becomes, back in New Orleans, a refusal: of her husband's expectations, of motherhood as she understands it, of the piano-and-visiting routine of the Creoles around her. She paints, she moves out, she takes a lover. Condemned on publication and almost forgotten, it is now read as the first great American novel about a woman's claim to herself.