Emma is a novel written by English author Jane Austen. It is set in the fictional country village of Highbury and the surrounding estates of Hartfield, Randalls and Donwell Abbey, and involves the relationships among people from a small number of families. The novel was first published in December 1815, although the title page is dated 1816. As in her other novels, Austen explores the concerns and difficulties of genteel women living in Georgian–Regency England. Emma is a comedy of manners.
Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life is a novel by English author George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. It appeared in eight installments (volumes) in 1871 and 1872. Set in Middlemarch, a fictional English Midlands town, in 1829 to 1832, it follows distinct, intersecting stories with many characters. Issues include the status of women, the nature of marriage, idealism, self-interest, religion, hypocrisy, political reform, and education. Despite comic elements, Middlemarch uses realism to encompass historical events: the 1832 Reform Act, early railways, and the accession of King William IV. It looks at medicine of the time and reactionary views in a settled community facing unwelcome change. Eliot began writing the two pieces that formed the novel in 1869–1870 and completed it in 1871. Initial reviews were mixed, but it is now seen widely as her best work and one of the great English novels.
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, often known simply as Tom Jones, is a comic novel by English playwright and novelist Henry Fielding. It is a Bildungsroman and a picaresque novel. It was first published on 28 February 1749 in London and is among the earliest English works to be classified as a novel. It is the earliest novel mentioned by W. Somerset Maugham in his 1948 book Great Novelists and Their Novels among the ten best novels of the world.
Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor is a novel by English author Richard Doddridge Blackmore, published in 1869. It is a romance based on a group of historical characters and set in the late 17th century in Devon and Somerset, particularly around the East Lyn Valley area of Exmoor. In 2003, the novel was listed on the BBC's survey The Big Read.
George Robert Gissing was an English novelist, who published 23 novels between 1880 and 1903. In the 1890s he was considered one of the three greatest novelists in England, and by the 1940s he had been recognised as a literary genius. Gissing's best-known works have reappeared in modern editions. They include The Nether World (1889), New Grub Street (1891) and The Odd Women (1893). He retains a small but devoted group of followers.
Richard Doddridge Blackmore, known as R. D. Blackmore, was one of the most famous English novelists of the second half of the nineteenth century. He won acclaim for vivid descriptions and personification of the countryside, sharing with Thomas Hardy a Western England background and a strong sense of regional setting in his works.
Humiliated and Insulted — also known in English as The Insulted and Humiliated, The Insulted and the Injured or Injury and Insult — is a novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, first published in 1861 in the monthly magazine Vremya.
Marius Lyle was the pseudonym of Una Maud Lyle Smyth, a British novelist and short story writer.
Alice Lorraine: a tale of the South Downs is a novel by R. D. Blackmore, published in 1875. Set in Sussex and Spain during the Napoleonic Wars, the novel recounts the divergent tales of the eponymous heroine and her brother in their efforts to save the noble Lorraine family from ruin.
Cradock Nowell: a tale of the New Forest is a three-volume novel by R. D. Blackmore published in 1866. Set in the New Forest and in London, it follows the fortunes of Cradock Nowell who is thrown out of his family home by his father following the suspicious death of Cradock's twin brother Clayton. It was Blackmore's second novel, and the novel he wrote prior to his most famous work Lorna Doone.
The Maid of Sker is a three-volume novel that was written by R. D. Blackmore and published in 1872. The novel is set in the late 18th century and is about an elderly fisherman who unravels the mysterious origins of a foundling child who is washed ashore on the coast of Glamorganshire, South Wales. It was published subsequent to Blackmore's Lorna Doone, although he had begun writing The Maid of Sker 25 years earlier. Blackmore considered The Maid of Sker to be his best novel.
Springhaven: a tale of the Great War is a three-volume novel by R. D. Blackmore published in 1887. It is set in Sussex, England, during the time of the Napoleonic Wars, and revolves around the plots of the villainous Captain Caryl Carne who attempts to aid a French invasion.
Christowell: a Dartmoor tale is a three-volume novel by R. D. Blackmore published in 1882. It is set in the fictional village of Christowell on the eastern edge of Dartmoor.
Mary Anerley: a Yorkshire tale is a three-volume novel by R. D. Blackmore published in 1880. It is set in the rugged landscape of Yorkshire's North Riding and the sea-coast of its East Riding.
Erema; or, my father's sin is a three-volume novel by R. D. Blackmore published in 1877. The novel is narrated by a teenage girl called Erema whose father escaped from England having been charged with a murder he did not commit. Erema has grown up in exile with her father, and the story begins in California in the 1850s.
Kit and Kitty: a story of west Middlesex is a three-volume novel by R. D. Blackmore published in 1890. It is set near Sunbury-on-Thames in Middlesex.
Perlycross: a tale of the western hills is a three-volume novel by R. D. Blackmore published in 1894. The story is set in eastern Devon around 1830.
Mary Susanna Lee (1846–1908) and her sister Catherine Harriet Lee (1847–1914) were English writers of children's fiction. Several of their books had a historical setting; some were targeted at girls. They were usually co-authors and published as M. and C. Lee or Mary and Catherine Lee.
Hester: A Story of Contemporary Life is an 1883 novel written by Margaret Oliphant. It examines the cycle of history through the lives of the Vernon family. The book was published in three separate volumes corresponding to three parts of the story. The novel was adapted by Kate Clanchy and Zena Forster for broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in 2013, showing Hester as a determined organizer successful for years but ultimately defeated by the male world of Victorian business.
Cécile is an historical novel by the British writer F. L. Lucas. His second novel, first published in 1930, it is a story of love, society and politics in the France of 1775–1776, set largely in Picardy and Paris, which locations form its two parts.
