Pierre Choderlos de Laclos produced “Les Liaisons Dangereuses”, or “Dangerous Liaisons”, in an effort to “write a work which departed from the ordinary, which made a noise, and which would remain on this earth after his death”. He did just that. First published in 1782 in four volumes, “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” was an immediate success, and has since inspired a large number of literary commentaries, plays, and films. The novel is an epistolary ...
William Wells Brown, who is credited with being the first African American novelist, crafts a groundbreaking piece of American fiction in his 1853 work “Clotel; Or, The President’s Daughter”. The long untouched subject matter of mixed race identity during the antebellum South is here treated with great deft and bravery. William Wells Brown confronts the hypocrisy of slavery, examining the detrimental effects it has on society. Even more direct i ...
Charles Brockden Brown was an American novelist, historian, and editor, who has been recognized as one of the first American novelists and an early proponent of the Gothic romance genre. Brown’s works are a combination of his own Romantic imagination and Enlightenment ideals, and are often characterized by elements of the sensational and violent. His work also reflects an interest in the early feminist movement, and frequently draws on Enlighten ...
Henry James’s 1904 novel “The Golden Bowl” is the story of Prince Amerigo, an impoverished but charismatic Italian nobleman who travels to London to marry Maggie Verver, the only child of the immensely wealthy American financier and art collector, Adam Verver. While in London, Prince Amerigo meets his former mistress, Charlotte Stant, who is Maggie’s close friend and soon to marry Maggie’s widowed father. Amerigo and the beautiful Charlotte find ...
First published in 1848, “Mary Barton” is a moving account of poverty and the working class by English author Elizabeth Gaskell. Set in the early 1840s in the English city of Manchester, Gaskell’s first novel follows the young and beautiful Mary Barton, daughter of a factory worker, who is eventually caught up in the class struggle of her time. She attracts the attention of a wealthy mill-owner’s son, Henry Carson, although she soon discovers he ...
Originally published in 1859, “Adam Bede” is the first novel by George Eliot, which was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. Eliot was one of the leading British writers of the Victorian era, as well as a noted journalist, poet, and translator. “Adam Bede” concerns a small, tight-knit, and fictional rural community called Hayslope and the romantic drama that develops between four of its young residents: the title character Adam, a young carpenter, th ...
First published in 1909, “A Girl of the Limberlost” is American author and naturalist Gene Stratton-Porter’s sequel to her 1904 novel “Freckles” and continues the stories of many of the same characters. Also set in Indiana near the Limberlost Swamp at the beginning of the 20th century, it tells the tale of Elnora Comstock, a young girl who is just entering high school at the outset of the novel. The story is one of Elnora’s emerging adulthood an ...
In Edgar Rice Burroughs’ sequel to “A Princess of Mars”, we find John Carter returning to Mars after a ten-year absence. First published serially in 1913, “The Gods of Mars” is the second volume in the “Barsoom” series. “A Princess of Mars” ended with the heroic Carter being unwillingly transported back to Earth. Having been long separated from his wife Dejah Thoris, his unborn child, and the Martian people of Helium that he has adopted as his o ...
“Eight Cousins” is Louisa May Alcott’s classic children’s tale first published in 1875. It is the story of Rose Campbell, who is thirteen when her wealthy father dies. Rose has been motherless from a young age and has had very little contact with her extended family when she finds herself orphaned. A pretty and sweet girl she is suddenly in the care of her great-aunts, her father’s six brothers, their wives, and her seven male cousins. Rose must ...
