Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy misjudge each other in a comedy of marriage, income, and pride. Austen’s second published novel is still the surest entrance to her shelf.
Public-domain books
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Jane Eyre
Jane Eyre
An orphan becomes a governess and refuses every arrangement that would make her less than a person. The house at Thornfield holds a secret the marriage plot cannot step around.
Frankenstein
Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley
Victor Frankenstein builds a living being and then abandons it. The creature’s education, and Victor’s refusal to answer for what he made, are the book’s real experiment.
Dracula
Dracula
by Bram Stoker
Jonathan Harker’s travel diary opens onto a count who intends to move to London. The rest of the novel is a coalition of notes, blood, and timetables trying to stop him.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Twelve early cases, from a speckled band to a scandal in Bohemia, narrated by Dr. Watson. This is the collection that fixed Holmes in the popular imagination.
Moby-Dick
Moby-Dick
Ishmael ships on the Pequod under a captain hunting one white whale. The book stops for whales, work, and metaphysics, then returns to the chase.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain
Huck Finn fakes his death and rafts the Mississippi with Jim, who is escaping enslavement. Twain’s novel is funny, and it does not let the joke forgive the country it travels.
Great Expectations
Great Expectations
Pip is lifted out of a forge by money whose source he misunderstands. Dickens’s late novel is about class, gratitude, and the patron Pip invents in his head.
Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment
Raskolnikov tests a theory that some people may kill for a higher purpose, and the theory does not survive the act. This entry points to a public-domain English translation.
The Odyssey
The Odyssey
by Homer
After the war at Troy, Odysseus tries to get home while suitors occupy his house. This catalog links Samuel Butler’s public-domain prose translation, not a modern verse one.
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
Nick Carraway rents a house next to Jay Gatsby’s parties and slowly learns what the parties are for.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Douglass describes enslavement in Maryland, the fight to read, and his escape. He published the Narrative to answer readers who claimed no one in bondage could have written it.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Alice follows a rabbit and finds a world that argues with her about size, manners, and the meaning of words. Carroll wrote it for a real child and then built a classic out of the joke.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
A cyclone carries Dorothy from Kansas to a road of yellow brick. The companions she picks up all want something a wizard in a city claims he can grant.
Walden
Walden
Thoreau’s account of two years in a cabin by Walden Pond, arranged by season and by argument. It is a book about economy in the old sense: how a life is furnished.
Meditations
Meditations
Private notes on judgment, death, and the discipline of wanting less than circumstances offer. The English text here is a public-domain translation of the emperor’s Greek.
Emma
Emma
by Jane Austen
Emma Woodhouse has money, leisure, and a talent for arranging other people’s lives. The novel lets her be charming and wrong in the same sentence.
Dubliners
Dubliners
by James Joyce
Fifteen stories of Dublin life, ending with The Dead. Joyce called the method a kind of clarity; the characters often stop just short of changing.
Fiction
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Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
Heathcliff and Catherine’s attachment wrecks two households across two generations. The story is told by a tenant and a housekeeper, never by the pair at its center.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
A young man wishes that a portrait would age in his place. Wilde’s only novel follows the wish into influence, cruelty, and a picture locked in a room.
A Tale of Two Cities
A Tale of Two Cities
London and Paris before and during the French Revolution, joined by a look-alike, a prisoner, and a sacrifice. The opening sentence is famous; the plot earns it.
Little Women
Little Women
Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March grow up in a household short of money and long on opinions. Jo’s wish to write is as much the plot as any marriage.
Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
Anna’s affair and Levin’s search for a workable life run side by side in imperial Russia. Tolstoy gives the social world as much weight as the passion. The link is to a public-domain English translation.
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Count of Monte Cristo
Edmond Dantès is imprisoned on a false charge and comes back, years later, with a new name and a plan. Dumas makes patience itself into an adventure.
Les Misérables
Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo
Jean Valjean leaves prison and is pursued across France by Inspector Javert, while Hugo pauses to write about sewers, convents, and justice. The catalog links a public-domain English translation.
Don Quixote
Don Quixote
A country gentleman renames himself a knight and rides out to enforce the plots of chivalric books. Cervantes’s novel is the comedy of taking reading literally. The link is to a public-domain English translation.
The Scarlet Letter
The Scarlet Letter
Hester Prynne wears a letter the town requires, while the father of her child stays unnamed. Hawthorne’s novel is about punishment as a public art.
Kids
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Peter and Wendy
Peter and Wendy
by J. M. Barrie
The Darling children leave the nursery for Neverland with a boy who refuses the future. Barrie’s novel keeps the flying, and also the cost of never coming home.
The Secret Garden
The Secret Garden
Mary Lennox arrives at a Yorkshire manor and finds a garden no one is allowed to enter. Tending it changes her, and the cousin shut in another room.
Anne of Green Gables
Anne of Green Gables
Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert ask for a boy from the orphanage and receive Anne Shirley. She talks, imagines, and slowly makes herself necessary to Avonlea.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Complete
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Complete
by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Complete is set in the 1830s–1840s in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, which is based on Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain lived as a boy. In the novel, Sawyer has several adventures, often with his friend Huckleberry Finn.
At the Back of the North Wind
At the Back of the North Wind
At the Back of the North Wind was serialized in the children's magazine Good Words for the Young beginning and was published in book form. At the Back of the North Wind is a fantasy centered on a boy named Diamond and his adventures with the North Wind.
Black Beauty
Black Beauty
by Anna Sewell
Black Beauty was written from a horse as main character's perspective. She wrote it in the last years of her life, during which she was bedridden and seriously ill.
Five Children and It
Five Children and It
Five Children and It was originally published the Strand Magazine under the general title The Psammead, or the Gifts, with a segment appearing each month. The stories were then expanded into a novel which was published the same year.
Little Lord Fauntleroy
Little Lord Fauntleroy
Little Lord Fauntleroy was published as a serial in St. Nicholas Magazine, then as a book by Scribner's (the publisher of St. Nicholas) in New York. Little Lord Fauntleroy was also published that year in November by Frederick Warne & Co.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
A cyclone carries Dorothy from Kansas to a road of yellow brick. The companions she picks up all want something a wizard in a city claims he can grant.
History
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The French Revolution: A History
The French Revolution: A History
The French Revolution: A History was written by the Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle. A massive undertaking which draws together a wide variety of sources, Carlyle's history—despite the unusual style in which it is written—is considered to be an authoritative account of the early course of the Revolution.
The History of London
The History of London
The history of London, the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, extends to over 2500 years. In that time, it has become one of the world's most impactful financial and cultural centres.
Ion
Ion
by Plato
In Plato's Ion (; Ancient Greek: Ἴων) Socrates discusses with the titular character, a professional rhapsode who also lectures on Homer, the question of whether the rhapsode, a performer of poetry, gives his performance on account of his skill and knowledge or by virtue of divine possession.
Cymbeline
Cymbeline
Although it is listed as a tragedy in the First Folio, modern critics often classify Cymbeline as a romance or even a comedy. Like Othello and The Winter's Tale, it takes up the themes of innocence and jealousy.
Menexenus
The Prince
The Prince
Many commentators have viewed that one of the main themes of The Prince is that immoral acts are sometimes necessary to achieve political glory. From Machiavelli's correspondence, a version was being written, using a Latin title, De Principatibus (Of Principalities).
Ancient law
Ancient law
Ancient law went through twelve editions during the lifetime of the author. The twelfth edition was published in 1888.
Maid Marian
Maid Marian
Peacock wrote all but the last three chapters of Maid Marian at Marlow. He wrote to Percy Bysshe Shelley that he did not find "this brilliant summer", "very favourable to intellectual exertion" but before it was quite over "rivers, castles, forests, abbeys, monks, maids, kings, and banditti were all dancing before me like a masked ball".
Common Sense
Common Sense
by Thomas Paine
Writing in clear and persuasive prose, Paine collected moral and political arguments to encourage common people in the Colonies to fight for egalitarian government. Common Sense was published anonymously at the beginning of the American Revolution and became an immediate sensation.
Poetry
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Poems on various subjects, religious and moral
Poems on various subjects, religious and moral
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral by Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston, in New England (published 1 September 1773) is a gathering of 39 poems written by Phillis Wheatley, the first professional African-American woman poet in America and the first African-American woman whose writings were published.
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
The Pied Piper of Hamelin (German: der Rattenfänger von Hameln), also known as the Pan Piper or the Rat-Catcher of Hamelin, is the title character of a legend from the town of Hamelin (Hameln), Lower Saxony, Germany. The legend dates back to the Middle Ages.
Mucedorus
Mucedorus
A Most pleasant Comedie of Mucedorus the Kings Sonne of Valentia, and Amadine the Kinges daughter of Aragon, commonly called Mucedorus, is an Elizabethan romantic comedy, first performed and regularly revived until the Restoration.
Rock of Ages
Rock of Ages
"Rock of Ages" is a popular Christian hymn written by the Reformed Anglican minister Augustus Toplady.
The Hole Book
The Hole Book
by Peter Newell
The Hole Book stays with an accidentally-fired bullet as it travels through various scenes and objects in a town. The physical book features a literal, die-cut hole on each page, which is incorporated into the illustrations of havoc wreaked along bullet's path.
Venus and Adonis
Venus and Adonis
Venus and Adonis is considered likely to be Shakespeare's first publication. The poem recounts Venus, the goddess of Love; of her unrequited love; and of her attempted seduction of Adonis, an extremely handsome young man, who would rather go hunting.
Heart of New England
Heart of New England
The Heart of New England Council is a Scouting America council serving Cub Scout packs, Scouts BSA troops, Exploring posts and Venturing crews in central Massachusetts with administrative support, program resources, activities, events, and camping properties.
Troilus and Criseyde
Troilus and Criseyde
Troilus and Criseyde was written in rime royale and probably completed during the mid-1380s. Many Chaucer scholars regard it as the poet's finest work.
An Essay on Criticism
An Essay on Criticism
An Essay on Criticism is one of the first major poems written by the English writer Alexander Pope (1688–1744), published. An Essay on Criticism is the source of the famous quotations "To err is human; to forgive, divine", "A little learning is a dang'rous thing" (frequently paraphrased as "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing"), and "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread".