18 books like Rachel Ray
The Man of Property
The first book of the Forsyte Saga, initially published in 1906 (the second was not published until 1921). Here the reader is introduced to the large Forsyte clan, with special attention paid to the rapacious Soames who’s urge to possess includes his beautiful wife Irene, who he eventually alienates by his jealous and grasping nature.
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The troll garden
"This collection of Willa Cather stories - her first book of fiction and the capstone of her early career - is as relevant today as at the time of its initial publication. As different and individually distinguished as the seven stories may be, they share as their subject the role and status of the artist in American society.
The passions, ambitions, and pretensions, the cant and the pathos of…
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The way of all flesh
I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.' With The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler threw a subversive brick at the smug face of Victorian domesticity. Published in 1903, a year after Butler's death, the novel is a thinly…
Shares: Middle class, Manners and customs, British and irish fiction, England
The small house at Allington
The Chronicles of Barsetshire, Book 5: The Small House at Allington
The Small House at Allington introduces Trollope's most charming heroine, the betwitching Lily Dale, onto the Barsetshire scene. She so endeared herself to readers of the Cornhill Magazine, where A Small House was first published in serial form, that Trollope was bombarded by letters begging him to marry her to her lifelong…
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Ladies whose bright eyes
What would really happen to a modern man thrown back to the Middle Ages ?
Shares: British and irish fiction, Romance & Relationships, England
Can you forgive her?
The Palliser Novels, book 1: Can You Forgive Her?
Alice Vavasor cannot decide whether to marry her ambitious but violent cousin George or the upright and gentlemanly John Grey - and finds herself accepting and rejecting each of them in turn. Increasingly confused about her own feelings and unable to forgive herself for such vacillation, her situation is contrasted with that of her friend Lady…
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Clayhanger
This coming-of-age story set in the Midlands of Victorian England follows Edwin Clayhanger as he leaves school, takes over the family business and falls in love. Bennett wrote it in 1910 at the Royal Albion Hotel, Brighton, and in Lausanne. Edwin Clayhanger's father, Darius, has risen from an extremely poor background, which Bennett repeatedly returns to, to become a prominent printer in Bursley.…
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Simon the Coldheart (Beauvallet Dynasty #1)
Simon was born in 1386, the illegitimate son of Geoffrey of Malvallet. He and his half-brother became great friends of the Prince, fighting against France. Simon, valiant and strong, with a keen mind and fair visage, had defied his ignoble birth to become a page, then a squire, and at last a lord of the land.
Friend of kings and princes, gentle and just with his people, and known for his silence…
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The peppered moth
"It is 1912 and Bessie Bawtry is a small child living in Breaseborough, a South Yorkshire mining town. Unusually gifted, she sits quietly and studies hard, waiting for the day when she can sit the Cambridge entrance exam and escape the kind of life her ancestors have never even thought to question. Her parents are in awe of her - who is this swan-child, is she a freak? (Where did she get her…
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The Black Robe
The Black Robe is an 1881 partially-epistolary novel by famed English writer, Wilkie Collins. The book, which relates the misadventures of one "Lewis Romayne", is noted for its anti-Catholic lens.
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Where Angels Fear to Tread
Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) follows two women to Italy: the widowed Lilia Herriton and her traveling companion Caroline Abbott. Lilia falls passionately in love with the country, and also with a young Italian man. Her decision to remain in Italy enrages her dead husband's family, who send her brother-in-law to fetch her back.
Shares: Middle class, British and irish fiction, England
The Good Soldier
This is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy - or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet as close as a good glove's with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about…
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Amelia
Against her mother's wishes, Amelia marries Captain William Booth, a young army officer, and runs away to London. William is unjustly imprisoned in Newgate, and is subsequently seduced by Miss Matthews. Amelia stays faithful to her husband and forgives his transgression, but William soon draws them into trouble again as he accrues gambling debts trying to lift the couple out of poverty.
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Orley Farm
When Joseph Mason of Groby Park, Yorkshire, died, he left his estate to his family. A codicil to his will, however, left Orley Farm (near London) to his much younger second wife and infant son. The will and the codicil were in her handwriting, and there were three witnesses, one of whom was no longer alive. A bitterly fought court case confirmed the codicil.
Twenty years pass. Lady Mason lives…
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Far from the Madding Crowd
Independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence draws three very different suitors: the gentleman-farmer Boldwood, soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy and the devoted shepherd Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways, unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and tragedy ensues,…
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Miss or Mrs.?
The night had come to an end. The new-born day waited for its quickening light in the silence that is never known on land - the silence before sunrise, in a calm at sea.
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No Thoroughfare
No Thoroughfare is a stage play and novel by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, both released in December 1867.
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The Newcomes
The Newcomes is Thackeray's most essentially 'Victorian' novel, generous in its proportions, sharp in its criticism of the moral convolutions of the age, and encyclopaedic in its reference. Set in the 1830s and 1840s, a period of rapid change and of political and economic development, the novel considers the fortunes and misfortunes of a 'most respectable' extended middle-class family. The action…
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