18 books like The Trumpet-Major, and Robert His Brother
Shirley
Shirley, published in 1849, was Charlotte Brontë’s second novel after Jane Eyre. Published under her pseudonym of “Currer Bell,” it differs in several respects from that earlier work. It is written in the third person with an omniscient narrator, rather than the first-person of Jane Eyre, and incorporates the themes of industrial change and the plight of unemployed workers. It also features…
Shares: Napoleonic wars, British and irish fiction, Social life and customs, Historical Fiction
The Great Shadow
| caption = Title page for The Great Shadow (1892)
Shares: Napoleonic wars, History
Uncle Bernac
This is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's dramatic tale of historical fiction set during the Napoleonic wars.
Shares: Napoleonic wars, British and irish fiction, History
The Wing-and-wing: Or, Le Feu-follet. A Tale
The year is 1799. Admiral Caraccioli of Naples is about to be executed from the yard-arm of Lord Nelson’s flagship in the Mediterranean. Young and in love with Carccioli’s daughter, the spirited French privateer, Raoul Yvard, and his wily sailing master, Ithuel Bolt, harass the British fleet against all odds. Yvard is captured but cunningly escapes, setting up a showdown at sea against the…
Shares: Napoleonic wars, Historical Fiction
The well-beloved
Jocelyn Pierston, a sculptor of growing fame, is determined to find his ideal in womanhood, a quest that has led to many fruitless encounters. For just as it seems he has found his heart's desire, disillusionment sets in and his burning love turns to ashes. Returning to Portland, his birthplace, he meets young, innocent Avice Caro. They are betrothed until a fateful meeting with the self-assured…
Shares: Wessex, British and irish fiction, Historical Fiction
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Like many of Hardy’s novels, The Mayor of Casterbridge is set in the fictional county of Wessex in the mid 1800s. It begins with Michael Henchard, a young hay-trusser, drunk on rum, auctioning off his wife and baby daughter at a village fair. The next day, overcome with remorse, Henchard resolves to turn his life around. When we meet Henchard eighteen years later, temperance and hard work have…
Shares: Wessex, British and irish fiction
Death Comes to the Village
Major Robert Kurland has returned to the quiet vistas of his village home to recuperate from the horrors of Waterloo. However injured his body may be, his mind is as active as ever. Too active, perhaps. When he glimpses a shadowy figure from his bedroom window struggling with a heavy load, the tranquil facade of the village begins to loom sinister. Unable to forget the incident, Robert confides…
Shares: Soldiers, History
Under the Greenwood Tree or, The Mellstock quire
Under the Greenwood Tree is the story of the romantic entanglement between church musician, Dick Dewey, and the attractive new school mistress, Fancy Day. A pleasant romantic tale set in the Victorian era, Under the Greenwood Tree is one of Thomas Hardy's most gentle and pastoral novels.
Shares: Wessex, British and irish fiction, Historical Fiction
The Woodlanders
When country-girl Grace Melbury returns home from her middle-class school she feels she has risen above her suitor, the simple woodsman Giles Winterborne. Though marriage had been discussed between her and Giles, Grace finds herself captivated by Dr Edred Fitzpiers, a sophisticated newcomer to the area - a relationship that is encouraged by her socially ambitious father. Hardy's novel of…
Shares: Wessex, British and irish fiction, Social life and customs, Historical Fiction
Afloat and Ashore a Sea Tale
The writer has published so much truth which the world has insisted was fiction, and so much fiction which has been received as truth, that, in the present instance, he is resolved to say nothing on the subject. Each of his readers is at liberty to believe just as much, or as little, of the matter here laid before him, or her, as may suit his, or her notions, prejudices, knowledge of the world,…
Shares: Napoleonic wars, Historical Fiction
Belinda
Maria Edgeworth won the admiration of her contemporaries Jane Austen and Walter Scott as well as later writers such as Thackeray and Turgenev. In Belinda (1801) she tackles issues of gender and race in a manner at once comic and thought-provoking. Braving the perils of the marriage market, Belinda learns to think for herself as the examples of her friends prove singularly unreliable.
Edgeworth's…
Shares: Courtship, British and irish fiction
The Return of the Native
The native of the title is Clym Yeobright, who returns to the area from the bright society of Paris and, as any reader of Hardy knows, all is not smooth. He is quickly taken by and marries the one woman he should not--Eustacia Vye. The suffering that follows is mitigated somewhat by the ending.
Shares: Wessex, Social life and customs, History
The uncommercial traveller
A collection of seventeen sketches which grew out of Dickens' insomnia. He took long walks through London at night and his observations resulted in these sketches.
Shares: British and irish fiction, Social life and customs, History
The egoist
Presents the text of George Meredith's classic satirical novel along with critical essays by Robert Mayo, Virginia Woolf, and others, textual notes, and background essays by the author.
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Plain tales from the hills
Originally written for the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette, the stories were intended for a provincial readership familiar with the pleasures and miseries of colonial life. For the subsequent English edition, Kipling revised the tales so as to recreate as vividly as possible the sights and smells of India for those at home. Yet far from being a celebration of Empire, Kipling's stories tell of…
Shares: Soldiers, British and irish fiction, Social life and customs, History
Sons
"Wang Lung lay dying." Thus the action of SONS begins immediately after that of the last chapter of THE GOOD EARTH.
This new novel carries on the saga of the house of Wang, of Pear Blossom and the aging Lotus, of the three sons of Wang Lung, their wives and their children. The chief character is the youngest son, Wang The Tiger, leader of men, who through raids and sieges and pitched battles…
Shares: Soldiers, Brothers, Social life and customs, History
Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice is an 1813 novel of manners written by Jane Austen. The novel follows the character development of Elizabeth Bennet, the dynamic protagonist of the book who learns about the repercussions of hasty judgments and comes to appreciate the difference between superficial goodness and actual goodness.
Mr. Bennet, owner of the Longbourn estate in Hertfordshire, has five daughters,…
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Weir of Hermiston
In Stevenson's tale of father - son confrontation, the father, Adam Weir, is modelled on Lord Braxfield, the eighteenth-century 'hanging judge'. Weir, a 'risen man' who has married a wealthy but weak woman, is both feared and respected, not least by his own son, Archie. At a public hanging, Archie speaks out against capital punishment, knowing that it was his own father who sentenced the man.
He…
Shares: Country life, British and irish fiction, Social life and customs