18 books like Under the Greenwood Tree or, The Mellstock quire
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, Romance & Relationships, Historical Fiction
Villette, a novel
In time for the 200th anniversary of her birth, a Penguin Hardcover Classics edition of the book many believe to be Charlotte Brontë's crowning achievement.
With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially…
Shares: Women teachers, Teachers, British and irish fiction, Romance & Relationships
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
The Professor
The Professor was the first novel that Charlotte Bronte completed. Rejected by the publisher who took on the work of her sisters in 1846 - Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights - it remained unpublished until 1857, two years after Charlotte Bronte's death. Like Villette (1853), The Professor is based on her experiences as a language student in Brussels in 1842.
Told from the point of…
Shares: Women teachers, Teachers, British and irish fiction
The Man From Stone Creek
There was trouble in Haven, Arizona, and Ranger Sam O'Ballivan was determined to sort it out. Badge and gun hidden, he arrived posing as the new schoolteacher, and discovered his first task was to bring the rough ranchers' children under control. So he started with a call on Maddie Chancelor, the local postmistress, and older sister of a young boy in firm need of discipline.It never occurred to…
Shares: Teachers, Romance & Relationships, Historical Fiction, Romance
The Stranger Diaries
"From the author of the beloved Ruth Galloway series, a modern gothic mystery for fans of Magpie Murders and The Lake House"--
Clare Cassidy is no stranger to murder. A high school English teacher specializing in the Gothic writer R.M. Holland, she teaches a course on it every year. But when one of Clare's colleagues and closest friends is found dead, with a line from R.M. Holland's most famous…
Shares: Women teachers, Teachers, Romance
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark’s timeless classic about a controversial teacher who deeply marks the lives of a select group of students in the years leading up to World War II
"Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!” So asserts Jean Brodie, a magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic teacher at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh. Brodie selects six favorite…
Shares: Women teachers, Teachers, British and irish fiction
Just Beyond the Clouds
1 bestselling author Karen Kingsbury tells the heartwrenching story of Cody Gunner, a widower fighting for stability, and the woman who wants to help him trust again--even when trust is the most terrifying thing of all.Still aching over his wife's death, Cody Gunner can't bear the thought of also letting go of his Down's Syndrome brother, Carl Joseph. Cody wants his brother home, where he will be…
Shares: Women teachers, Teachers, Romance & Relationships
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, Historical Fiction, Romance
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.
Shares: British and irish fiction, Romance & Relationships, English literature
Autumn Lover
Returning to her Wyoming ranch at the Civil War's end, Elyssa Sutton finds it picked bare by scavengers and coveted by determined men. Yet the proud young woman vows never again to abandon her Ruby Mountain home-though it means enlisting the aid of a dark and dangerous stranger who lives for revenge alone.
Hunter Maxwell has suffered from the savagery of outlaws and the faithlessness of a woman.…
Shares: Romance & Relationships, Historical Fiction, Romance
The Trumpet-Major, and Robert His Brother
Set against a backdrop of the Napoleonic wars, this is a novel about a young woman and the three very different suitors who vie for her hand. Two of the men are brothers involved in the fighting, one an easygoing sailor, the other an honest and diffident trumpet major, the third suitor being the cowardly son of the local squire.
Shares: Wessex, British and irish fiction, Historical Fiction
Dark Tides
1 New York Times bestselling author of Tidelands returns with an “sweeping” (Parade) historical novel tracking the rise of the Tidelands family in London, Venice, and New England.Midsummer Eve 1670. Two unexpected visitors arrive at a shabby warehouse on the south side of the River Thames. The first is a wealthy nobleman seeking the lover he deserted twenty-one years earlier. Now James Avery has…
Shares: English literature, Romance
Murder in the Bookshop
‘A lovely mystery evocative of the period from a talented writer’ Helena Dixon, bestselling author of the Miss Underhay mysteriesSomeone’s been read their last rites…1915, London: Working in the dusty bookshop that her Aunt Violet mysteriously inherited, Hannah Merrill is accustomed to finding twists in every tale. But discovering her beloved best friend Lily-Anne – with a paperknife through her…
Shares: English literature, Romance
The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard
New York Times bestselling author Natasha Lester delivers a brilliant blend of feminism, fashion, and history in this bold novel set against the real-life designers’ showdown in Versailles in the 1970s.  "Vogue meets Daisy Jones & The Six ... Natasha Lester's most compelling novel yet!" —Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Alice NetworkFrench countryside, Present Day: …
Shares: English literature, Romance
Traveling Light
"Travel light and you can sing in the robber's face" was the best advice Summer Zwolenick ever received from her father, though she didn't recognize it at the time. Three years after the accident that ended her career as a ballerina, she is back in the familiar suburbs of Dayton, Ohio, teaching at a local high school. But it wasn't nostalgia that called Summer home. It was her need to spend…
Shares: Women teachers, Teachers
The January Dancer
A triumph of the New Space Opera: fast, complicated, wonder-filled!
Hugo Award finalist and Robert A. Heinlein Award–winning SF writer Michael Flynn now turns to space opera with stunningly successful results. Full of rich echoes of space opera classics from Doc Smith to Cordwainer Smith, The January Dancer tells the fateful story of an ancient pre-human artifact of great power, and the people…
Shares: Musicians, Romance & Relationships
Une si longue lettre
This novel is in the form of a letter, written by the widowed Ramatoulaye and describing her struggle for survival. A beautiful glimpse inside a woman's heart.
Shares: Women teachers, Teachers
About the book Under the Greenwood Tree or, The Mellstock quire →