Topics in Literature

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  Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

  First published in 1893, when Stephen Crane was only twenty-one years old, Maggie is the harrowing tale of a young woman’s fall into prostitution and…

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  The Autobiography of Ashley Bowen (1728-1813)

  The first American sailor known to write his own autobiography, Ashley Bowen remains a valuable storyteller who can speak to today’s readers about the maritime…

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  The Keepsake for 1829

  Literary annuals played a major role in the popular culture of nineteenth-century Britain and America, and The Keepsake was the most distinguished, successful, and enduring…

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  Soldiers of Fortune

  A romance of America’s nascent imperial power, Richard Harding Davis’s Soldiers of Fortune recounts the adventures of Robert Clay, a mining engineer and sometime mercenary,…

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  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

  This classic novel of childhood is set in fictional St. Petersburg, a town based on Mark Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. Twain’s recounting of Tom…

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  The Woman in White

  As the inscription on his tombstone reveals, Wilkie Collins wanted to be remembered as the “author of The Woman in White,” for it was this…

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  Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales

  Vernon Lee writes in the Preface to Hauntings, “My ghosts are what you call spurious ghosts... of whom I can affirm only one thing, that…

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  Reuben Sachs

  Oscar Wilde wrote of this novel, “Its directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and above all, its absence of any single superfluous word,…

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  The Romance of a Shop

  The Romance of a Shop is an early “New Woman” novel about four sisters, who decide to establish their own photography business and their own…

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  She

  First published in 1886–87, H. Rider Haggard’s imperial romance follows its English heroes from the quiet rooms of Cambridge to the uncharted interior of Africa…

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  The Hound of the Baskervilles

  The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–02) is Arthur Conan Doyle’s most celebrated Sherlock Holmes adventure. At the end of the yew tree path of his…

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  The Girl Behind the Keys

  “As the door was thrust open, I heard, as in a dream, the voice of Neal Larrard—calm and cool as ever—dictating to me; mechanically, my…

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  Villette

  Charlotte Brontë’s contemporary George Eliot wrote of Villette, “There is something almost preternatural in its power.” The deceptive stillness and security of a girls’ school…

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  The Idea of Being Free

  Mary Hays (1759-1843) is often best remembered for her early revolutionary novels The Memoirs of Emma Courtney and The Victim of Prejudice. In this collection,…

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  John Halifax, Gentleman

  This 1856 novel, one of the most beloved of the Victorian period, follows the life, from childhood to death, of an orphaned boy who grows…

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  Shakespeare’s Heroines

  First published in 1832, Shakespeare’s Heroines is a unique hybrid of Shakespeare criticism, women’s rights activism, and conduct literature. Jameson’s collection of readings of female…

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  The Governess

  Published in 1749, the story of Mrs. Teachum and the nine pupils who make up her “little female academy” is widely recognized as the first…

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  Mrs Warren’s Profession

  One of Bernard Shaw’s early plays of social protest, Mrs Warren’s Profession places the protagonist’s decision to become a prostitute in the context of the…

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  The House of Mirth

  One of Edith Wharton’s most accomplished social satires, this novel tells the story of the beautiful but impoverished New York socialite Lily Bart, whose refusal…

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  Adam Bede

  The seemingly peaceful country village of Hayslope is the setting for this ambitious first novel by one of the nineteenth century’s great novelists. With sympathy,…

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  Obi

  “Three-Fingered Jack,” the protagonist of this 1800 novel, is based on the escaped slave and Jamaican folk hero Jack Mansong, who was believed to have…

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  Moths

  First published in 1880, Moths addresses such Victorian taboos as adultery, domestic violence, and divorce in vivid and flamboyant prose. The beautiful young heroine, Vere…

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  The Imperialist

  Set in the fictional Ontario town of Elgin at the beginning of the twentieth century, this 1904 novel was in its own time addressed largely…

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  Kim

  Kim tells the story of Kimball O’Hara, an orphaned Irish boy growing up in late nineteenth-century India, and his quest for identity as he strives…