Free summaries
British Literature — page 20
1,020 public-domain british literature books, summarised. Page 20 of 22.
Just—William
Richmal Crompton
Eleven-year-old William Brown is a whirlwind of well-intentioned chaos whose singular talent is turning the orderly world of his family and neighbors upside down.
The Beggar's Opera
John Gay
A rakish highwayman finds his criminal underworld turned upside down when his secret marriage to a receiver’s daughter sparks a chaotic power struggle between rival thieves and corrupt officials.
The Pearl: A Middle English Poem, A Modern Version in the Metre of the Original
Sophie Jewett
A grieving father finds solace in a dream of a radiant city, where he glimpses his lost child among the blessed, learning to surrender his earthly anguish to a higher, divine order.
The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 14
Robert Louis Stevenson
The wide world is seen through the singular, shifting lens of a child’s imagination, where the backyard becomes an ocean and a bed is a boat destined for distant shores.
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Volume 1 (of 3): Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs and Other Pieces of Our Earlier Poets Together With Some Few of Later Date
Unknown
This collection gathers the lost voices of a disappearing world, preserving the heroic ballads, tragic songs, and rough-hewn rhymes that once echoed in English fields and royal halls. It serves as a bridge between the oral traditions of the past and the literary canon of the future.
Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens
An innocent orphan boy navigates a treacherous underworld of thieves and criminals in London, struggling to maintain his purity while searching for his true identity and a place to call home.
The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year out and a New Year In
Charles Dickens
When a humble man is told by the powerful that he and his kind are beyond redemption, he discovers that the wind, the bells, and the night hold a terrifying, transformative truth about the future.
Tales from Shakespeare
Charles Lamb
These stories offer a gentle, accessible gateway into the vast and complex world of the most celebrated playwright in the English language. They serve as a narrative bridge, distilling profound drama into readable prose for a new generation.
When the Sleeper Wakes
H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
A man falls into a century-long sleep, only to wake in a future where he is the world's accidental, captive king. This is a story of total displacement, exploring how one person’s identity is swallowed by the machinery of an unforgiving, hyper-industrialized society.
Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 4. Naturalism in England
Georg Brandes
This historical survey traces the radical shift in English literature from rigid classicism to the raw, revolutionary spirit of the nineteenth century, mapping the intellectual currents that defined a generation of poets.
Miss Million's Maid: A Romance of Love and Fortune
Berta Ruck
HOOK When a working-class girl inherits a fortune, her former mistress decides to bridge the widening social gap by becoming her lady’s maid.
![Cover of The Comedy of Errors: The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.]](https://cdn.myebooksbuy.com/c/the-comedy-of-errors-the-works-of-william-shakespeare-cambridge-edition.webp)
The Comedy of Errors: The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.]
William Shakespeare
A frantic comedy of errors unfolds when two sets of long-lost identical twins accidentally converge in the same city, triggering a chaotic day of mistaken identities, false accusations, and mounting absurdity.
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
Samuel Johnson
A celebrated man of letters and his curious companion set out to survey the rugged, vanishing cultures of the remote Western Islands, documenting a society perched between ancient tradition and a modernizing world.
Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906
L. M. (Lucy Maud) Montgomery
This collection gathers thirty-one short stories published during a pivotal time in the author’s career. These vignettes capture the quiet dramas, domestic tensions, and romantic yearnings of turn-of-the-century Prince Edward Island.
The Taming of the Shrew
William Shakespeare
A brash, high-stakes wager forces a headstrong woman into a marriage she never sought, sparking a volatile battle of wills that echoes through the streets of Padua.
The Beetle: A Mystery
Richard Marsh
A disgraced, vengeful entity from the ancient world pursues a prominent British politician, dragging a cast of Londoners into a terrifying struggle against a power that defies human explanation.
English Critical Essays: Nineteenth Century
Unknown
This collection gathers the seminal critical voices of the nineteenth century, tracing the intellectual revolution that redefined poetry from a rigid exercise in form to a profound, living expression of the human spirit.
Misalliance
Bernard Shaw
A boisterous household of wealth, boredom, and mismatched expectations is suddenly upended when an unexpected visitor drops from the sky, forcing everyone to confront the stifling reality of their comfortable lives.
The Tatler, Volume 1
Steele, Richard, Sir
Through the eyes of an imaginary astrologer, these essays observe the coffee-house wits and social customs of London, offering a witty, enduring mirror to the vanities of a changing age.
Lord Alistair's Rebellion
Allen Upward
This turn-of-the-century novel charts the spiritual and social restlessness of a young aristocrat who rejects the stifling conventions of his class to seek a life of authentic passion and purpose.
The Celtic Twilight
W. B. (William Butler) Yeats
The border between the waking world and the realm of spirit is dangerously, beautifully thin. Here, ancient myths and modern ghosts walk the same Irish hills, weaving a tapestry of wonder that defies the rigid logic of the everyday.
A Strange Story
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
The boundary between the known world and the terrifying unknown is often thinner than we care to admit. Those who seek to cross it frequently find that the truth is more haunting than the darkest fable.
King Henry V
William Shakespeare
A young king balances the weight of his crown against the chaos of war, seeking to claim a foreign throne while proving his worth to his own people.
The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands
W. Somerset (William Somerset) Maugham
The Pacific holds a mirror to the human soul, revealing a place where the line between absolute bliss and utter despair is as thin as a trembling leaf. These stories explore the lives of those drawn to the South Seas—and the irrevocable ways the islands change them.
Aunt Rachel: A Rustic Sentimental Comedy
David Christie Murray
A long-severed love affair between two aging villagers finds an unlikely second act, woven into the romantic courtship of their younger relatives in a quiet, music-filled English hamlet.
Mike and Psmith
P. G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse
A disgraced schoolboy and a dandy with an eyeglass navigate the absurd, rigid hierarchies of an English boarding school. Their unlikely friendship turns the tide of the school’s cricket fortunes and its social order.
Charles Dickens and Music
James T. (James Thomas) Lightwood
The musical landscape of Victorian England comes alive through the eyes of its most famous novelist, revealing how songs, instruments, and melodies were woven into the daily lives of his iconic characters.
Dope
Sax Rohmer
This mystery novel plunges into the shadows of post-WWI London, where the gilded salons of the West End collide with the hidden, illicit opium dens of Limehouse.
The Shepherd's Calendar. Volume I (of II)
James Hogg
The Scottish hills are home to stories where the boundaries between the physical world and the supernatural thin, leaving shepherds and lairds to face the unpredictable hand of providence. These tales capture the raw, haunting spirit of a people living on the edge of wild, desolated landscapes.
The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 18
Robert Louis Stevenson
A traveler traverses the vast Pacific, documenting the fading traditions of remote islanders and the encroaching influence of colonial powers in a world caught between ancient custom and modern wreckage.
A Tale of a Tub
Jonathan Swift
A labyrinthine satire on human folly, this work dissects the pretensions of religion, philosophy, and literature through a chaotic blend of allegory and intellectual mischief. It remains a foundational masterpiece of ironic prose.
Quotes and Images From The Works of George Meredith
George Meredith
A lover must have his delusions, just as a man must have a skin. This collection gathers the sharp, bracing observations of a Victorian master who found the human comedy written in the wrinkles of our social pretenses.
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 06 (of 12)
Edmund Burke
The state, at its best, is a moral organism defined by duty, tradition, and the fragile balance of human rights. Through a series of urgent letters and public addresses, the architect of this collection argues that political power is a trust, not a possession.
The Grey Woman and other Tales
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Through tales of domestic peril and urban struggle, these narratives capture the quiet, persistent courage of women navigating worlds that often treat them as property or afterthoughts.
A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad
F. W. (Frederick William) Harvey
A soldier’s lyric heart beats against the brutality of war, finding a sanctuary of memory in the green hills of home.
The Celestial Omnibus, and Other Stories
E. M. (Edward Morgan) Forster
These tales explore the friction between the constraints of mundane, ordered life and the wild, transformative power of the unseen world.
English Verse: Specimens Illustrating its Principles and History
Raymond MacDonald Alden
This collection serves as a practical guide to the mechanics of English poetry, offering a carefully curated selection of verse designed for inductive study. It maps the evolution of rhythmic forms from their earliest origins to the modern era.
The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 05 (of 12)
William Hazlitt
The written word is a living companion, transforming solitary hours into a vibrant, crowded conversation with the greatest minds of the past. To read is to walk through history, shaking hands with ghosts who speak as clearly as friends.
The Humorous Poetry of the English Language
Unknown
A spirited anthology of wit, this collection gathers centuries of verse that mocks, pricks, and plays, proving that a sharp mind and a nimble rhyme are the surest antidotes to a dull day.
Julius Caesar
William Shakespeare
A Roman general stands at the threshold of absolute power, forcing his closest allies to decide if the survival of their republic is worth the cold-blooded murder of a friend.
Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A haunted mariner, a sinister guest, and a vision of a pleasure-dome reveal the restless, transformative power of the imagination. These verses capture the fleeting brilliance of a mind caught between ethereal beauty and dark, heavy isolation.
Rambles in Dickens' Land
Robert Allbut
The streets of Victorian London and the winding roads of Kent hold ghosts of fiction, where every corner reveals a phantom from a beloved page. This guide bridges the divide between the map and the novel, inviting readers to walk where imagination once took shape.
A Selection from the Lyrical Poems of Robert Herrick
Robert Herrick
This collection gathers the lyrical voice of a seventeenth-century poet whose verses are as enduring as the natural cycles they celebrate. It offers a rare, intimate encounter with a master of the short, musical form, preserved for a modern audience that seeks both elegance and brevity in its reading.
The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vol 2 (of 2)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A collection of dramatic verse and poetic revisions reveals a artist constantly staging the internal battles of duty, deceit, and conscience. Through historical tragedies, gothic melodramas, and intimate lyrical drafts, these late works trace a restless search for moral clarity.
The Eustace Diamonds
Anthony Trollope
A glittering, deceitful widow schemes to keep a fortune in diamonds, setting off a storm of greed, legal maneuverings, and romantic chaos across London society.
The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature
Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
The ancient sagas of the Northland whisper through the centuries, shaping the imagination of English poets and thinkers who found in those rugged verses a mirror for their own heroic ideals.
Historic Tales: The Romance of Reality. Vol. 13 (of 15), King Arthur (1)
Malory, Thomas, Sir
A young king establishes his realm, testing his newly anointed knights against treacherous sorcery, hidden lineages, and the absolute trials of chivalric honor.
The Jest Book: The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings
Mark Lemon
Centuries of British wit, sharp retorts, and tavern banter converge in a expansive collection designed to capture the enduring architecture of humor.