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British Literature — page 28
6,377 public-domain british literature books, summarised. Page 28 of 133.
A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage: Together with the Sense of Antiquity on this Argument
Jeremy Collier
The English stage of the late 17th century serves as a battlefield where virtue confronts vice, and the theater is painted as a theater of corruption. This polemic remains a foundational, albeit controversial, artifact of moral criticism.
The Admirable Crichton
J. M. (James Matthew) Barrie
HOOK When a shipwreck strips away the rigid hierarchies of Edwardian society, the natural order of human merit suddenly finds itself at odds with the artificial order of the British class system.
The Paris Sketch Book of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh
William Makepeace Thackeray
This collection of observations captures a young writer’s witty, cynical, and affectionate immersion in the French capital. It serves as a sharp-eyed record of a society in flux, balancing travelogue, art criticism, and social commentary.
The Priest and the Acolyte: With an Introductory Protest by Stuart Mason
John Francis Bloxam
This story of a forbidden attachment between a young clergyman and a choir boy serves as a poignant, if controversial, artifact of late-Victorian aestheticism. It remains a notable document for its defiant rejection of conventional morality and its tragic exploration of social alienation.
Tommy and Grizel
J. M. (James Matthew) Barrie
A man who prefers the romance of his own imagination to the messy realities of human connection finds himself caught between the woman who truly knows him and the hollow fame he has built for himself.
The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green
Cuthbert Bede
The path to adulthood is rarely straightforward, especially when it involves navigating the bizarre initiation rituals, academic blunders, and social traps of mid-Victorian university life.
The Four Feathers
A. E. W. (Alfred Edward Woodley) Mason
A young man is branded a coward by his peers and fiancée, setting him on a harrowing quest to reclaim his honor through acts of supreme, self-sacrificing courage in the Sudanese desert.
The Works of Aphra Behn, Volume II
Aphra Behn
This collection of seventeenth-century drama captures the fierce energy of a world where ambition, desire, and wit collide with the rigid structures of court and city life. It reveals a playwright who fearlessly maps the intersection of power and pleasure.
Red and White: A Tale of the Wars of the Roses
Emily Sarah Holt
The Wars of the Roses serve as the backdrop for this tale of domestic survival amidst a crumbling kingdom. It is a work of historical fiction that prioritizes the personal costs of political upheaval, focusing on the lives of those caught in the shadow of the great houses of York and Lancaster. The narrative spans…
Fifty-One Tales
Lord Dunsany
The world is a fragile, passing thing, and the gods, the years, and even our own creations are merely whispers in the dark. These brief, haunting vignettes hold a mirror to the fleeting nature of human endeavor.
Stories from Virgil
Alfred John Church
A classic foundation of Western literature is rendered into accessible prose, tracing a legendary hero’s migration from the ruins of Troy to the shores of Italy. This volume distills the epic journey of Æneas, capturing the sweep of divine intervention, tragic romance, and the brutal necessity of war.
Paul Kelver
Jerome K. (Jerome Klapka) Jerome
The journey of a sensitive spirit navigating the rigid expectations of late-Victorian society, this story traces one man’s struggle to reconcile his artistic ideals with the crushing demands of earning a living.
The Open Door, and the Portrait.: Stories of the Seen and the Unseen
Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
These two tales of the supernatural explore the boundary between the living and the dead, focusing less on the terror of ghosts and more on the profound, unsettling weight of unresolved human longing.
Pearl-Maiden: A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem
H. Rider (Henry Rider) Haggard
HOOK Amidst the ruin of Jerusalem and the opulence of Rome, a woman’s faith and a soldier’s devotion endure the crucible of slavery and war.
A Simpleton
Charles Reade
This is a story of a young doctor, his impulsive wife, and the brutal collision between their idealistic romance and the harsh, materialistic world. It explores how innocence survives—or falters—under the weight of financial ruin and long-held secrets.
Mary Olivier: a Life
May Sinclair
To understand the weight of a life, one must examine the quiet, crushing accumulation of its days. This story traces the long, inward journey of a woman finding her own soul in the shadow of a stifling home.
Early Reviews of English Poets
John Louis Haney
The history of literature is often written by the victors, but this collection unearths the biting, often cruel, contemporary judgments that once greeted the now-hallowed masterpieces of English poetry.
Green Tea
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
The veil between the living and the dead is thinned by obsession and guilt, inviting unseen, malevolent forces to cross the threshold into our physical world.
Spies of the Kaiser: Plotting the Downfall of England
William Le Queux
HOOK England sits on the precipice of a secret invasion, its defenses compromised by a vast, hidden network of foreign agents operating in plain sight.
The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D
Jonathan Swift
These collected writings offer a bracing, unsentimental look at the Church of England through the eyes of its most brilliant and contentious defender. They reveal a mind as comfortable with political maneuvering as with theological inquiry.
Lady into Fox
David Garnett
This is the unsettling account of a quiet Oxfordshire marriage upended when a wife suddenly transforms into a fox. It is a stark, fable-like examination of love, loss, and the boundaries between human and animal natures.
The Hundred Best English Poems
Unknown
This collection gathers iconic English verse into a single volume, aiming to curate poems so essential they become part of a reader’s inner life. It offers an enduring bridge to the foundational voices of the English language.
The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Sassoon
The soldier’s experience of the Great War is captured here not in high-flown rhetoric, but in the raw, immediate sensory details of trench life. It remains a searing, essential witness to the human cost of conflict.
Marius the Epicurean
Walter Pater
In the twilight of the Roman Empire, a sensitive young man seeks a philosophy of life that honors the beauty of the passing moment while navigating an age of profound moral uncertainty.
The Light That Failed
Rudyard Kipling
A searing portrait of ambition, obsession, and the fragility of sight, this narrative captures the descent of a man who loses everything he values just as he reaches the pinnacle of his professional success.
The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
A poet finds the infinite in the everyday, turning a walk through the hills or a glance at a passing stranger into a meditation on memory, loss, and the enduring power of the natural world.
The Purcell Papers
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Beneath the surface of polite Irish society lies a landscape haunted by ancestral debts, spectral visitors, and the unshakable weight of moral consequence.
To Be Read at Dusk
Charles Dickens
When the sun sets over the Great St. Bernard Pass, five weary couriers gather to trade stories of the inexplicable, proving that the most unsettling mysteries are often those that leave no physical trace.
Five Tales
John Galsworthy
HOOK These five stories examine the quiet, often hidden tensions of English life, where honor, fleeting romance, and the inexorable weight of aging collide within the rigid structures of the Edwardian era.
Game and Playe of the Chesse: A Verbatim Reprint of the First Edition, 1474
Jacobus, de Cessolis, active 1288-1322
A medieval game serves as a mirror for the social order, transforming the movement of wooden pieces into a blueprint for a virtuous and well-governed society.
Miscellaneous Essays
Thomas De Quincey
This collection of essays offers an intimate, idiosyncratic tour through history, literature, and the curious corners of the human psyche. It is an invitation to view the familiar with fresh, often unsettling, clarity.
As You Like It
William Shakespeare
Two cousins seek refuge in a wild forest, trading the treacherous politics of a tyrant’s court for the unpredictable, transformative lessons of an ancient woodland.
The Return
Walter De la Mare
A man’s identity is violently usurped after a chance encounter in a graveyard, leaving him to navigate a world that no longer recognizes him as himself.
Original Plays, Second Series
W. S. (William Schwenck) Gilbert
These theatrical works define the sharp, rhythmic wit of Victorian satire, blending absurd social observation with melodic, crystalline language. They remain vital as the bedrock of comic musical drama.
St. Ronan's Well
Walter Scott
A fading Scottish village discovers that the healing waters of its new mineral spring offer no remedy for the poisonous deceits, long-buried secrets, and fragile honor of the local gentry.
The Paston Letters, A.D. 1422-1509. Volume 5 (of 6): New Complete Library Edition
Unknown
An intimate, unvarnished window into fifteenth-century England, these authentic letters reveal the daily struggles, legal battles, and private romances of a family rising through the ranks of the gentry.
The Happy Hypocrite: A Fairy Tale for Tired Men
Beerbohm, Max, Sir
A man of legendary wickedness assumes a saintly mask to win a virtuous woman’s heart, only to discover that the soul reflects the face it chooses to wear.
The Jumblies, and Other Nonsense Verses
Edward Lear
The Jumblies and Other Nonsense Verses is a collection of imaginative, rhythmic, and absurd poetry that explores the whimsy of travel, unrequited longing, and the courage required to live differently.
The works of John Dryden, now first collected in eighteen volumes. Volume 06
John Dryden
The Restoration stage is a theater of sharp satire, tragic grandeur, and moral complexity, where the boundaries between public virtue and private appetite are constantly tested. These collected works offer a vivid, unvarnished window into an era that treated wit as its highest currency and scandal as its favorite…
The Works of John Marston. Volume 3
John Marston
Two men plot a wild escape to Virginia that collapses in the stormy Thames, leaving a trail of bankrupt foolishness, vengeful spouses, and biting moral satire in early modern London.
Essays and Tales
Joseph Addison
This collection of classic eighteenth-century essays offers a refined, observant window into the social habits, intellectual curiosities, and moral aspirations of a bygone era. It serves as an elegant guide for those seeking to sharpen their wit and deepen their reflection.
A Florentine Tragedy
Oscar Wilde
The search for love often leads to a sudden, violent confrontation between the soul and its own hidden nature. In this piercing drama, a merchant and his wife face the arrival of a prince who reveals the fractures in their marriage.
Much Ado about Nothing
William Shakespeare
A sharp-witted battle of words masks the deeper, more dangerous vulnerabilities of love and honor in this enduring exploration of human folly and fragile trust.
Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e: Written during Her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa to Persons of Distinction, Men of Letters, &c. in Different Parts of Europe
Montagu, Mary Wortley, Lady
A sharp-witted diplomat’s wife documents her travels across Europe and into the Ottoman Empire, dismantling Western misconceptions with a skeptical eye and a formidable intellect. These dispatches remain a definitive, subversive portrait of eighteenth-century life.
The Arrow of Gold: A Story Between Two Notes
Joseph Conrad
A young man is drawn into the orbit of a mysterious woman and the high-stakes world of political intrigue, finding his life irrevocably altered by a fleeting, intense obsession.
Wessex Poems and Other Verses
Thomas Hardy
The weight of human history rests on the quiet, often overlooked corners of the heart. These poems hold the fragile intersection where personal longing meets the indifferent machinery of time.
Cynthia's Revels
Ben Jonson
This satirical comedy exposes the vapid vanity of court life, where posturing courtiers obsess over trivial fashions and empty status while blinded by their own self-love.
The Little Duke: Richard the Fearless
Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary) Yonge
This is a tale of a young boy born to a throne of swords, caught between the brutal vengeance of his Norse ancestors and the fragile ideals of a Christian king. It captures the lonely, perilous coming-of-age of a child who must navigate the treacherous waters of medieval power while striving to remain honorable.