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British Literature — page 32
6,377 public-domain british literature books, summarised. Page 32 of 133.
Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624)
Barksted, William, active 1611
The minor epics of the English Renaissance are exquisite, ornamental windows into the imaginative excesses of the seventeenth century. These poems transform classical myth into intense, decorative displays of human desire, wit, and tragic ruin.
The Secret Glory
Arthur Machen
A young man struggles against the crushing conformism of an English public school, ultimately abandoning the modern world to pursue a hidden, mystical legacy.
Bartholomew Fair: A Comedy
Ben Jonson
A bustling, chaotic London market serves as the backdrop for a collision of pretension, greed, and absurdity. Beneath the noise, the play exposes the thin line separating the law-abiding from the lawless.
Christina Alberta's father
H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
A man discovers a startling new identity after the death of his wife, while his daughter struggles to navigate a world that feels increasingly hollow and indifferent.
Memoirs of My Dead Life
George Moore
A meditative journey through the topography of a life, these essays map the intersection of memory, desire, and the enduring landscapes of the human heart.
Sailors' Knots (Entire Collection)
W. W. (William Wymark) Jacobs
Woven with the salt-sprayed wit of the London docks, these tales capture the hilarious, often frantic schemes of sailors and townsfolk caught in the crossfire of their own appetites. A masterwork of understated irony, the collection reveals the absurdity of the human condition with profound, rhythmic charm.
The Hills and the Vale
Richard Jefferies
HOOK This collection of essays captures the vanishing spirit of the English countryside, balancing sharp-eyed observations of rural labor with a profound, almost mystical reverence for the natural world.
The Knight Of Gwynne, Vol. 2 (of 2)
Charles Lever
A fallen nobleman struggles to reclaim his ancestral home while Ireland undergoes the turbulent, irreversible political shift of the 1801 Act of Union.
The works of John Dryden, now first collected in eighteen volumes. Volume 05
John Dryden
This collection showcases the dramatic range of one of the seventeenth century’s most formidable intellects, moving from the sharp edges of historical grievance to the sweeping, celestial scale of epic theater.
A Woman's War: A Novel
Warwick Deeping
The shadow of a secret habit threatens to undo a dedicated physician, forcing his family to endure a grueling, public fall from grace before a chance at redemption emerges from the wreckage of their former lives.
Dream Days
Kenneth Grahame
Childhood is a kingdom of fierce imagination, where the distance between a nursery floor and a far-off, dragon-haunted mountain is bridged by nothing more than a stubborn refusal to accept the dullness of the adult world.
In the Wilderness
Robert Hichens
A husband's hidden hunger for a total devotion his high-minded wife cannot yield drives him into the net of a destructive socialite, setting off a tragedy that scatters their quiet lives across England and the Levant.
Liza of Lambeth
W. Somerset (William Somerset) Maugham
The streets of Lambeth are suffocatingly hot, but for a young factory girl, the true heat comes from the dangerous, illicit fire of an affair that threatens to consume her life.
Soldiers Three
Rudyard Kipling
This collection of linked short stories captures the rough, sun-scorched vitality of British-Indian colonial life, centered on the unbreakable bond between three irrepressible infantrymen.
Sylvia's Lovers
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Set in a late eighteenth-century Yorkshire whaling port, this story traces the quiet wreckage of a young woman’s life after a lie separates her from the sailor she loves.
Tales and Legends of the English Lakes
Wilson Armistead
The English Lake District serves as the backdrop for a collection of folklore, historical anecdotes, and poetic reflections, weaving together the rugged beauty of northern valleys with the lives of those who have haunted or inhabited them.
Phantom Fortune, a Novel
M. E. (Mary Elizabeth) Braddon
An ambitious matriarch, a hidden fortune, and two sisters driven by radically different desires collide in a dark, Victorian tale of pride, deception, and moral reckoning.
The Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly
Charles Lever
A wealthy English family’s claim to an Irish estate collapses under a surprise heir’s challenge, testing their alliances and character as they rebuild their lives abroad.
The Lady of the Lake
Walter Scott
A fugitive king finds sanctuary among the enemies of his throne, sparking a dangerous dance of honor, jealousy, and hidden identities in the rugged heart of the Scottish Highlands.
The White People
Frances Hodgson Burnett
The boundary between the living and the dead dissolves in the mist of a Scottish moor, revealing a world where love persists beyond the reach of human sorrow.
The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb
Charles Lamb
A gentle, light-hearted collection of classic English children's literature, this volume weaves together the magic of Shakespearean drama, ancient myth, and quiet lessons in everyday kindness.
Three Courses and a Dessert: Comprising Three Sets of Tales, West Country, Irish, and Legal
William Clarke
An eccentric host lays out a generous feast of rustic comedy, wild escapades, and sharp courtroom drama across the nineteenth-century British Isles.
These Twain
Arnold Bennett
A masterwork of Victorian provincial realism that captures the quiet, grinding friction of two lives bound together in marriage.
Fanny's First Play
Bernard Shaw
A play-within-a-play about the generational disconnect between the stuffy Victorian past and the rebellious, restless modern future. It is a sharp, witty, and surprisingly modern satire that refuses to take itself too seriously.
The Chariot of the Flesh
Hedley Peek
In a quiet English village, a man discovers that he can read minds, project his consciousness, and trace the centuries-long binding of his soul to another.
The Great Impersonation
E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
A desperate, down-at-heel Englishman collapses in the African bush, only to find a wealthy German military officer who looks like his identical twin—and who plans to steal his name to infiltrate London high society.
The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories
Arnold Bennett
In the smoke-hued, industrial heartland of Staffordshire, local heroes, scheming husbands, and stubborn domestic servants navigate the absurd, high-stakes dramas of everyday provincial life. <Image alt="Book cover of The Matador of the Five Towns showing an industrial landscape with chimneys and smoke" caption="The…
Weir of Hermiston: An Unfinished Romance
Robert Louis Stevenson
Two mismatched Scots—a brutal hanging judge and his sensitive, principled son—clash across a bitter divide of morals and temperament, driving the boy into a lonely exile where a dangerous secret romance awaits.
Born in Exile
George Gissing
An exceptionally gifted lower-class intellectual attempts to enter Victorian high society by pretending to embrace the Anglican priesthood, only to find that deceiving those he loves destroys his own soul.
Carnival
Compton MacKenzie
A sharp London girl dances her way from Islington back alleys to the footlights of the West End, only to find that the price of freedom is higher than any stage ticket.
New Poems
D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
A soul trapped between the soot of industrial England and the vivid fire of human passion weighs love against the cold, encroaching machinery of the modern world.
Once on a Time
A. A. (Alan Alexander) Milne
When a monarch's morning flight over his neighbor's kingdom leads to an unexpected shower of arrows, a war breaks out that is fought less with cold steel than with magical misdirections, vanity, and bureaucratic cunning.
The Adventure of the Red Circle
Arthur Conan Doyle
A desperate landlady seeks help when her secretive new lodger vanishes into a locked room, leaving only printed notes and mysterious signals across a darkened London street.
The Duchess of Padua
Oscar Wilde
A son swears blood revenge against his father’s murderer, only to discover that love renders his dagger useless and dooms everyone involved.
The Tapestried Chamber, and Death of the Laird's Jock
Walter Scott
A ghostly encounter in a secured chamber and a dying Border chieftain’s final, roaring heartbreak reveal how swiftly human pride crumbles before supernatural terror and national dishonor.
A History of Pendennis, Volume 1: His fortunes and misfortunes, his friends and his greatest enemy
William Makepeace Thackeray
A young man's vanity is his own greatest enemy as he navigates the temptations of nineteenth-century England.
A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume 11
Unknown
A wide-ranging collection of early seventeenth-century plays captures the humor, sharp-tongued wit, and theatrical flair of Jacobean London.
Magic: A Fantastic Comedy
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
In an aristocratic English drawing room, a cynical stage magician performs a genuinely miraculous act, shattering the fragile, narrow worldviews of the skeptics and dreamers gathered around him.
Nuts to crack
Richard Gooch
An irrepressible gallery of university wits, eccentrics, and collegiate rogues fills this lively nineteenth-century compendium of academic folklore.
Preface to Major Barbara: First Aid to Critics
Bernard Shaw
Grounded in the social realities of industrial Britain, this polemical essay dismantling the myths surrounding poverty, charity, and institutional morality reveals that economic starvation is a societal crime rather than a personal failing.
The Rake's Progress
Marjorie Bowen
A sudden drop from inherited elegance into terminal debt leaves a young aristocrat with only his charm, his title, and a series of increasingly cold calculation.
The Sea Lady
H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
When a mermaid comes ashore at an English seaside resort, her arrival disrupts the carefully ordered lives, sensible political ambitions, and social conventions of a respectable Edwardian family.
A Selection from the Poems of William Morris
William Morris
A sweep of mortal longing runs through these verses, where medieval chivalry and ancient myth collapse under the weight of passing time.
Androcles and the Lion
Bernard Shaw
A gentle, animal-loving tailor pulls a painful thorn from a wounded lion's paw in a jungle, only to meet the same beast months later in the Roman Coliseum.
One Hundred Books Famous in English Literature: With Facsimiles of the Title-Pages
Grolier Club
A scholarly survey of landmark volumes reveals how physical books preserve intellectual heritage while shedding the private lives of their creators.
Poems
John Clare
A rustling of meadow grass, a cold winter wind cutting through a worn doublet, and the sharp, observational gaze of an unlettered farm laborer who captured the disappearing English countryside.
Rhoda Fleming
George Meredith
A story of two Kentish sisters whose lives are upended by seduction, pride, and mistaken virtue, where family honor becomes a weapon as destructive as the dishonor it seeks to avenge.
Studies in Early Victorian Literature
Frederic Harrison
When literature turns inward to examine the human conscience, a culture undergoes a profound shift from physical action to internal psychological discovery.