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British Literature — page 46
6,377 public-domain british literature books, summarised. Page 46 of 133.
The Duchess of Wrexe, Her Decline and Death
Hugh Walpole
Behind a grand facade in late-Victorian London, a formidable matriarch rules an aristocratic clan whose rigid authority is quietly beginning to fracture.
The Freelands
John Galsworthy
A quiet Worcestershire field hides a deep, bitter struggle over English soil and human freedom.
The Northern Iron
George A. Birmingham
A sea-carved cavern in County Antrim shelters a fugitive rebel, while on the cliffs above, an aristocrat's aunt matches wits with a royal officer to steal him away to sea.
The Vicar of Wrexhill
Frances Milton Trollope
A grieving widow hands the keys to her family estate—and the hearts of her daughters—to an ambitious evangelical vicar who turns a peaceful English village into a battlefield of self-righteousness, deceit, and ruin.
Vain Fortune: A Novel
George Moore
A desperate playwright, a penniless ward, and a wealthy widow tangle in a quiet English country house where ambition and desire turn fatally inward.
A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume 02
Unknown
These early dramatic works dramatize the eternal struggle between virtue and vice, inviting the audience to witness the soul's precarious journey toward salvation through allegory and moral instruction.
Dodo's Daughter: A Sequel to Dodo
E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
This novel chronicles the restless, high-society lives of the irrepressible Dodo and her daughter, Nadine, as they navigate the shifting tides of love, ambition, and personal discovery in early 20th-century England.
Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles: Idea, Fidesa and Chloris
Michael Drayton
This collection preserves three distinct sequences of Elizabethan sonnets, capturing a moment when the fashion for Petrarchan devotion dominated the English literary imagination. These poems function as formal exercises in romantic obsession, mapping the interior landscape of the "starving" lover through elaborate…
Esther's Charge: A Story for Girls
Evelyn Everett-Green
This story follows a young girl tasked with managing her widowed mother’s household and two high-spirited boy cousins, eventually finding her own strength through the guidance of a reclusive kinsman.
Hadrian the Seventh
Frederick Rolfe
A disgraced, impoverished English priest is unexpectedly elected Pope, thrusting his radical, uncompromising vision of faith into the heart of a cynical, modern world. This is a story of profound loneliness, intellectual arrogance, and the desperate, imaginative wish to be vindicated by the highest authority on earth.
Over the Border: A Romance
Robert Barr
A desperate daughter navigates the treacherous landscape of the English Civil War to save her father, only to find her fate linked to a charming, mysterious scout.
The House on the Moor, v. 1/3
Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
A brother and sister endure a stifling, mysterious existence on a desolate moor, until an unexpected visitor pierces their isolation and threatens to dismantle their father’s carefully guarded, melancholy world.
The Nebuly Coat
John Meade Falkner
A crumbling medieval church tower and a long-hidden heraldic secret pull a young architect into the shadow of a powerful, mysterious nobleman.
The White Lady of Hazelwood: A Tale of the Fourteenth Century
Emily Sarah Holt
A tragic account of a medieval heroine’s fall, this story unearths the bitter reality behind a famous warrior-countess who was abandoned by the son she spent her life defending.
Uneasy Money
P. G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse
A guileless British peer suddenly finds himself a millionaire, only to discover that wealth is a complication rather than a cure for his romantic entanglements. This breezy tale charts the collision of Old World manners and New World ambition.
Venetia
Disraeli, Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield
This is a story of two families bound by fate, exploring the tension between the sanctuary of a quiet life and the destructive, brilliant intensity of the world beyond. It is a work of reflection and romance that lingers on the high cost of genius and the enduring power of domestic duty.
We ten
Barbara Yechton
This story of a large, motherless family navigates the quiet, often painful transitions of growing up, where the weight of responsibility falls heaviest on those least prepared to bear it. Through the eyes of ten siblings, the narrative captures the precarious balance between childhood innocence and the sudden,…
Anne of Geierstein
Walter Scott
The alpine heights of the fifteenth century conceal a deadly, invisible justice. Beneath the shadow of ancestral mountains, personal loyalties and the shifting tides of European power collide in a desperate struggle for survival.
Headlong Hall
Thomas Love Peacock
A riotous house party brings together clashing intellectuals and eccentric obsessives, each determined to force the world to fit their own narrow theory of human progress.
Nina Balatka
Anthony Trollope
In a city defined by its ancient barriers, a Christian girl and a Jewish merchant must choose between the sanctity of their love and the crushing weight of their communities’ expectations.
Poetical Works of Robert Bridges, Volume 2
Robert Bridges
A meditative collection of lyrical poetry and dramatic eclogues that captures the fleeting beauty of the natural world and the quiet persistence of human affection.
Rob Roy
Walter Scott
A young man is thrust from the counting-house into the wild, lawless Highlands, where he must navigate clashing loyalties and the shadow of a legendary outlaw to save his family’s honor.
The Flower of the Mind
Alice Meynell
This curated volume gathers the finest voices of English verse, spanning centuries to present a singular, distilled vision of the poetic craft. It is an intimate invitation to revisit the music of the language.
The Ghost Ship
Richard Middleton
This collection of short stories captures the delicate, often melancholic boundary between the mundane reality of early 20th-century life and the transcendent power of the imagination. It is a work of quiet brilliance, focusing on the internal lives of dreamers, misfits, and the grieving, whose experiences are…
The Pool in the Desert
Sara Jeannette Duncan
The landscape of colonial India is vast and arid, yet within its borders, the human heart finds hidden, precarious springs of passion and duty. This collection of stories reveals the quiet, often devastating trysts that occur behind the stiff facades of British officialdom.
The Toll-House: Sailor's Knots, Part 7
W. W. (William Wymark) Jacobs
A group of skeptical friends challenges a local legend by spending the night in a house notoriously known for claiming the lives of its inhabitants.
White Heather: A Novel (Volume 1 of 3)
William Black
A gifted Scottish gamekeeper lives a life of quiet dignity until the arrival of wealthy outsiders disrupts the delicate social order of his remote Highland home.
Christie Johnstone: A Novel
Charles Reade
A bored nobleman finds purpose through a spirited Scottish fishwife, navigating the stark divide between his gilded, aimless world and her vibrant, labor-driven community.
Contributions to All The Year Round
Unknown
This collection gathers the spirited, opinionated journalism of a master storyteller navigating the changing tides of Victorian public life. It serves as a candid window into the mind of a writer observing his era with sharp-eyed clarity.
Debits and credits
Rudyard Kipling
The Great War has ended, but the silence that follows is louder than the guns. This collection of stories and verse captures the echoes of a world irrevocably changed by loss, memory, and the persistent, quiet rituals of the living.
Love Eternal
H. Rider (Henry Rider) Haggard
The story of two souls bound across lifetimes, this narrative explores the spiritual magnetism between a man and woman whose love persists through war, separation, and the veil of death.
Mr. Punch with Rod and Gun: The Humours of Fishing and Shooting
Unknown
A witty, illustrated collection of late-Victorian and Edwardian satire, this volume captures the perennial absurdity of the dedicated outdoorsman through a series of sharp, irreverent sketches and humorous verse.
Queen Lucia
E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
In a self-important English village, a woman of relentless ambition orchestrates the lives of her neighbors, only to find her own carefully curated world besieged by new arrivals and her own absurd pretensions.
Ringan Gilhaize, or, The Covenanters
John Galt
A man’s lifelong quest to avenge his family’s honor culminates in a final, fateful act of justice against the oppressor who destroyed his peace. This sweeping historical chronicle traces the generations of a Scottish family caught in the bloody struggle for religious liberty.
The Belle's Stratagem
Hannah Cowley
A spirited young woman crafts an elaborate ruse to win the heart of a traveler who finds her dull, proving that true connection requires more than a first impression.
The British Barbarians
Grant Allen
A man from a future society arrives in Victorian England, where he finds himself baffled and repelled by the rigid, hypocritical social codes he labels "barbarous." This bracing, polemical fiction challenges the sanctity of marriage, property, and class.
The Cricket on the Hearth
Charles Dickens
A hearth-bound spirit watches over the quiet joys of a simple home, reminding us that happiness is often found in the small, steadfast virtues of those we love. Beneath the chirping of the home-fire, a story unfolds about the enduring power of devotion and the wisdom of a trusting heart.
The Honey-Pot
Countess (Hélène) Barcynska
The honey-pot is the glittering, perilous world of the London stage, where young women trade their innocence for a chance at fame and, perhaps, a life beyond the chorus line.
The Orange-Yellow Diamond
J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
A desperate, penniless writer in a gloomy London district becomes tangled in a lethal hunt for a legendary, stolen diamond.
The Regent
Arnold Bennett
A provincial businessman’s impulsive, high-stakes leap into the London theatrical world becomes a test of his own cunning, stamina, and the shifting nature of ambition.
White Fire
John Oxenham
Driven by an unyielding sense of duty, a missionary and his small team arrive in the South Seas, where they find that saving souls requires as much steel, grit, and strategy as it does faith.
A Blot in the 'Scutcheon
Robert Browning
A noble house falls to ruin when a secret affair collides with an uncompromising obsession with family honor. This tragic drama explores how rigid pride can blind the powerful to the truth until it is too late to offer mercy.
J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 1
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
The walls of old houses hold more than just dust, and some promises made to the dead are never meant to be broken. This collection of supernatural tales explores the thin, terrifying membrane between the living and the departed.
Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers
Ian Maclaren
In the quiet corners of a Scottish glen, the rigid traditions of the kirk and the spirited arrival of an outsider collide, forcing a young minister to confront both the shifting boundaries of his faith and the mysteries of his own heart.
Letters to His Son, 1746-47: On the Fine Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman
Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of
To master the world, one must first master oneself: this is the stern, polished mandate issued by a father to his son as he prepares the boy for the rigors of eighteenth-century diplomacy and society.
Spring Days
George Moore
A portrait of middle-class provincial life, this narrative explores the tangled romantic entanglements and social anxieties of a family in decline. It captures a fleeting, bittersweet transition from the innocence of youth to the harsh realities of adult compromise.
The Bedford-Row Conspiracy
William Makepeace Thackeray
A tale of provincial elections, social climbing, and the absurdity of political loyalties, this narrative exposes the hollow posturing of the 19th-century English gentry. It remains a sharp, enduring study of human vanity and ambition.
The Lighter Side of School Life
Ian Hay
This look at the inner workings of English public schools captures the rhythm of academic life with a sharp, affectionate eye. It transforms the institutional humdrum of classrooms and dormitories into a vivid, often humorous, gallery of human archetypes.