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British Literature — page 60
6,210 public-domain british literature books, summarised. Page 60 of 130.
The Independence of Claire
Vaizey, George de Horne, Mrs.
Faced with the duty of supporting her mother, a spirited young woman chooses the path of professional independence. Yet, in the bustling classrooms of London, she finds that life and love offer challenges no textbook can solve.
The Maids Tragedy
John Fletcher
A soldier returns to a kingdom corrupted by its monarch, only to find his own sister sacrificed to the King’s insatiable lust. This high-stakes drama explores the collision of private honor with the public demands of loyalty.
The Squire's Daughter
Silas K. (Silas Kitto) Hocking
A young man’s refusal to open a gate for a haughty rider sparks a clash of wills that bridges the divide between a struggling tenant farmer and the landed gentry. This story of social friction and forbidden affection explores the human cost of rigid class hierarchies in rural England.
Chippinge Borough
Stanley John Weyman
This historical novel captures the volatile atmosphere of 1831 England, where the passage of the Reform Bill threatens to topple the ancient, rigid social order. It is a story of political upheaval mirrored by the personal awakening of an idealistic young man.
Miscellanea
Juliana Horatia Ewing
This collection gathers the stray threads of a prolific storyteller’s career, blending high-stakes Victorian melodrama with whimsical fables and informative cultural sketches. It serves as a rare, intimate look at the imagination of a writer who moved effortlessly between the domestic and the fantastic.
Poems, 1799
Robert Southey
This collection captures a world in transition, where the lingering superstitions of the past collide with the harsh, modern realities of poverty, war, and social displacement.
The Cuckoo in the Nest, v. 2/2
Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
A social climber finds her grand ambitions for a landed life thwarted by the very class she seeks to join. This sharp, nuanced domestic drama dissects the collision between entitlement and cold reality.
The Deemster
Caine, Hall, Sir
The clash between a rigid, inherited law and the messy, impulsive nature of the human heart drives a man to ruin and potential redemption. This sweeping tale of the Isle of Man traces how a single lie can fracture families, destroy reputations, and exile a soul to the edge of the world.
The Duke's Sweetheart: A Romance
Richard Dowling
A tale of lost identity and sudden, life-altering fortune, this narrative explores the precarious intersection of common life and the high aristocracy in Victorian England. It is a story of how a man’s status changes, but his heart remains tethered to a single, deep-seated devotion.
The Lady of Blossholme
H. Rider (Henry Rider) Haggard
A courageous young woman battles the treachery of a powerful, corrupt abbot amidst the religious and political upheavals of Henry VIII’s reign.
The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1
Gilbert White
The quiet beauty of an English parish serves as a laboratory for the curious mind, proving that even the most familiar backyard hides wonders for those patient enough to observe.
The Pennycomequicks, Volume 2 (of 3)
S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
A family’s quiet life is shattered when the past, once thought buried, returns in the form of a disgraced, long-absent father whose very name threatens the stability and honor of a proud household.
The Silent House
Fergus Hume
A briefless barrister finds himself entangled in a murder mystery when he witnesses a suspicious struggle through a window in a quiet London square.
Twenty-One Days in India, or, the Tour Of Sir Ali Baba K.C.B
George Aberigh-Mackay
A biting, satirical tour through the corridors of British-ruled India, where the pomp of the imperial administration is stripped bare by a keen, cynical observer.
Vanitas: Polite Stories
Vernon Lee
These stories examine the lives of "frivolous women" in high society, tracing the quiet, haunting erosion of the soul that occurs when beauty and wealth become one’s only currency.
Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces
Thomas W. Hanshew
A master of disguise, known as "The Man of the Forty Faces," forsakes his criminal past to outwit the most cunning villains in Edwardian London.
Dividing Waters
I. A. R. (Ida Alexa Ross) Wylie
The life of a young woman is irrevocably altered by a cross-cultural marriage that forces her to reconcile her English upbringing with the rigid, honor-bound social landscape of Imperial Germany.
Essays on the Stage: Preface to the Campaigners (1689) and Preface to the Translation of Bossuet's Maxims and Reflections on Plays (1699)
Thomas D'Urfey
These documents capture the heated collision between seventeenth-century playwrights and their moralistic critics, offering a raw, unvarnished look at the early battle over the soul of the English stage.
Miss Esperance and Mr Wycherly
L. Allen (Lizzie Allen) Harker
The quiet rhythms of a Scottish village find new life when two orphaned brothers arrive on the doorstep of a spinster and her reclusive, scholarly boarder.
Rogues and Vagabonds
George R. (George Robert) Sims
A man haunted by a shadowy past finds that the secrets of his former life are never truly buried, even as he attempts to build a respectable future. This is a story of narrow escapes, hidden identities, and the persistent reach of one’s history.
Sonia Married
Stephen McKenna
The weight of the Great War presses upon the private lives of a fractured generation, as a young couple discovers that romantic impulse is a poor foundation for the endurance required by a crumbling world.
Speed the plough : A comedy, in five acts
Thomas Morton
A lively comedy of manners and mistaken identity, this play navigates the social hierarchies and hidden secrets of a rural English estate with warmth, wit, and a touch of dramatic intensity.
The Rival Heirs
A. D. (Augustine David) Crake
This historical narrative follows a young Anglo-Saxon heir surviving the brutal realities of the Norman Conquest to find redemption on the distant battlefields of the First Crusade.
The Wanderer
Fanny Burney
A young woman escapes the terror of the French Revolution, only to find herself a penniless refugee in England. She must navigate a rigid society that views her very existence as a dangerous mystery.
Three Plays by Granville-Barker: The Marrying of Ann Leete
Harley Granville-Barker
These plays capture the quiet, stifling friction of a society rigidly divided by class, where private integrity is constantly traded against the demands of public appearance.
William—the fourth
Richmal Crompton
Eleven-year-old William Brown is a force of nature, a scruffy, irrepressible boy whose relentless quest for adventure turns his quiet suburban neighborhood into a landscape of unintended chaos. Whether he is accidentally kidnapping a peer, starting a society for "higher thought," or terrorizing the local innkeeper,…
Wine, Water, and Song
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
A spirited collection of verse that champions the traditional English inn while skewering the joyless moralists of the modern age. These songs celebrate the sanctity of fellowship, the defiance of the spirit, and the enduring rhythm of a rolling road.
Young Barbarians
Ian Maclaren
A group of spirited boys at a Scottish grammar school navigate the rough-and-tumble of youth, finding unexpected common ground with their sternest masters and local rivals.
As You Like It
William Shakespeare
A young woman, banished from a corrupt court, finds liberation in the guise of a man within the wild, untamed Forest of Arden. Amidst shifting identities and tangled romances, she orchestrates a joyful reconciliation for all.
Cymbeline
William Shakespeare
A princess disguises herself as a boy, a jealous husband wages a ruinous bet, and a king discovers his stolen legacy amidst the chaotic collision of ancient Britain and Rome.
Louis' School Days: A Story for Boys
E. J. (Edith J.) May
A young boy struggles to maintain his faith and integrity amidst the shifting loyalties and harsh social hierarchies of an English boarding school.
Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914
Various
This collection of wit, satire, and social observation captures the anxieties and absurdities of Edwardian England on the brink of the Great War. It functions as a sharp-tongued mirror held up to a society preoccupied with politics, class, and the march of modernity.
The Pennycomequicks, Volume 1 (of 3)
S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
The greedy heirs of a wealthy manufacturer wait for him to drop from the tree of life, only to find that his sudden, watery disappearance leaves them with a tangled inheritance of suspicion and ghosts.
The Root of All Evil
J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
A woman of fierce, unyielding ambition rises from rural poverty to challenge a local monopoly, only to find that the pursuit of wealth demands a price no ledger can record.
The Talleyrand Maxim
J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
A junior clerk’s illicit scheme to suppress a dead man’s will unravels as a web of greed, blackmail, and murder ensnares an aristocratic family.
The Transformation of Philip Jettan
Georgette Heyer
A young man leaves his quiet life to master the art of being a rake, hoping to win the heart of the girl who discarded him. This elegant, spirited comedy of manners follows his return from Paris, where he is now the most fashionable and dangerous man in London.
The Young Enchanted: A Romantic Story
Hugh Walpole
Life in post-war London offers a young man and his sister a dizzying, bittersweet education in the fragility of human connections. Everything is changing, and for those ready to witness it, the world is nothing short of miraculous.
A Comedy of Masks: A Novel
Ernest Christopher Dowson
A comedy of errors played out in the drawing rooms of London, this novel reveals the heavy, often hidden price of maintaining a perfect social facade. Beneath the polished veneer of Victorian life, characters struggle with long-buried secrets, unrequited devotion, and the crushing weight of their own expectations.
A Houseful of Girls
Sarah Tytler
The departure of children from the family nest is a universal ache, yet when financial ruin forces a household of sisters to abandon their sheltered life, the transition from girlhood to adulthood becomes an urgent, bittersweet adventure.
An Orkney Maid
Amelia E. Barr
HOOK Set in the rugged, storm-tossed islands of Orkney, this tale follows a young woman’s journey through love, loss, and the stern demands of duty during the Crimean War.
Donald Ross of Heimra (Volume 2 of 3)
William Black
A young woman struggles to manage her inherited Highland estate while navigating the deep-seated grievances of a displaced local population. Her path repeatedly crosses with a dispossessed islander whose quiet dignity challenges her charitable ideals.
Prisoners of Conscience
Amelia E. Barr
A man haunted by a blood feud inherits a cycle of spiritual suffering, only for his son to seek a path of grace in the rugged, isolated landscape of the Shetland Islands.
Shrewsbury: A Romance
Stanley John Weyman
A young man is drawn into the dangerous web of Jacobite intrigue, where his survival depends on the shifting loyalties of a powerful, haunted Duke and the manipulations of a treacherous woman.
Sir Brook Fossbrooke, Volume II
Charles Lever
The storm tests the endurance of the island’s inhabitants, but the true tempests are the human deceptions swirling through the halls of justice and high society.
The Foundations (An Extravagant Play)
John Galsworthy
A sharp, satirical look at the chasm between the idle rich and the struggling poor, this play uses a simple misunderstanding to expose the absurdity of class, media, and social reform.
The Stoneground Ghost Tales: Compiled from the recollections of the Reverend Roland Batchel, Vicar of the parish
E. G. (Edmund Gill) Swain
HOOK The ancient, gravel-founded parish of Stoneground harbors secrets that defy the modern world, revealing that the boundary between the living and the departed is far thinner than the local villagers dare to admit.
The Toy Shop (1735) The King and the Miller of Mansfield (1737)
Robert Dodsley
The world is a grand shop where everyone runs mad for rattles, but one man possesses the keys to the cabinet. These two dramatic pieces offer a sharp, moral mirror to the follies of high society and the hidden nobility of the rural heart.
The Works of Henry Fielding, vol. 12
Henry Fielding
This collection gathers the sharp, satirical wit of a master observer, exposing the absurdities of eighteenth-century theater, social pretension, and the messy realities of London life.