Back

English Audio Books

Show only books with text

Popular Genres
The most popular500
Children400
Fiction750
Fantasy350
Horror/Ghost stories700
SPONSORED LINKS

Learn English
Dictionary 180,000

Children's Fiction
Fiction364
Action & Adventure315
Animals & Nature275
Myths, Legends & Fairy Tales222
Family117
General102
Historical43
Poetry48
Religion37
School33
Short works52
Children's Non-Fiction
Non-fiction76
Reference5
Religion19
Science21
History14
Biography23

Plays
General113
Comedy76
Satire26
Tragedy & Drama101
Romance10

Short Stories - Fiction
Short Stories260
Anthologies37
Single Author Collections142

Fiction by year
Published before 180020
Published 1800-1900207
Published 1900 onward207

Poetry
General483
Anthologies44
Single author156
Ballads & Epics43
Narratives13
Multi-version601

Science - Non Fiction
Science67
Astronomy, Physics & Mechanics25
Chemistry8
Earth Sciences22
Life Sciences40

Philosophy - Non Fiction
Philosophy92
Ancient & Medieval30
Early Modern32
Modern & Contemporary43
Atheism & Agnosticism19

History - Non Fiction
History256
Antiquity37
Middle Ages/Middle History36
Early Modern82
Modern (19th C)127
Modern (20th C)49

Religion - Non Fiction
Religion63
Christianity - Commentary19
Christianity - Biographies26
Christianity - Other86
Other religions29
Bibles
Bibles69
King James Version63

Literary Collections - Non Fiction
Literary Collections34
Essays / Short non-fiction20
Letters27

Literary Fiction
SPONSORED LINKS
Previous Next
House Behind the Cedars

Charles Waddell Chesnutt
In this, Chesnutt's first novel, he tells the tragic story of love set against a backdrop of racism, miscegenation and “passing” during the period spanning the antebellum and reconstruction eras in American history. And through his use of the vernacular prevalent in the South of that time, Chesnutt lent a compassionate voice to a group that America did not want to hear. More broadly, however, Chesnutt illustrated, in this character play, the vast and perhaps insurmountable debt this country continues to pay for the sins of slavery.
Another Study of Woman

Honoré de Balzac
A series of tales -- told by men, of course -- about women. Though the book first appeared in 1842, Balzac later added to it as an addenfum a tale of 1831, La Grande Bretèche. That will be read later, keeping it separate to mirror the form of the English translation here used. (More to follow)
Grande Bretèche

Honoré de Balzac
La Grande Bretèche is an addendum to Balzac's Another Study of Woman, and is the final of a set of stories told around a dinner table. This one, given to the guests at about two in the morning, is tale of marital infidelity and revenge,and perhaps might have given some of the audience a sleepless night. ( Nicholas Clifford)
Sacred Fount, The

James, Henry
Published in 1901, The Sacred Fount delves into the interior observations and obsessions of one Englishman during a weekend gathering in the country. Regarding himself as a master of human psychology, the narrator watches the goings-on of the other guests and weaves theories about the interpersonal implications of what he witnesses, leaving the not infrequently perplexed reader the task of sorting out whether his conclusions are facts or fancies.
Rough and Ready OR Life Among the New York Newsboys

Horatio Alger, Jr.
Join Rough and Ready for his adventure on the streets of New York City. Working as a newsboy, Rough and Ready tries to support himself and his sister on his meager earnings. Unfortunately, their stepfather is seeking to kidnap little Rose, getting an education is hard work, swindlers are trying to trick him out of his money, and thieves are planning nefarious deeds. Luckily for Rough and Ready, he makes some good friends along the way
Old Man's Love

Anthony Trollope
This was Trollope's last completed novel, and he may have acquired his sympathy for older lovers with age! A not-so-very-old man, Mr. Whittlestaff, dearly loves Mary Lawrie, the girl he provides a home for after her father's death. He wishes to marry her, and she reluctantly accepts him, but warns him of her deep regard for a young man she had known years earlier. That Mr. Gordon had not exactly engaged her, but had gone off to seek his fortune and had not communicated with Mary ever since. Shortly after Mary accepts Mr. Whittlestaff, Gordon shows up. Trollope works out a final arrangement which resolves the quandary, but not with comfort. (Arnold Banner)
Dreamer of Dreams

Marie of Romania Alexandra Victoria
Eric, artist for the king, has created a marvelous painting of a royal wedding. It is finished except for the face of the queen, which appeared to him in a dream. When he awoke, he had forgotten the form of the features. Obsessed with recapturing this vision, he goes on a quest to find the woman because he cannot paint another stroke until he sees those eyes again. During his journey, he discovers much more, perhaps even the true meaning of his dream and of his life.
SPONSORED LINKS
Immortal Moment

May Sinclair
This is one of the later works of May Sinclair – a prolific author, literary critic, and feminist activist – famous in Britain and the US after the 1904 publication of The Divine Fire. The Immortal Moment concerns the defining episode in the life of Kitty Tailleur, a beautiful and enormously charming but “fallen” woman, who yearns to become respectable. As ever, Sinclair uses irony and understatement to expose the hypocrisy of the social order by revealing the tragic social reality of women’s powerlessness within it.

While on holiday at a small seaside hotel Kitty attracts the love of a truly good man. Though good to the core, Robert Lucy, a widower with two young daughters, is emotionally undeveloped and naïve. Kitty’s own maturity has been stultified by her circumscribed life as a mistress in the demi-monde. Yet their love is deep and passionate. They plan to marry, which Kitty hopes will liberate her from a life of sexual servitude and degradation. The story unfolds a series of potential threats to the consummation of their happiness, leaving the outcome uncertain to the last. Will Kitty fall victim to the gossip and hints of various guests at the hotel, who, less naïve than Robert, suspect her dubious past? Will her most recent lover betray her? How will the still dominant, still extreme Victorian prudery of the day influence the course of events? Can Kitty disregard the potential effect on Robert’s little girls, should her secret become known after she has become their second mother? Or will love conquer all (or most)?

Several well-drawn secondary characters influence the course of events. These include Kitty’s clinging but deeply repressed and everlastingly oppressed chaperone; Robert’s imaginative, loving, almost saintly sister; and the influential and urbane man who, until recently, has “kept” Kitty.
Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson

Anthony Trollope
Billed as a satire concerning the dishonest advertising and business practices of the day, it tells the tale of an upstart clothing business doomed from the get-go to utter failure. Its senior partner (the elderly Brown, who provides the investment) is far too timid for business. His son-in-law (Jones, who runs the store) is stealing from the till, and the junior partner, Robinson (who writes advertisements for the store) is so obsessed with the idea that advertising alone will drive the business, he uses up every last penny of the capital investment in a series of increasingly ludicrous ad campaigns and publicity stunts.

Thrown into this mix are the two daughters of Brown, who are equally cold and calculating. The elder (married to Jones) is constantly trying to wring money out of the old man, and the younger, Maryanne, spends the entire novel playing off of two potential suitors, Robinson, or Brisket the butcher (one of Trollope's wonderful examples of ironic character naming). (above summary by Steve Forsyth, Texas)

Nevertheless, Trollope shows considerable sympathy for the risks faced by small businessmen (and also notes the vulnerability of writers to over-ready critics); Robinson is to publish his experiences in the Cornhill Magazine, a prominent journal for over 100 years, in which many Victorians serialized novels (including this one). In the final chapter there is a surprising ennoblement of Robinson, and a very positive ending (final comments by Arnold Banner)
Huguenot: A Tale of the French Protestants

George Payne Rainsford James
The time of French king Louis XIV was a time of religious conflict. His father, Louis XIII had tried to suppress the teachings and followers of Calvin but was thwarted by his ministers. The son took a different path. The king was Catholic, and although he was tolerant of others, some in his government were less so, and persecuted the Protestant Huguenots. This is the story of Albert, Count of Morseiul as he treads the tightrope of being a Huguenot landowner and loyal subject and friend of the king.
Prelude To Adventure

Hugh Walpole
Olva Dune is a Cambridge undergraduate who commits a murder and at that moment feels the presence of God. In a tour de force Walpole novelizes the Francis Thompson poem The Hound of Heaven, about a fearful soul pursued by an insistently loving God. (One could enrich the reading of the novel by first reading the poem (“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;… Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue…. Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,/ Save Me, save only Me?”). The psychologist Carl Jung, in a letter to the author, called the 1911 novel “a psychological masterpiece.” Hergesheimer on this novel: “So excellent is the versatility of Hugh Walpole that this writer of dignified and realistic and always beautiful pictures of life has among his books one with all the tension and strange plot of a Poe masterpiece… What happened is so filled with suspense that, very real and human though it is, the plot comes to have all the unexpectedness of the cleverest detective story…. Suspense--color of life--love--fear--triumph--they all mingle in an atmosphere as effective as the Cornish sea.”
Tysons

May Sinclair
Another frank May Sinclair exploration of fin de siècle English love and sex, marriage and adultery, "The Tysons" is the story of the caddish Nevill Tyson and his beautiful but frivolous young wife Molly. Sinclair uses a different narrative voice than we hear in much of her fiction, a sort of witty Jane Austen archness as she dissects the characters of the provincial village Drayton Parva. As always, she demonstrates an intriguing mixture of Victorian prudishness and modern free-thinking, particularly in her rendering of the sexual escapades of her characters. The step-by-step fragmentation of the Tyson marriage seems predestined from the start, but the novel reveals, as Sinclair's novels always do, a passion for profound understanding of the human comedy and why we do what we do. Even though the story is told from the perspectives of mostly masculine characters, Sinclair uses their voices to shine a stark light on the many ways in which women were victimized at the time by being the chattel of the men in their lives, in particular the denigration of the female intellect in favor of the merely decorative feminine beauty which existed only for the male ego.
Three Sisters

May Sinclair
Fascinated as she was by the lives of the Brontë siblings, May Sinclair loosely based her subtly sensual, quietly insurrectionary 1914 novel The Three Sisters on the Haworth moor milieu of the three literary Brontë sisters. Alice, Gwenda, and Mary Cartaret are the daughters of the Vicar of Garth, an abusive father with rigid, selfish expectations for female behavior. Hope of rescue seems to dawn in the person of an idealistic young doctor in the village, but this is no Austen romance. Described with Edwardian restraint, it is still sexual passion that is the underlying theme of the story: the rebellion of human sensuality in almost every major character in the story against the artificial constraints of conventional Society and Religion. Sinclair, herself a fascinating hybrid of Victorian and modern, shows the desperate, inertial ennui inherent in the lives of unmarried late-Victorian women dependent on their male guardians but fired by dreams and desires of their own. Sinclair's gently seditious fiction is always deeply imbued with philosophy as well as human psychology, giving it rich layers of interest.
Judgment of Eve

May Sinclair
May Sinclair was a prolific author, literary critic, and feminist activist, famous in Britain and the US in the 1910’s and 20’s. The Judgment of Eve, like most of her novels, uses irony and understatement to expose the hypocrisy of the social order by revealing the tragic social reality of women’s powerlessness within it.

Aggie is by far the best looking, and the best educated young woman in her small, isolated village of Queningford. Should she marry the strong, confident, and successful –- but not intellectual -- farmer, John? Or would her life be happier with the relatively poor, but sensitive, poetic and intellectual lawyer’s clerk, Arthur? She chooses Arthur, and their life in London, though impoverished, begins in a whirlwind of lectures, debates and museums. Both are thrilled by the birth of their first child, though his arrival puts an end, temporarily, to their cultural activities. Ever desirous of fulfilling her husband’s wishes, Aggie bears another child every year, for 6 years. The story exposes the very different ways in which Aggie and Arthur experience and manage the crowding out of their early intellectual dreams by the increasingly grim realities – the poverty, illness and estrangement – imposed by the life they have chosen to create.
Town Traveller

George Gissing
The town traveller is himself a British salesman, living in a lower class part of London in the Victorian era. The story depicts his interactions with his neighbors, and thus brings us images and vocabulary of personal exchanges, street scenes and practices of that time and class. The story is generally lighthearted and the action fast paced, although the characters are not at all intricate. (Arnold Banner)
Cradock Nowell Vol. 3

Richard Doddridge Blackmore
Cradock Nowell: a Tale of the New Forest is a three-volume novel by R. D. Blackmore published in 1866. Set in the New Forest and in London, it follows the fortunes of Cradock Nowell who, at the end of Volume 1, is thrown out of his family home and disowned by his father following the suspicious death of Cradock's twin brother Clayton, their father's favorite. In Volume 2, the story picks up with those left behind at Nowelhurst and the question of who is now heir apparent to the Nowell fortune. Meanwhile, Cradock discovers life independent of the Nowell name and fortune is not easy. At the end of volume 2, we leave Cradock fighting for his life and his beloved Amy rushing to be with him. It was Blackmore's second novel, and the novel he wrote prior to his most famous work Lorna Doone.

*Warning: Some listeners may be offended by some of the language. Words that were considered acceptable in the nineteenth century are not always politically correct today. It is LibriVox policy to leave the original wording as the author intended.
Daughter of Today

Sara Jeannette Duncan
The Canadian author Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes) is today best known for her 1904 novel of Ontario life, “The Imperialist” (also available as a LibriVox recording), but in Duncan’s own time readers were impressed more by her other works, including “A Daughter of Today,” published in 1894. “A Daughter of Today” follows the story of Elfrida Bell, a young woman who escapes the American Midwest to pursue first an artistic education in Paris, and then a novice career in journalism in London. As the novel’s title indicates, Elfrida is a product “of today,” i.e., of her day — the 1890s. She is swept up in the heady notions of that period: Aestheticism (“art for art’s sake”), fin-de-siècle Decadence, and ideas about the “New Woman” who breaks free of bourgeois conventions. With the self-absorption of youth, Elfrida sets about constructing herself along these lines. She pursues this project with bracing energy, mixed with pretension and affectation: “In nothing that she said or did, admired or condemned, was there any trace of the commonplace, except, perhaps, the desire to avoid it.” Early reviewers debated whether the character of Elfrida was “fresh and original,” or simply “ill-bred.” This novel explores clashes between convention and originality, cultural differences (American /French /British), and rivalry between friends.
Chaperon

Henry James
What on earth is a girl to do when London society has convicted her mother of a dreadful sin and has ostracized her? If blood is thicker than water, and the daughter remains loyal to her erring parent, how far will affect her own standing in society (and most important, of course) in the marriage market that is controlled by that society? This is the problem facing Rose Tramore and it will take all her charm -- and perseverance -- to solve it.(Nicholas Clifford)
Zeit-Geist

Lily Dougall
"When travelling in Canada, in the region north of Lake Ontario, I came upon traces of the somewhat remarkable life which is the subject of the following sketch.

Having applied to the school-master in the town where Bartholomew Toyner lived, I received an account the graphic detail and imaginative insight of which attest the writer's personal affection. This account, with only such condensation as is necessary, I now give to the world. I do not believe that it belongs to the novel to teach theology; but I do believe that religious sentiments and opinions are a legitimate subject of its art, and that perhaps its highest function is to promote understanding by bringing into contact minds that habitually misinterpret one another." (From the Preface)

"One of the most remarkable novels of the year."-- New York Commercial Advertiser.
"Powerful in conception, treatment, and influence."-- Boston Globe.
Tree of Heaven

May Sinclair
One of the most heart-breaking of all World War I novels, this family epic was written in the midst of the War itself, and shows the intense emotion generated in ordinary lives by that tragedy. May Sinclair astonishingly weaves multiple themes into her narrative, seamlessly drawing from the great movements of her day: suffrage, sexual liberation, artistic revolt, war, and pacifism. Her most powerful metaphor throughout the novel is that of the Vortex: the dangerously irresistible force of human masses, how to resist it and (much more difficult) how to participate in it without losing one’s individual autonomy.
Colonel's Dream

Charles Waddell Chesnutt
In this novel, Chesnutt described the hopelessness of Reconstruction in a post-Civil War South that was bent on reestablishing the former status quo and rebuilding itself as a region of the United States where new forms of "slavery" would replace the old. This novel illustrated how race hatred and the impotence of a reluctant Federal Government trumped the rule of law, ultimately setting the stage for the rise of institutions such as Jim Crow, lynching, chain gangs and work farms--all established with the intent of disenfranchising African Americans.
Oliver Twist (version 6)

Charles Dickens
"Please sir, I want some more," the famous line spoken by Oliver Twist at age nine, becomes the tipping point of a huge change in Oliver's life. He is soon captured into the service of Fagin and his gang of pick-pocketing boys. But, Mr. Brownlow saves him from arrest, and for the first time in his young life Oliver finds comfort and caring. Unfortunately, he is recaptured into the seedy and disgusting world he had escaped, and meets with Bill Sykes, a dangerous criminal. There are numerous delightful or wicked characters that carry the story along, such as the Artful Dodger-- a boy of the streets under Fagin, Mr. Bumble the Beadle, looking for ways to get rid of Oliver, Nancy who makes a fateful betrayal, and the Maylies, whose affection Oliver craves. The author's descriptions of the back street life in London, bring us full force into the crushing poverty and the terrible way in which poor people were treated during that time. Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist as a serial in 1837, and it is considered one of the most popular in English literature.
Anthem (Version 4)

Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand is best known for her classics Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. One of her earlier works, Anthem, is a dystopian vision of a world in which “self” has been abolished and people have become nothing more than parts of a greater “collective.” Rooted in her own experiences fleeing from the communist Russia of the 1920’s, as well as the rise of fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany, Rand wrote Anthem as a warning to all concerned with losing personal identity in an ever changing and rapidly developing world
Anonymous Story

Anton Chekhov
In "An Anonymous Story," Chekhov continues to explore his favorite themes of superfluous men, ironic rakes, exploited women, and the dangers of social conventions to human happiness. The Anonymous Narrator is a feckless, would-be revolutionary who gets himself hired on as a flunky in the household of the young useless aristocrat Orlov, hoping to spy out some useful information for the Cause. Orlov seduces the beautiful Zinaida Fyodorovna away from her husband but quickly tires of her. The Narrator, another in the long line of Russian literary superfluous men, allows Orlov to use him to deceive Zinaida Fyodorovna, hating himself for it all the while. In the end he does his weak best to rescue the spurned mistress and her newborn child from their sufferings. Chekhov's subtle sympathy for the women victimized by conventional marriage is demonstrated in his narration of Zinaida Fyodorovna's tragic unraveling, ending in a masterful final chapter of heartbreaking ambiguity.
Mayor of Casterbridge (version 3)

Thomas Hardy
In a fit of drunkenness, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter to the highest bidder at a country fair. He lives with regret and swears off drink, until his wife and daughter return eighteen years later, when he is now well-off and the Mayor of Casterbridge.
Agnes Grey (Version 3)

Anne Brontë
Anne Bronte's semi-autobiographic novel about Agnes Grey, a young woman who becomes a governess to support her family, but finds her new career more difficult than she expected.
Jacob's Room (version 2)

Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf’s third novel lacks a conventional narrative style and some say even a plot. It follows Jacob from his childhood, through his education at Cambridge and finally to his death in World War I. The prose repeatedly shifts its point of view and the reader is challenged to find connections between the narrative fragments. Largely from the comments of others we come to know the sequence and some moments of Jacob’s life but we never fully learn who Jacob is. The literary experimentation in Jacob’s Room is used even more successfully in Woolf’s later novels.
Bride of Lammermoor

Sir Walter Scott
An historical novel by Sir Walter Scott, part of the Tales of My Landlord series, published anonymously in 1819. Based on a true story, it is set in south-east Scotland and (in this edition) in the reign of Queen Anne, after the 1707 Acts of Union which joined Scotland and England. It tells of a tragic love affair between young Lucy Ashton and Edgar Ravenswood, her family's enemy. Lady Ashton sets out to end their engagement and make Lucy marry a man better placed politically.
Crome Yellow, Version 2

Aldous Huxley
Fascinating and brilliant at many levels, Huxley's spoof of Lady Ottoline Morrell's famous bohemian gatherings is difficult to categorize. The ironic tone and caricaturish rendering of some characters makes it partly entertaining satire, but intertwined with the irony are a very human love story and much poignant social commentary. Denis Stone (Huxley himself) is a young poet hopelessly enamored of the languid Anne Wimbush, who comes to Priscilla Wimbush's Crome estate for several weeks of intellectual and artistic escape. Along the way of his love affair, he engages in or eavesdrops upon conversations with other guests about the War, about eschatology, about future society, about Sex, about Art, about Love. Several of these dialogues directly foreshadow themes of Huxley's later dystopian masterpiece, Brave New World. Others show a tragic prescience of another great European war on its way, an awareness that future tragedy might attempt to complete the unfinished business of the recent Great War. Huxley's first novel, Crome Yellow is well worth reading in its own right, while containing embryonic forms of so much of Huxley's later intellectual themes.
Custom of the Country (version 2)

Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton's 1913 novel is a devastating critique of American upward mobility, told through the journey of Undine Spragg from fictional Midwestern Apex City to New York to Paris. Undine is determined to acquire money and position through marriage, even if it means multiple divorces.
Howards End (version 3)

E. M. Forster
Considered Forster's masterpiece and one of the best books of the 20th century, Howards End tackles social conventions of the Edwardian era. The story focuses on three families in England at the beginning of the 20th century: the Wilcoxes, rich capitalists with a fortune made in the colonies; the half-German Schlegel siblings (Margaret, Helen, and Tibby), whose cultural pursuits have much in common with the Bloomsbury Group; and the Basts, an impoverished young couple from a lower-class background. The idealistic, intelligent Schlegel sisters seek to help the struggling Basts and to rid the Wilcoxes of some of their deep-seated social and economic prejudices.
Clayhanger

Bennett, Arnold
This first of a trilogy of novels is a coming-of-age story set in the Midlands of Victorian England, following Edwin Clayhanger as he leaves school, takes over the family business, and falls in love.
The books are set in Bennett's usual setting of "the 5 Towns", a thinly-disguised version of the six towns of "the Potteries" which amalgamated (at the time of which Bennett was writing) into the borough (and later city) of Stoke-on-Trent.
In one of the earlier chapters in the book, Bennett writes that Edwin had only heard of a philosopher as 'someone who made the best of a bad job' and in some ways that is what Edwin has to do in the book - survive under a stifling layer of conduct imposed by his father, his church and the society he is part of.
Botchan

Soseki Natsume
Botchan is the story of a young math teacher from Tokyo whose first assignment takes him to a middle school in the country side. His arrival there is not very lucky: The pupils are bound to test his perseverance and cheerily comment every one of his perceived missteps. In the teacher's room, he soon finds himself in the middle of an intrigue between the jovial "Porcupine" and the fat "Hubbard Squash" on one side, and the effeminate "Red Shirt" and his follower "Clown" on the other. Will Botchan choose the right side in the end?

Botchan - with morality as the main theme - is one of the most popular novels in Japan. Soseki Natsume bases the story on his own experiences as teacher in Matsuyama, his first assignment away from Tokyo.
Purple Land

William Henry Hudson
In W.H. Hudson’s first novel, an Englishman wandering on horseback across the pampas finds adventure and romance in Uruguay. The full title became: “The Purple Land: Being the Narrative of One Richard Lamb's Adventures in The Banda Oriental, in South America, as Told By Himself”. In the preface to "The Sun Also Rises", President Teddy Roosevelt said that everyone should read "The Purple Land."
Liza of Lambeth

W. Somerset Maugham
Liza of Lambeth focuses on the challenges of life facing Liza, an 18 year old factory girl who lives in the poverty of the slums of 1890s London. The main plot is driven by Liza's affections and the consequences these have for her. Based on W Somerset Maugham's experiences as a visiting trainee Doctor at the time, the book is an insight into working class life at the time and was his debut, the success of which led to him pursuing his vocation not as a Doctor, but instead a novelist.
Absentee

Maria Edgeworth
Published in 1812, “The Absentee” by Maria Edgeworth examines social injustice in 19th-century Britain. At that time, the management of many Irish estates suffered from the absenteeism of their Anglo-Irish landlords.

We meet Lord and Lady Clonbrony. Lord Clonbrony struggles with debt, while Lady Clonbrony tries to shed her Irish connections and earn status in London’s high society (known as “the ton.”) Meanwhile, their son, Lord Colambre, is wary of the entanglements of that society and escapes to the family estate in Ireland, where he discovers the abuses that have arisen in the family’s absence.

Maria Edgeworth was a pioneer of realism in fiction, and one of the most successful and popular novelists of her time. She offered satirical portraits of society manners and sympathetic treatment of regional life. Her work won admiration from authors such as Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott. “The Absentee” is named in the reference list “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.”
Antic Hay

Aldous Huxley
The epigram to this work from Christoher Marlowe applies to the plot of this story: "My men like satyrs grazing on the lawns / Shall with their goat-feet dance the antic hay." The plot follows Huxley and his cohorts in a search for meaning and hope and love in post WWI London.
So Big

Edna Ferber
The story of Selina DeJong and her son Dirk, whom she affectionately calls So Big. After the death of her husband, Selina raises So Big on her own while managing her deceased husband's farm in Illinois. When So Big grows up, he moves to Chicago, where he finds himself drawn to the fast-money stock-broker lifestyle of the 1920s. So Big is conflicted: he wants to live in the world of speculation and finance, but he's aware that his mother (and his love interest, an artist) are disappointed that he hasn't lived up to the hard-working, hardscrabble values instilled by his mother.
Hero

W. Somerset Maugham
James Parsons comes home to Little Primpton after serving in the Boer War. The whole town is proud of their new hero, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for risking his life to save a fellow soldier. However, for Jamie, nothing is the same anymore. His varied experience after leaving home has changed his worldview completely and he finds it impossible to go back to his former way of life and beliefs. Torn between individual freedom and obligations towards his family, Maugham portrays Jamie's struggles and social intolerance.
Explorer

W. Somerset Maugham
An early novel by W. Somerset Maugham about conflicting feelings of self-integrity, filial love, romantic love. Lucy Allerton and Alec MacKenzie have to choose between grasping happiness that is their due and upholding a set of moral values that define themselves.
Hester: A Story of Contemporary Life, Volume 1

Margaret O. Oliphant
Catherine Vernon has a firm hand on her family and on the family business. Her plans for her young protege Edward, whom she loves like a son, are disturbed by the arrival of Hester, a 14-year-old girl who is just as strong willed. The conflict between Catherine and Hester is resolved through their mutual love for Edward. On one level a love story, Hester is unusual for its time in its portrayal of women in business.
Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid

Thomas Hardy
A milkmaid, Margery, encounters a mysterious foreigner and perhaps prevents him from committing suicide. In gratitude, the man offers her any reward she can name. She tells him she wants to go to a ball. He takes her, admittedly a bit reluctantly, to a yeoman's ball in a neighboring county. From there the story continues because of course, a lot happens after the ball. She happens to already have an engagement to a local lad but his hold over her seems to grow of its own accord. This Hardy story may not end the way you wish, but that is often true of stories by this master writer.
Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906

Various
"Mother Earth was an American anarchist journal that described itself as "A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature". Founded in early 1906 and initially edited by Emma Goldman, an activist in the United States, it published articles by contemporary activists and writers in Europe as well as the US, in addition to essays by historic figures." (Wikipedia) This is Volume 1 of the series. This is the third number of the magazine.
Unveiling a Parallel

Alice Ilgenfritz Jones
In this work of utopian science fiction from the Victorian era written by Two Women of the West, a moniker for Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Marchant. A man travels to Mars to discover an Utopian world which is parallel to the Earth in some ways, but strikingly different in some. The freedom of women is not of this world. It is especially intriguing coming from the imagination of these two American women in the 19th Century
Lost Diaries

Maurice Baring
Within these pages find passages from the "lost diaries" of a wide range of people: royal, regular, famous, infamous, historical, and fictional.
Life and Death of Harriett Frean

May Sinclair
Harriett Frean is a well-to-do, unmarried woman living a life of meaningless dependency, boredom, and unproductivity as she patiently cares for her aging parents, waiting for a man to marry. When her opportunity for Love finally comes, she is offered a moral dilemma: the man is engaged to her best friend. Should she sacrifice what, according to the priorities of the time, seems like her "one chance for happiness," or should she seize the moment? Can she make something meaningful of her life without significant others? May Sinclair, as always gently ironic in tone, succeeds in skewering the conventions of her society while laying bare the hopeless realities for so many women of the era who were given so few chances really to live. ( summary by Expatriate)
Taking the Bastile

Alexandre Dumas
Pitou lost his mother when he was small. He was raised by a stern aunt who did not really love him. He starts knowing the world by going to service. How can this man, Pitou the Peasant (as the subtitle of the novel suggests) go on to influence the whole state? How can he go on and take a part in the French revolution? Can his motivation, coming from what he did not have, be enough?
Audrey Craven

May Sinclair
In May Sinclair’s remarkable first novel, Audrey Craven is a beautiful young woman who has by her idiosyncrasies acquired a thoroughly undeserved reputation for originality. In fact, Audrey is a shallow, selfish, malleable person of negligible intelligence, with a fastidious horror of anyone who might be considered a nobody. Her pursuit of the stimulation of extraordinary minds (and her persistent fantasy of being somebody’s Muse) brings her into contact with serious women and men representing the profoundest passions of art, religion, science, and love. The question is, will these encounters prove to be her salvation, or will her vindictive self-centeredness damage the ardent lives she touches? (Expatriate)
Hester: A Story of Contemporary Life, Volume 2

Margaret O. Oliphant
Catherine Vernon has a firm hand on her family and on the family business. Her plans for her young protege Edward, whom she loves like a son, are disturbed by the arrival of Hester, a 14-year-old girl who is just as strong willed. The conflict between Catherine and Hester is resolved through their mutual love for Edward. On one level a love story, Hester is unusual for its time in its portrayal of women in business.
Miss Crespigny

Frances Hodgson Burnett
This is a less known, but not less beautiful, novel by the author of The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, The Lost Prince, Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Shuttle, and many more. There is something different about miss Lysbeth Crespigny. Raised by three maiden aunts and sheltered from the world, she leaves them for the first time in order to explore the world. Yet she is often misunderstood. The world she discovers is more complicated and confusing then she anticipates. She is only 18 when the book starts. However the choices she has to make have consequences which she learns to navigate and become the strong woman she can be.
Previous Next

© 2012 - 2024 Beelingo.com | Cookies | Privacy | Terms of use | Mobile apps | Support