Forster tells us that Dickens, in his later novels, from Bleak House onwards (1853), “assiduously cultivated” construction, “this essential of his art.” Some critics may think, that since so many of the best novels in the world “have no outline, or, if they have an outline, it is a demned outline,” elaborate construction is not absolutely “essential.” Really essential are character, “atmosphere,” humour. But as, in the natural...

In The Nabob Alphonse Daudet writes fluidly and somewhat romantically about a nouveau riche Frenchman (originally from the south of France, like Daudet) returning from Tunis and determined to buy his way into the upper reaches of Paris society. He is led from one mistake to another, humbled and humiliated. The underlying thesis would appear to be either a) country mouse comes to city and is eaten by the urban cats or b) Darwinian naturalism rules...

The novel follows the fortunes of four women, all in one way or another 'fallen leaves', who are linked by their relationships with the hero, Amelius Goldenheart, and also by secrets from the past. Their histories are looked at from two perspectives: that of the ruthless capitalist society of England in which they live, and that of the Christian Socialism of the hero who has been brought up in a Utopian community in America. Collins modelled his description...

This 1891 volume of essays, in the words of its editor, Fred Scott, "is just the work to go into the hands of those that hope and despair of the teacher of rhetoric-the callow young man with a sneaking ambition for literature..." Lewes examines how such elements as vision, sincerity, beauty, and style determine literary success or failure.

The Awakening of Helena Richie is a novel by the American writer Margaret Deland (1857 - 1945) set in the 19th century fictional locale of Old Chester, a Western Pennsylvania rural village just a few miles outside the city of Pittsburgh, then an industrial boomtown. From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).

In Cosmopolis, his psychological novel set in the Eternal City, Paul Bourget (1852-1935) studies "the contrast between the rather incoherent ways of the rovers of high life and the character of perennity impressed everywhere in the great city of the Caesars and of the Popes . . . where even the corners speak of a secular past, [evoking] some representatives of the most modern, as well as the most arbitrary and the most momentary, life." In the ephemeral...

A funny, satirical tale of English mothers on the brink of rebellion, Arlington Park is a novel for the ages.

Set over the course of one rainy day in an ordinary English suburb, Arlington Park is a viciously funny portrait of a group of young mothers, each bound to their families, each straining for some kind of independence: Juliet, enraged at the victory of men over women in family life; Amanda, warding off thoughts of death with obsessive

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Bloody Hand Matt Braun He found a people who needed his courage… Born a slave, Jim Beckwirth forged his own path to freedom as a mountain man. But when a wealthy trading company owner offered to pay him to live among the Crow Indians, Beckwirth accepted the deal-and discovered another way of life that changed him forever. He fought a battle that had to be won… Here in the Wind River Mountains, amidst blood feuds and blood brothers, he became...

"Elison's brutal, incisive novel cuts to the heart of what makes public figures vulnerable and asks us to question our voyeurism." —New York Times Book Review
She created a beautiful world. Now he wants it all.
On her way to a speaking engagement, bestselling novelist Eli Grey gets into a cab and accepts a drink from the driver, trusting that everything is fine. She wakes up chained...

Excerpt: "...he is hardly even a caricaturist; that he is something very like a realist. Those comic monstrosities which the critics found incredible will be found to be the immense majority of the citizens of this country. We shall find that Sweedlepipe cuts our hair and Pumblechook sells our cereals; that Sam Weller blacks our boots and Tony Weller drives our omnibus. For the exaggerated notion of the exaggerations of Dickens (as was admirably pointed...