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Recommendations based on The Way We Live Nowby Anthony Trollope
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Barchester Towers
by Anthony Trollope
Social satire of Victorian England, exploring hypocrisy and ambition in a small cathedral town.
Barchester Towers concerns the leading clergy of the cathedral city of Barchester. The much loved bishop having died, all expectations are that his son, Archdeacon Grantly, will succeed him. Owing to ... (Wikipedia)
The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins
A thrilling mystery of secrets and hidden identities, with a hero on a quest for the truth.
Walter Hartright, a young art teacher, encounters and gives directions to a mysterious and distressed woman dressed entirely in white, lost in London; he is later informed by policemen that she has ... (Wikipedia)
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
A grand narrative of life in a small English town, exploring the lives of its inhabitants.
Middlemarch centres on the lives of residents of Middlemarch, a fictitious Midlands town, from 1829 onwards – the years up to the 1832 Reform Act . The narrative is variably considered to consist of ... (Wikipedia)
Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
A social commentary on the English legal system, exploring themes of inequality, injustice and corruption.
Bleak House opens in the twilight of foggy London, where fog grips the city most densely in the Court of Chancery. The obscure case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in which an inheritance is gradually ... (Goodreads)
Daniel Deronda
by George Eliot
Story of a man's struggle to reconcile his Jewish identity and the expectations of English society.
Daniel Deronda contains two main strains of plot, united by the title character. The novel begins in late August 1865 , with the meeting of Daniel Deronda and Gwendolen Harleth in the fictional town ... (Wikipedia)
Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
A story of social climbing and ambition, set against the backdrop of 19th century England.
A novel that chronicles the lives of two women who could not be more different: Becky Sharp, an orphan whose only resources are her vast ambitions, her native wit, and her loose morals; and her ... (Goodreads)
The Warden
by Anthony Trollope
A moral story of a struggling clergyman and the corruption of church institutions.
The Warden centers on Mr. Harding, a clergyman of great personal integrity who is nevertheless in possession of an income from a charity far in excess of the sum devoted to the purposes of the ... (Goodreads)
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
by Anne Brontë
An exploration of 19th-century gender roles, revealing a woman's struggle for independence.
The novel is divided into three volumes. Part One (Chapters 1 to 15): Gilbert Markham narrates how a mysterious widow, Mrs Helen Graham, arrives at Wildfell Hall, a nearby mansion. A source of ... (Wikipedia)
The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
A romantic drama set in the high society of 19th century New York, exploring the limits of love and longing.
Newland Archer, gentleman lawyer and heir to one of New York City's most illustrious families, happily anticipates his highly desirable marriage to the sheltered and beautiful May Welland. Yet he ... (Wikipedia)
A Passage to India
by E.M. Forster
Exploring imperial tensions between colonial India and Britain in the early 20th century.
A young British schoolmistress, Adela Quested, and her elderly friend, Mrs. Moore, visit the fictional city of Chandrapore, British India . Adela is to decide if she wants to marry Mrs. Moore's son, ... (Wikipedia)
Wives and Daughters
by Elizabeth Gaskell
A story of growth, love, and values in a rural English village.
The novel opens with young Molly Gibson, who has been raised by her widowed father, Dr. Gibson. During a visit to the local aristocratic 'great house' of Lord and Lady Cumnor, Molly loses her way in ... (Wikipedia)
The Good Soldier
by Ford Madox Ford
A chronicle of the lives of two couples, weaving together tragedy, deceit, and self-deception.
The Good Soldier is narrated by the character John Dowell, half of one of the couples whose dissolving relationships form the subject of the novel. Dowell tells the story of those dissolutions, plus ... (Wikipedia)
Our Mutual Friend
by Charles Dickens
A satirical novel about the corrupt society of Victorian England, where money and greed rule all.
Having made his fortune from London's rubbish, a rich misanthropic miser dies, estranged from all except his faithful employees Mr and Mrs Boffin. By his will, his fortune goes to his estranged son ... (Wikipedia)
Little Dorrit
by Charles Dickens
A tale of injustice, exploring the social and economic inequalities of Victorian England.
The novel begins in Marseilles "thirty years ago" (c. 1826), with the notorious murderer Rigaud telling his prison cellmate John Baptist Cavalletto how he killed his wife, just prior to being ... (Wikipedia)
The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
A young woman's journey of self-discovery, standing up to society's expectations.
Isabel Archer, from Albany, New York , is invited by her maternal aunt, Lydia Touchett, to visit Lydia's rich husband, Daniel, at his estate near London, following the death of Isabel's father. ... (Wikipedia)
Nostromo
by Joseph Conrad
A gripping tale of greed and political intrigue in a fictional South American country.
Nostromo is set in the South American country of Costaguana, and more specifically in that country's Occidental Province and its port city of Sulaco. Though Costaguana is a fictional nation, its ... (Wikipedia)
Cranford
by Elizabeth Gaskell
A charming portrait of a rural town and the lives of its eccentric inhabitants.
Mary Smith and her friends live in Cranford, a town predominantly inhabited by women. The return of a long-lost brother named Peter is the most dramatic event to occur over the course of the sixteen ... (Goodreads)
Mary Barton
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Social injustice and class divisions explored through the lens of a mill worker’s family.
The novel begins in Manchester, where we are introduced to the Bartons and the Wilsons, two working-class families. John Barton is a questioner of the distribution of wealth and the relations between ... (Wikipedia)
Howards End
by E.M. Forster
Exploration of the societal divides in early 20th century England, and the consequences of class prejudice.
Howards End is a novel by E. M. Forster about social conventions, codes of conduct and relationships in turn-of-the-century England. A strong-willed and intelligent woman refuses to allow the ... (Goodreads)
Adam Bede
by George Eliot
A carpenter, Adam Bede, falls in love with a beautiful woman, Hetty Sorrel, who is in love with another man. Tragedy ensues.
According to, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, (1967), The novel follows four characters' rural lives in the fictional community of Hayslope—a rural, pastoral, and close-knit community in ... (Wikipedia)
The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
A young woman's struggle to navigate New York high society, in pursuit of financial security and true love.
Lily Bart, a beautiful but impoverished socialite, is on her way to a house party at Bellomont, the country home of her best friend, Judy Trenor. Her pressing task is to find a husband with the ... (Wikipedia)
Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy
A tale of struggle and sorrow for a poor, uneducated man amid the rigid conventions of Victorian England.
The novel tells the story of Jude Fawley, who lives in a village in southern England (part of Hardy's fictional county of Wessex ), who yearns to be a scholar at "Christminster", a city modelled on ... (Wikipedia)
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
by John le Carré
A retired spy is called back into action to uncover a mole in the British Secret Service.
Control , chief of the Circus, suspects one of the five senior intelligence officers at the Circus to be a long-standing Soviet mole and assigns code names with the intention that should his agent ... (Wikipedia)
Les Liaisons dangereuses
by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
An intricate game of love, lust and manipulation as two rival aristocrats scheme to outwit one another.
The Vicomte de Valmont is determined to seduce the virtuous, married, and therefore inaccessible Madame de Tourvel, who is staying with Valmont's aunt while her husband is away on a court case. At ... (Wikipedia)
Ulysses
by James Joyce
Epic narrative following a day in the life of an Irishman living in Dublin.
It is 8 a.m. Buck Mulligan , a boisterous medical student, calls Stephen Dedalus (a young writer encountered as the principal subject of, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ) up to the roof of ... (Wikipedia)
Mansfield Park
by Jane Austen
Social satire exploring morality and class in 19th century England.
Fanny Price, at age ten, is sent from her impoverished home in Portsmouth to live as one of the family at Mansfield Park, the Northamptonshire country estate of her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram. There ... (Wikipedia)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
A young woman's struggles against societal expectations, and her journey of resilience and self-realization.
Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780141439594 . When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D'Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting ... (Goodreads)
The Plague
by Albert Camus
A small town in Algeria is struck by a deadly plague, testing the courage and faith of its citizens.
The book begins with an epigraph quoting Daniel Defoe , author of, A Journal of the Plague Year, . In the town of Oran, thousands of rats, initially unnoticed by the populace, begin to die in the ... (Wikipedia)
The Mayor of Casterbridge
by Thomas Hardy
A man sells his wife and daughter while drunk, then becomes a successful businessman and mayor, but his past haunts him.
At a country fair near Casterbridge in Wessex Michael Henchard, a 21-year-old hay-trusser, argues with his wife Susan. Drunk on rum-laced furmity he auctions her off, along with their baby daughter ... (Wikipedia)
The Canterbury Tales
by Geoffrey Chaucer
A collection of stories told by a group of pilgrims on a journey to Canterbury.
The procession that crosses Chaucer's pages is as full of life and as richly textured as a medieval tapestry. The Knight, the Miller, the Friar, the Squire, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath, and others ... (Goodreads)
