Free summaries
British Literature — page 14
4,240 public-domain british literature books, summarised. Page 14 of 89.
Antony and Cleopatra
William Shakespeare
A colossal military leader abandons political duty for an intoxicating, volatile romance in Egypt, sparking a global civil war that shatters an empire.
A century of English essays
Unknown
Centuries of English thought unfold through a choir of distinct voices, mapping the quiet shifts of daily life, human frailty, and spiritual wonder.
Illustrations of Shakspeare, and of Ancient Manners:: with Dissertations on the Clowns and Fools of Shakspeare
Francis Douce
Unearthing the forgotten customs, linguistic eccentricities, and folklore behind Early Modern drama, an antiquarian meticulously decodes the lost world that shaped Shakespeare's plays and popular entertainments.
The Eyes of Asia
Rudyard Kipling
Letters sent home by Indian soldiers fighting in France during World War I reveal a profound, transforming encounter between Eastern traditions and Western modernity.
Zanoni
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
A centuries-old immortal faces an agonizing choice between endless, untouched existence and the mortal world of love, passion, and ultimate self-sacrifice during the blood-soaked Reign of Terror.
The Secret Sharer
Joseph Conrad
A midnight swimmer climbs aboard an anchored ship, binding a young, isolated captain to a fugitive who shares his secret identity.
The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan
W. S. (William Schwenck) Gilbert
These fourteen librettos capture Victorian society at its most brilliant, sending absurd aristocrats, earnest idealists, and strict moralists tumbling into dizzying paradoxes.
Why we should read--
S. P. B. (Stuart Petre Brodie) Mais
Literary appreciation demands neither academic stiffness nor blind reverence, but an eager, open-hearted engagement with the written word. This critical guide surveys classic and contemporary literature, offering an infectious defense of reading for sheer vital enjoyment.
The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford
A pristine facade of upper-class propriety collapses into betrayal, madness, and suicide when two couples spend nine years pretending their lives are utterly civil and refined.
The Ball and the Cross
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
A passionate Young Ireland Catholic and a fiercely dogmatic Scottish atheist agree to fight a duel to the death over a smashed shop window, only to find the entire modern world conspiring to keep them from settling their difference.
Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends
John Keats
A young English poet records the raw, unvarnished collision between high artistic ambition and the crushing physical and financial realities of mortal life.
Hamlet
William Shakespeare
A grieving prince discovers his uncle murdered his father to seize the throne and marry his mother. Paralyzed by doubt and surrounded by spies, he feigns madness while plotting a delayed, ruinous revenge.
The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Cæsar
William Shakespeare
When a powerful leader's vaulting ambition threatens to swallow a republic, honorable men are forced to choose between loyalty to their friend and devotion to their nation.
The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke
Rupert Brooke
A young man captures the ecstatic, sensory rush of early youth, turns through heartbreak and travel, and ultimately greets mortal sacrifice with serene, romantic resolve.
Beowulf
Francis Barton Gummere
A lordless foundling builds an empire, and a hero must fight the monsters left in the dark.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Edwin Abbott Abbott
A two-dimensional square living in a flat world travels beyond his native plane, discovering high-dimensional realms that shatter his narrow worldview and turn him into a radical prophet of higher spatial possibilities.
The Professor
Charlotte Brontë
Refusing the comforts of easy romance, an ambitious young Englishman sets out for Belgium to carve out his own modest, unvarnished destiny.
The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents
H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
A stolen cholera germ, a bloodthirsty orchid, and a creature haunting an astronomical observatory: these fifteen tales blend Victorian science with bizarre, speculative terror.
The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James
An ardent young American woman inherits a sudden fortune and travels to Europe to seek an expansive life, only to find her fiercely guarded independence ensnared by a cold and calculating fortune hunter.
The Sleeper Awakes: A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes
H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
A man falls into a two-hundred-year trance, only to wake as the absolute, fabulously wealthy master of a hyper-capitalist future he never asked for.
Jacob's Room
Virginia Woolf
A young man moves through the world like a shadow in late afternoon light: clearly outlined, endlessly observed, yet inherently impossible to fully hold or know.
The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman
Laurence Sterne
A baby is born into a world where a broken nose, a mischosen name, and a father's convoluted theories shape a life before it even properly begins.
More English Fairy Tales
Unknown
Ancient folklore comes to life through spirited English tricksters, shape-shifting spirits, and clever rustic fools.
The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, Volume 1
Alexander Pope
Mastering every shade of verse from delicate rural landscapes to razor-sharp social satire, this volume captures an entire era’s intellectual life through one poet's unmatched mastery of heroic couplets.
Barry Lyndon
William Makepeace Thackeray
An audacious Irish fortune-hunter blunders and bravadoes his way across eighteenth-century Europe, charting his rise from penniless provincial duels to high-society opulence—and his inevitable, self-inflicted ruin.
The Jew of Malta
Christopher Marlowe
A villainous merchant turns his infinite capacity for malice against the rulers of Malta after they seize his fortune to pay off an invading army.
A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land: Together with Personal Reminiscences of the 'Inimitable Boz' Therein Collected
William R. (William Richard) Hughes
Footsteps echo down the centuries when a dedicated reader traces the physical paths of a beloved author's fictional worlds.
Hazlitt on English Literature: An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature
William Hazlitt
A passionate journey through the landscape of English letters reveals how literature springs not from polite rules or artificial polish, but from the raw, uncompromising energy of the human intellect and heart.
Every Man in His Humor
Ben Jonson
A tangle of self-absorbed Londoners parade their quirks and obsessions, entirely oblivious to the fact that their eccentricities make them easy prey for sharper wits.
Baboo Jabberjee, B.A
F. Anstey
A bombastic Bengalee law student in Victorian London blunders through high society, confusing elaborate English idioms and causing social havoc wherever he goes.
Cat and Dog
Julia Charlotte Maitland
An pampered hunting dog learns to look past his own prejudices, forming an unlikely bond with a young cat before embarking on a dangerous cross-country journey back to their beloved family.
The Battaile of Agincourt
Michael Drayton
A swift, sweeping English epic revives the 1415 invasion of France, transforming historical bloodshed into a fierce celebration of national pride and martial valor.
The Chronicles of Clovis
Saki
A cynical youth glides through Edwardian drawing rooms, using sharp wits and relentless mischief to expose the absurdity of polite society.
![Cover of The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [Vol. 8 of 9]](https://cdn.myebooksbuy.com/c/the-works-of-william-shakespeare-cambridge-edition-vol-8-of-9-william.webp)
The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [Vol. 8 of 9]
William Shakespeare
Three monumental tragedies of tragic inheritance, fractured minds, and fatal betrayal unfold within a single critical edition that meticulously captures every textual variant, historical quarto, and scholarly debate of the early modern stage.
The Daffodil Mystery
Edgar Wallace
When an arrogant London store owner is found dead with a cluster of yellow flowers pressed to his body, an international detective must unravel a web of embezzlement, revenge, and secrets stretching from Shanghai to Highgate.
Miscellaneous Aphorisms
Oscar Wilde
To seek beauty over utility is to choose the soul’s liberation over the world’s dull machinery. True freedom requires stripping away social hypocrisy, authority, and unselfish altruism to make room for pure individual expression.
English Fairy Tales
Flora Annie Webster Steel
Courage, sly wits, and sudden magic carry plain folk through a countryside where giants wait around the turn and foolishness proves as fatal as a blade.
Old English Poems: Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose
Cosette Faust Newton
Heroic song, mystical vision, and practical wisdom collide in a volume that recreates the lost rhythms of early English speech, capturing both the thunder of battle and the icy quiet of exile.
The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
Nature and human suffering intertwine across high mountain peaks, tranquil lake shores, and desolate English plains. Through quiet observation and dramatic tragedy, everyday lives reveal profound psychological depth.
Mary Barton
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
When a desperate mill worker turns to political murder in industrial Manchester, his innocent daughter is forced into a heroic race to save the wrongly accused man she loves.
Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street
Virginia Woolf
A woman walks through the morning bustle of post-war London on a simple errand, yet every step through the streets unlocks the vast, quiet expanse of her inner life.
The Golden Bowl
Henry James
Two wealthy, interwoven couples attempt to preserve their luxurious joint existence through silence, avoiding a public scandal by slowly and exquisitely reshaping their private alliances.
The Gods of Pegana
Lord Dunsany
A grand, invented mythology unfolds with the quiet rhythm of an ancient scripture, chronicling a pantheon born from a sleeping creator's fitful dreams.
The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction
Dorothy Scarborough
Frightened readers used to demand that phantoms explain themselves by morning, but modern stories let the darkness linger, transforming raw terror into a subtle, lingering art.
Essays and Lectures
Oscar Wilde
A defense of beauty, intellect, and decorative craft emerges through a sharp critique of rigid systems and practical utility.
Browning's Shorter Poems
Robert Browning
These poems pulse with a restless, muscular energy, capturing the secret struggles of the human soul through the voices of kings, painters, rats, and rebels. They turn the quiet moments of life into grand, dramatic battlefields of the spirit.
What I Saw in America
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
A traveler crosses the ocean to find that crossing a distance is not the same as bridging a mind.
When we were very young
A. A. (Alan Alexander) Milne
A whimsical collection of poems capturing the joys and wonders of childhood, from teddy bears to Buckingham Palace.