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British Literature — page 24
4,564 public-domain british literature books, summarised. Page 24 of 96.
A Brief Handbook of English Authors
Oscar Fay Adams
A compact reference guide gathers hundreds of English literary figures into a single accessible volume. It offers immediate bibliographic details, critical summaries, and publishing contexts for readers seeking quick facts without consulting massive multi-volume encyclopedias.
The Fair Maid of Perth
Walter Scott
In fourteen-century Scotland, a peaceful maiden and an fiery armorer navigate a treacherous web of royal corruption, feud, and bloody urban warfare.
Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin: Comprising the Celebrated Political and Satirical Poems, of the Rt. Hons. G. Canning, John Hookham Frere, W. Pitt, the Marquis Wellesley, G. Ellis, W. Gifford, the Earl of Carlisle, and Others
Unknown
High-spirits and sharp-edged wit fuel this classic collection of British political satires, written to combat revolutionary radicalism through the power of ridicule.
The Poems and Verses of Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
A varied collection of verses reveals a famous novelist experimenting with theatrical songs, biting political satires, and solemn dramatic prologues.
A Wodehouse Miscellany: Articles & Stories
P. G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse
High society, domestic dilemmas, and absurdity meet in early comic sketches and stories filled with foolish bachelors, imperious women, and sharp-witted servants.
Every Man out of His Humour
Ben Jonson
A biting Elizabethan satire exposes human absurdity through characters consumed by bizarre, self-indulgent obsessions they mistake for refined personality traits.
Love for Love: A Comedy
William Congreve
A young lover in debt pretends to lose his mind to avoid losing his inheritance, only to find that the woman he adores is playing a far cleverer game of her own.
The Prussian Officer
D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
Sweat drips beneath heavy helmets on dusty roads, where a sullen, bruised soldier marches behind the arrogant officer who beat him.
Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood
George MacDonald
When a newly appointed country vicar arrives at his quiet parish, he expects a simple ministry, only to be drawn into the hidden heartbreaks, deep prejudices, and dark secrets of his flock.
English Poets of the Eighteenth Century
Unknown
Across a century of sweeping literary transformation, the voices of a changing nation echo through courtly satires, quiet country churchyards, and the raw, vital rhythms of the rural plow.
Micah Clarke: His Statement as made to his three grandchildren Joseph, Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734
Arthur Conan Doyle
An elderly Puritan soldier sits by his hearth in 1734 to record how he fought, suffered, and survived the bloody Monmouth Rebellion of 1685.
The Heir of Redclyffe
Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary) Yonge
A fiery young heir, burdened by his family’s dark temper, enters the home of his easygoing guardian, where his sudden arrival reorders every life he touches.
The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
William John Locke
A pedantic schoolmaster inherits a fortune, leaves his classroom to cultivate a life of quiet philosophy, and finds his detached existence upended when he shelter a beautiful, naive young refugee from the Ottoman Empire.
The Wrong Box
Robert Louis Stevenson
Two scheming brothers, a missing corpse, and a mislaid piano converge in a Victorian farce where everyone is pursuing a fortune no one can quite manage to grasp.
A Bunch of Cherries: A Story of Cherry Court School
L. T. Meade
To win a life-changing prize, a schoolgirl must choose between absolute honesty and saving her impoverished mother from ruin.
Puck of Pook's Hill
Rudyard Kipling
Along the grassy banks and ancient ditches of a Sussex farm, two children meet an ancient fairy who summons figures from England's past to tell their stories face-to-face.
Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
A disgraced prisoner watches a doomed man march toward the gallows, turning personal ruin and institutional cruelty into an unsparing song of human sorrow.
The House by the Church-Yard
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
A sleepy Irish village hides a dark web of past crimes, sinister identities, spectral visitations, and a brutal murder that shatters its idyllic eighteenth-century social life. <Image alt="Cover of The House by the Churchyard by Sheridan Le Fanu" caption="Sheridan Le Fanu's classic atmospheric mystery"…
Last Poems by A. E. Housman
A. E. (Alfred Edward) Housman
A quiet melancholy permeates these verses, where youthful passion, military duty, and mortal grief drift toward an inevitable twilight.
Callista
John Henry Newman
A young Greek idol-maker in third-century North Africa finds her weary, intellectual world upended when imperial edicts demand the blood of a local Christian community.
The Devil Doctor
Sax Rohmer
A shadow falls across London when the sinister Dr. Fu-Manchu returns from the dead to launch a terrifying new campaign of terror.
The Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection
W. W. (William Wymark) Jacobs
Men on the river bank share stories over pipes and mugs of ale, unaware that fate is about to play a trick on them.
Danger! and Other Stories
Arthur Conan Doyle
A speculative threat turns real, revealing humanity's terrifying vulnerability in a world of rapid mechanical and atmospheric invention.
Men and Women
Robert Browning
Voices from across centuries speak directly to the mind, laying bare their secrets, rationalizations, and deepest desires. These character studies capture human ambition, faith, doubt, and art with unmatched psychological depth and poetic precision.
Mr. Britling Sees It Through
H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
A complacent English household watches its comfortable world shatter as global war transforms private lives into devastating public sacrifice.
The Tale of the Pie and the Patty Pan
Beatrix Potter
A small polite dog secretly swaps her pie into a cat's oven to avoid eating mouse, only to convince herself she swallowed a metal tin.
The Trees of Pride
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
On a remote Cornish estate, three exotic trees loom over a mystery of vanishing men, local superstitions, and a seemingly impossible crime. <Image alt="Book cover of The Trees of Pride by G. K. Chesterton" caption="Cover of G. K. Chesterton's mystery novella." src="imageagenttag2565547035013271987"/
Charles Peace, or The Adventures of a Notorious Burglar
Anonymous
A dark lantern, a nimble violin, and a trail of broken locks mark the bloody, labyrinthine career of England's most elusive nineteenth-century criminal.
Shakespeare's Roman plays and their background
MacCallum, Mungo William, Sir
Understanding Shakespeare’s Roman plays requires examining how historical facts and ancient biographies transformed into dramatic art through Elizabethan and Jacobean lenses.
The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1
William Painter
Courts of empire, dark alleys of revenge, and secret bedchambers form a grand tapestry of human passion and betrayal.
The Works of Aphra Behn, Volume III
Aphra Behn
A wild, cynical flurry of forced marriages, cross-dressing revenges, Ottoman trickery, and farce shows Restoration comedy at its most rowdy and energetic.
Milton: Minor Poems
John Milton
Where youthful joy once danced in the shadows of the forest, the soul must eventually confront loss, darkness, and its own mortal boundaries.
Stalky & Co
Rudyard Kipling
A trio of clever, rebellious schoolboys wages a relentless war of wits against overbearing masters and self-righteous peers at a Victorian military prep school, forging an unwritten code that ultimately prepares them for empire.
The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb
Charles Lamb
A varied collection of drama, poetry, and satirical epigrams reveals a quiet literary mind grappling with personal grief, domestic quietude, and the fickle nature of the public stage.
Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1
John Roby
In high-ceilinged halls, damp mossy woods, and lonely stone chapels, the ancient ghosts, witches, and iron-willed barons of Lancashire play out their dark, forgotten destinies.
Measure for Measure
William Shakespeare
A corrupt deputy enforces a forgotten law against mortal passion, triggering a dark sequence of moral coercion, disguised authority, and back-room trade-offs.
Notes on My Books
Joseph Conrad
Cruising through the origins of a master’s literary universe reveals how personal memory, chance encounters, and real-world perils transform into timeless fiction.
Ruth
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
An orphaned apprentice dressmaker is seduced, abandoned, and left pregnant in North Wales, only to find redemption and purpose through quiet devotion in an unforgiving Victorian society. <Image alt="Penguin Classics cover edition of Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell" caption="Gaskell's poignant tale of redemption"…
The Adventures of Sally
P. G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse
A young New York woman inherits a fortune, loses it to theatrical dreamers and bad luck, and finds her way through heartbreaks and misadventures to a quiet, genuine happiness.
The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 1 (of 8): Poems Lyrical and Narrative
W. B. (William Butler) Yeats
This collection of early verse offers a gateway into a world where ancient Irish myth and personal longing collide. These poems map the transformation of a young poet as he moves from romantic idealism toward a more austere, hard-won wisdom.
The Man of Feeling
Henry Mackenzie
Life is too harsh for Harley, a young Scottish gentleman whose extraordinary empathy leaves him utterly defenseless against a mercenary world.
An Englishman Looks at the World: Being a Series of Unrestrained Remarks upon Contemporary Matters
H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
This collection of essays captures a restless, intellectually ambitious mind grappling with the rapid transformations of the early twentieth century. It serves as a candid window into the anxieties and hopes of an era on the cusp of modernity.
Dream Days
Kenneth Grahame
Childhood is a secret, sun-drenched country where adults are merely border guards to be evaded. This collection of linked stories captures the fierce, fragile intensity of growing up in a world that rarely understands the importance of play.
Princess Sarah, and Other Stories
John Strange Winter
The life of a young girl often hangs upon the sudden shifts of fortune, where grace and grit determine whether she is crushed or emboldened by the world. This collection of stories explores the quiet trials of Victorian girlhood.
Tales and Fantasies
Robert Louis Stevenson
These narratives explore the fragile boundary between respectability and ruin, charting how ordinary lives are upended by sudden violence, shameful secrets, and the stubborn weight of family expectations.
Hypatia
Charles Kingsley
A scholarly woman of the fifth century finds her life and philosophy caught in the tightening grip of a city fracturing between dying paganism and a rising, often ruthless, Christian orthodoxy.
Quotes and Images from Chesterfield's Letters to His Son
Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of
The world is an arena of social negotiation, and success belongs to those who master the subtle art of pleasing others while keeping their own counsel. To navigate this landscape, one must dress with care, speak with elegance, and above all, treat manners as the necessary varnish that makes merit shine.
In Mr. Knox's Country
E. Oe. (Edith Oenone) Somerville
In a world of crumbling manor houses and unpredictable hunts, a Resident Magistrate navigates the chaotic, witty, and often absurd social landscape of rural Ireland.