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British Literature — page 47
4,564 public-domain british literature books, summarised. Page 47 of 96.
Poetical Works of Robert Bridges, Volume 2
Robert Bridges
A meditative collection of lyrical poetry and dramatic eclogues that captures the fleeting beauty of the natural world and the quiet persistence of human affection.
Rob Roy
Walter Scott
A young man is thrust from the counting-house into the wild, lawless Highlands, where he must navigate clashing loyalties and the shadow of a legendary outlaw to save his family’s honor.
The Flower of the Mind
Alice Meynell
This curated volume gathers the finest voices of English verse, spanning centuries to present a singular, distilled vision of the poetic craft. It is an intimate invitation to revisit the music of the language.
The Ghost Ship
Richard Middleton
This collection of short stories captures the delicate, often melancholic boundary between the mundane reality of early 20th-century life and the transcendent power of the imagination. It is a work of quiet brilliance, focusing on the internal lives of dreamers, misfits, and the grieving, whose experiences are…
The Immortal Moment: The Story of Kitty Tailleur
May Sinclair
This is a stark, psychological portrait of a woman defined by her past, caught in the crossfire between her desperate hope for redemption and the unforgiving morality of her social circle.
The Pool in the Desert
Sara Jeannette Duncan
The landscape of colonial India is vast and arid, yet within its borders, the human heart finds hidden, precarious springs of passion and duty. This collection of stories reveals the quiet, often devastating trysts that occur behind the stiff facades of British officialdom.
The Toll-House: Sailor's Knots, Part 7
W. W. (William Wymark) Jacobs
A group of skeptical friends challenges a local legend by spending the night in a house notoriously known for claiming the lives of its inhabitants.
White Heather: A Novel (Volume 1 of 3)
William Black
A gifted Scottish gamekeeper lives a life of quiet dignity until the arrival of wealthy outsiders disrupts the delicate social order of his remote Highland home.
Christie Johnstone: A Novel
Charles Reade
A bored nobleman finds purpose through a spirited Scottish fishwife, navigating the stark divide between his gilded, aimless world and her vibrant, labor-driven community.
Contributions to All The Year Round
Unknown
This collection gathers the spirited, opinionated journalism of a master storyteller navigating the changing tides of Victorian public life. It serves as a candid window into the mind of a writer observing his era with sharp-eyed clarity.
Debits and credits
Rudyard Kipling
The Great War has ended, but the silence that follows is louder than the guns. This collection of stories and verse captures the echoes of a world irrevocably changed by loss, memory, and the persistent, quiet rituals of the living.
Love Eternal
H. Rider (Henry Rider) Haggard
The story of two souls bound across lifetimes, this narrative explores the spiritual magnetism between a man and woman whose love persists through war, separation, and the veil of death.
Mr. Punch with Rod and Gun: The Humours of Fishing and Shooting
Unknown
A witty, illustrated collection of late-Victorian and Edwardian satire, this volume captures the perennial absurdity of the dedicated outdoorsman through a series of sharp, irreverent sketches and humorous verse.
Queen Lucia
E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
In a self-important English village, a woman of relentless ambition orchestrates the lives of her neighbors, only to find her own carefully curated world besieged by new arrivals and her own absurd pretensions.
Ringan Gilhaize, or, The Covenanters
John Galt
A man’s lifelong quest to avenge his family’s honor culminates in a final, fateful act of justice against the oppressor who destroyed his peace. This sweeping historical chronicle traces the generations of a Scottish family caught in the bloody struggle for religious liberty.
The Belle's Stratagem
Hannah Cowley
A spirited young woman crafts an elaborate ruse to win the heart of a traveler who finds her dull, proving that true connection requires more than a first impression.
The British Barbarians
Grant Allen
A man from a future society arrives in Victorian England, where he finds himself baffled and repelled by the rigid, hypocritical social codes he labels "barbarous." This bracing, polemical fiction challenges the sanctity of marriage, property, and class.
The Cricket on the Hearth
Charles Dickens
A hearth-bound spirit watches over the quiet joys of a simple home, reminding us that happiness is often found in the small, steadfast virtues of those we love. Beneath the chirping of the home-fire, a story unfolds about the enduring power of devotion and the wisdom of a trusting heart.
The Honey-Pot
Countess (Hélène) Barcynska
The honey-pot is the glittering, perilous world of the London stage, where young women trade their innocence for a chance at fame and, perhaps, a life beyond the chorus line.
The Orange-Yellow Diamond
J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
A desperate, penniless writer in a gloomy London district becomes tangled in a lethal hunt for a legendary, stolen diamond.
The Regent
Arnold Bennett
A provincial businessman’s impulsive, high-stakes leap into the London theatrical world becomes a test of his own cunning, stamina, and the shifting nature of ambition.
White Fire
John Oxenham
Driven by an unyielding sense of duty, a missionary and his small team arrive in the South Seas, where they find that saving souls requires as much steel, grit, and strategy as it does faith.
A Blot in the 'Scutcheon
Robert Browning
A noble house falls to ruin when a secret affair collides with an uncompromising obsession with family honor. This tragic drama explores how rigid pride can blind the powerful to the truth until it is too late to offer mercy.
J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 1
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
The walls of old houses hold more than just dust, and some promises made to the dead are never meant to be broken. This collection of supernatural tales explores the thin, terrifying membrane between the living and the departed.
Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers
Ian Maclaren
In the quiet corners of a Scottish glen, the rigid traditions of the kirk and the spirited arrival of an outsider collide, forcing a young minister to confront both the shifting boundaries of his faith and the mysteries of his own heart.
Letters to His Son, 1746-47: On the Fine Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman
Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of
To master the world, one must first master oneself: this is the stern, polished mandate issued by a father to his son as he prepares the boy for the rigors of eighteenth-century diplomacy and society.
Spring Days
George Moore
A portrait of middle-class provincial life, this narrative explores the tangled romantic entanglements and social anxieties of a family in decline. It captures a fleeting, bittersweet transition from the innocence of youth to the harsh realities of adult compromise.
The Bedford-Row Conspiracy
William Makepeace Thackeray
A tale of provincial elections, social climbing, and the absurdity of political loyalties, this narrative exposes the hollow posturing of the 19th-century English gentry. It remains a sharp, enduring study of human vanity and ambition.
The Lighter Side of School Life
Ian Hay
This look at the inner workings of English public schools captures the rhythm of academic life with a sharp, affectionate eye. It transforms the institutional humdrum of classrooms and dormitories into a vivid, often humorous, gallery of human archetypes.
The Mountebank
William John Locke
A former circus clown turned war hero struggles to reconcile his past life as a performer with the prestige of his military rank, searching for his place in a world changed by the Great War.
The Solitary Summer
Elizabeth Von Arnim
The quiet pulse of a garden offers a sanctuary for the soul, provided one can keep the weeds—and the unwanted company—at bay. This meditation on solitude proves that the most profound growth happens in the spaces between the seasons.
The Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan
William Makepeace Thackeray
A boastful, self-appointed hero narrates his own tall tales of military glory and obsessive romance against the backdrop of British-occupied India. This exuberant, satirical memoir serves as a parody of the self-important, sensationalist military biographies popular in the nineteenth century.
Tortoises
D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
This collection of poems observes the tortoise as a metaphor for the human condition, tracing the arc of existence from solitary, shell-bound independence to the shattering, transformative experience of sexual desire.
1851
Henry Mayhew
The Great Exhibition of 1851 serves as a magnetic, unreachable horizon for a provincial family whose quest to see the marvels of the age dissolves into a series of absurd, urban misadventures.
Beaumont and Fletcher's Works, Vol. 07 of 10
John Fletcher
These plays capture the vibrant, restless spirit of Jacobean theater, weaving intricate plots of romantic misunderstanding, noble honor, and sharp-witted deception set against a backdrop of sun-drenched Spain.
Jennie Baxter, Journalist
Robert Barr
A resourceful reporter navigates the cutthroat world of late-Victorian journalism, where she consistently outwits government officials, international detectives, and foreign spies to secure the breaking news of the day.
King Henry V
William Shakespeare
A brilliant young monarch stakes his crown and his conscience on a perilous invasion of France, where the reality of war proves far grimmer than the myths of glory.
Love and the Ironmonger
F. J. (Frederick John) Randall
A clerk discovers that his sudden fortune comes with a stifling moral condition, sparking a frantic, humorous chase through London as he dodges coworkers desperate to expose his slightest slip.
Madam Crowl's Ghost and the Dead Sexton
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
This collection features two chilling tales of the North Country, where long-buried secrets and spectral presences refuse to stay silent, dragging the living into their dark, inexorable orbits.
Political Pamphlets
Unknown
This collection gathers essential, hard-hitting political tracts from the 17th to the 19th centuries, capturing the urgent, often biting voices that shaped British public discourse during eras of profound national upheaval.
Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 11, 1893
Various
HOOK A boisterous, satirical window into the late Victorian era, where political theater, social pretensions, and the absurdity of bureaucracy are skewered with sharp, rhythmic wit.
Soldiers of the Queen
Harold Avery
A defiant schoolboy runs from a stifling life to enlist in the British Army, only to find that the true battle is proving his worth to those he loves.
Storm in a Teacup
Eden Phillpotts
The quiet routines of a Devon paper mill are shattered when an idealistic worker runs off with his coworker’s wife, only to discover that the reality of their intellectual union is far less harmonious than his lofty principles promised.
Tales of two people
Anthony Hope
These stories explore the whimsical intersections of high society and human folly, where the boundaries between play-acting and sincerity are perpetually blurred. In a world of aristocrats, impostors, and ambitious social climbers, the true cost of a gesture is often hidden behind a polished veneer of charm.
The Diary of a Man of Fifty
Henry James
A middle-aged man returns to Florence and attempts to steer a young compatriot away from a romance that mirrors his own failed past. It is a cautionary tale about the high cost of cynicism.
The Heart of a Woman
Orczy, Emmuska Orczy, Baroness
A young man faces a murder charge for a crime he refuses to deny, while the woman who loves him fights to uncover the truth behind his cryptic sacrifice.
The Literary Sense
E. (Edith) Nesbit
The world is a stage, and for these characters, life is merely a script they desperately hope to follow. They navigate their desires through the lens of romantic artifice, often sacrificing genuine happiness for the sake of a "better scene.
The Little House
Coningsby Dawson
HOOK An anthropomorphic house in London, acting as a silent witness and guardian, orchestrates a Christmas miracle to unite two lonely souls amidst the backdrop of the First World War.