Romance
Novels in this genre place their primary focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people, which have an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending.
The New Machiavelli [en] (1911)
H. G. Wells
As H. G. Wells sat down to write, he realised with almost shuddering accuracy that he had reached the exact same age as Machiavelli was when he fell from politics and wrote of the restlessness of his spirit. And it was this same restless passion that compelled H G Wells to write a similar...
The Hunchback of Notre Dame [en] (1831) 
Victor Hugo
Set in medieval Paris, Victor Hugo’s powerful historical romance The Hunchback of Notre-Dame has resonated with succeeding generations ever since its publication in 1837. It tells the story of the beautiful gypsy Esmeralda, condemned as a witch by the tormented archdeacon Claude Frollo, who...
Genre: Romance
The Prince of India [en] (1893)
Lew Wallace
A glowing romance of the Byzantine Empire, presenting with extraordinary power the siege of Constantinople, and lighting its tragedy with the warm underglow of an Oriental romance.
Genres: Action/Adventure, Romance
The Last of the Mohicans [en] (1826) 
James Fenimore Cooper
While the French and Indians besiege Fort William Henry, Cora and Alice Munro, daughters of the English commander, are on their way to join him. They are accompanied by Major Duncan Heyward, Alice's fiance, and by the treacherous Indian Magua, who secretly serves the French. Magua plans to...
Genres: Historical Fiction, Romance
Soldiers of Fortune [en] (1897)
Richard Harding Davis
A romance of America's nascent imperial power recounting the adventures of Robert Clay, a mining engineer and sometime mercenary, and Hope Langham, the daughter of a wealthy American industrialist, as they become caught up in a coup in Olancho, a fictional Latin American republic. When the...
Genre: Romance
Adam Bede [en] (1859)
George Eliot
The seemingly peaceful country village of Hayslope is the setting for this ambitious first novel by one of the nineteenth century's great novelists. With sympathy, wit, and unflinching realism, Adam Bede tells a story that would have been familiar to Eliot's first readers: the seduction of a...
Genres: Historical Fiction, Romance
The Man Who Laughs [en] (1869)
Victor Hugo
The Man Who Laughs is a romantic masterpiece of a man whose face has been disfigured into a laughing mask in childhood, the loyal blind girl who gives him her heart, and the cruelty of the privileged aristocracy whose laughingstock and saviour he becomes, is remarkable in its emotional...
Genre: Romance
The Battle of Life [en] (1846)
Charles Dickens
A Christmas love story and the only one of Dickens' Christmas stories without a supernatural theme, is about a group of philosophical friends who meet over breakfast in the woods to discuss the serious questions of life while the four daughters of one of them sing dance naturally. It's a book...
Genre: Romance
Right Ho, Jeeves [en] (1922)
P. G. Wodehouse
When Jeeves suggests dreamy, soulful Gussie Fink-Nottle don scarlet tights and false beard to win over soppy Madeline Bassett, Bertie Wooster doubts this is the way to get his friend hitched. Meanwhile, Bertie's eccentric Aunt Dahlia asks him to hand out prizes at the Market Snodsbury Grammar...
The Black Arrow [en] (1888)
Robert Louis Stevenson
From the beloved author of Treasure Island Originally serialized in a periodical of boys’ adventure fiction, The Black Arrow is a swashbuckling portrait of a young man’s journey to discover the heroism within himself. Young Dick Shelton, caught in the midst of England’s War of the Roses,...
Genres: Action/Adventure, Historical Fiction, Romance
Mathilda [en] (1819)
Mary Shelley
This shocking tale of father-daughter incest, by the author of Frankenstein, was suppressed for over a century. Mathilda's adoration of her beloved father veers into tragedy in this High Romantic tale of forbidden passion. Mary Shelley's father, William Godwin, was so repulsed by the story...
Genre: Romance
This Side of Paradise [en] (1920)
Francis Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic and witty first novel, was written when the author was only twenty-three years old. This semiautobiographical story of the handsome, indulged, and idealistic Princeton student Amory Blaine received critical raves and catapulted Fitzgerald...
Genre: Romance
The Woodlanders [en] (1887)
Thomas Hardy
Love, and the erratic heart, are at the centre of Hardy's 'woodland story'. Set in the beautiful Blackmoor Vale, The Woodlanders concerns the fortunes of Giles Winterborne, whose love for the well-to-do Grace Melbury is challenged by the arrival of the dashing and dissolute doctor, Edred...
Genre: Romance
Anna Karenina [en] (1877)
Leo Tolstoy
A magnificent drama of vengeance, infidelity, and retribution, Anna Karenina portrays the moving story of people whose emotions conflict with the dominant social mores of their time. Sensual, rebellious Anna falls deeply and passionately in love with the handsome Count Vronsky. When she...
Genre: Romance
Anne Of The Island [en] (1915)
L. M. Montgomery
New adventures lie ahead as Anne Shirley packs her bags, waves good-bye to childhood, and heads for Redmond College. With old friend Prissy Grant waiting in the bustling city of Kingsport and frivolous new pal Philippa Gordon at her side, Anne tucks her memories of rural Avonlea away and...
Genres: Romance, Young Readers
Anne Of Avonlea [en] (1909)
L. M. Montgomery
At sixteen Anne is grown up...almost. Her gray eyes shine like evening stars, but her red hair is still as peppery as her temper. In the years since she arrived at Green Gables as a freckle-faced orphan, she has earned the love of the people of Avonlea and a reputation for getting into...
Genres: Romance, Young Readers
A Pair of Blue Eyes [en] (1873)
Thomas Hardy
Elfride finds herself caught in a battle between her heart, her mind and the expectations of her parents and society. The novel is notable for the strong parallels to Hardy and his first wife Emma Gifford. When Elfride's father finds that his guest and candidate for his daughter's hand,...
Genre: Romance
Tess of the d'Urbervilles [en] (1891)
Thomas Hardy
A pretty young girl has to leave home to make money for her family. She is clever and a good worker; but she is uneducated and does not know the cruel ways of the world. So, when a rich young man says he loves her, she is careful - but not careful enough. He is persuasive, and she is...
Moll Flanders [en] (1722)
Daniel Defoe
Moll Flanders recounts the story of her extraordinary life, from her birth in Newgate prison to her declining years in married prosperity. After being seduced in the home of her adoptive family she lives off her wits and her beauty, as a whore, 'five times a Wife', and a thief, and is...
O Pioneers! [en] (1913)
Willa Cather
"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman," writes Willa Cather in O Pioneers! The country is America; the woman is Alexandra Bergson, a fiercely independent young Swedish immigrant girl who inherits her father’s farm in Nebraska. A model of emotional strength,...
Genres: Family Life, Historical Fiction, Romance