Subject: Romance

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A Bride of the Plains Emma Orczy

The story is set in Hungary and the scene is laid in a village close to the Maros. On this particular fourteenth of September it is Andor's turn to go unwillingly into the army for three years. On the eve preceding it, at the village merrymaking, as the whole population spends its last happy hours trying to forget t…Read More »
Adam Bede 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 pretty farm girl by the …Read More »
A Laodicean Thomas Hardy

Paula Power inherits a medieval castle from her industrialist father who has purchased it from the aristocratic De Stancy family. She employs two architects, one local and one, George Somerset, newly qualified from London. She is attracted to both men for their different virtues and is thrust onto the horns of relig…Read More »
Allan's Wife H. Rider Haggard

It may be remembered that in the last pages of his diary, written just before his death, Allan Quatermain makes allusion to his long dead wife, stating that he has written of her fully elsewhere. When his death was known, his papers were handed to myself as his literary executor. Among them I found two manuscripts, …Read More »
Anna Karenina 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 refuses to conduct the discre…Read More »
Anne Of Avonlea 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 scrapes. But when Anne begins …Read More »
Anne Of The Island 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 discovers life on her own te…Read More »
Ann Veronica H. G. Wells

Stong-willed, reckless and fiercely independent, Ann Veronica Stanley is determined to be a Person, to work, love and, above all, to live. Walking away from her stifling father and the social conventions of her time, she leaves drab suburbia for Edwardian London and encounters an unknown world of suffragettes, Fab…Read More »
A Pair of Blue Eyes 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, architect's assistant Stephen…Read More »
A Room With A View E. M. Forster

This Edwardian social comedy explores love and prim propriety among an eccentric cast of characters assembled in an Italian pensione and in a corner of Surrey, England. A charming young English woman, Lucy Honeychurch, faints into the arms of a fellow Britisher when she witnesses a murder in a Florentine piazza. Att…Read More »
Bellarion Rafael Sabatini

Set against a backdrop of pre-Renaissance Italy (a larger than life time, with swaggering condottieri, Machiavellian plotting, and high stakes in politics and war) convent-bred orphan Bellarion is sidetracked almost immediately upon setting out on a journey from the monastery at Cigliano to study at Pavia. The adven…Read More »
Blix Frank Norris

This short romance was based on Norris's courtship of his wife. It features a San Francisco journalist, Condy Rivers, who falls in love with the daughter of a wealthy family that believes him to be very much beneath her. Willa Cather praised the novel as 'all wheat and no chaff'.
Chance Joseph Conrad

Chance is narrated by Conrad's regular narrator, Charles Marlow, but is characterised by a complex, nested narrative in which different narrators take up the story at different points and attempt to interpret various episodes in the life of Miss de Barral, the daughter of a convicted swindler named Smith de Barral (…Read More »
Emma Jane Austen

Emma Woodhouse is the lovely, lively, willful, and fallible heroine of Jane Austen's fourth published novel. Confident that she knows best, Emma schemes to find a suitable husband for her pliant friend Harriet, only to discover that she understands the feelings of others as little as she does her own heart. As Emma …Read More »
Fanshawe Nathaniel Hawthorne

While he had written many short stories before, "Fanshawe" was Nathaniel Hawthorne's first attempt at writing a novel. The novel is based on his experiences at Bowdoin College in the early 1820s and Hawthorne published the novel himself anonymously in 1828. A commercial failure, Nathaniel Hawthorne's contempt for hi…Read More »
Far from the Madding Crowd Thomas Hardy

Far from the Madding Crowd was the first of Hardy's novels to apply the name of Wessex to the landscape of south-west England, and the first to gain him widespread popularity as a novelist. When the beautiful and spirited Bathsheba Everdene inherits her own farm, she attracts three very different suitors; the seemin…Read More »
Free Air Sinclair Lewis

This cheerful little road novel is about Claire Boltwood, who, in the early days of the 20th century, travels by automobile from New York City to the Pacific Northwest, where she falls in love with a nice, down-to-earth young man and gives up her snobbish Estate.
Godolphin Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Godolphin is a satirical 19th century British romance novel about the life of an idealistic man, Percy Godolphin, and his eventual lover, Constance Vernon. Written as a frame narrative, Godolphin provides a satirical insight into the day-to-day lives of the early 19th century British elite. The story is told throu…Read More »
Gone to Earth Mary Webb

The daughter of a Welsh gypsy and a crazy bee-keeper, Hazel Woodus is happiest living in her forest cottage in the remote Shropshire hills, at one with the winds and seasons, protector and friend of the wild animals she loves. But Hazel's beauty and innocence prove irresistible to the men in her orbit. Both Jack Red…Read More »
Gone With The Wind Margaret Mitchell

Tomorrow is another day … Set against the dramatic backdrop of the American Civil War, Margaret Mitchell's magnificent historical epic is an unforgettable tale of love and loss, of a nation mortally divided and a people forever changed. Above all, it is the story of beautiful, ruthless Scarlett O'Hara and the dash…Read More »
House of Mirth Edith Wharton

Born in 1862 into an exclusive New York society – against whose rigid mores she often rebelled – Edith Wharton bridged the literary worlds of two continents and two centuries in her rich and glamorous life. The House of Mirth, her tenth book, is the story of young Lily Bart and her tragic sojourn among the upper c…Read More »
Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë

Romantic melodrama or feminist classic, Jane Eyre is one of the most enduringly popular and compelling novels in the literary canon. Overlooked or dismissed by critics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it first began to attract serious critical attention in the 1970s as New Critical, formalist and fem…Read More »
Jerry Jean Webster

Never before in the history of his connection with the Hotel du Lac had Gustavo encountered such a munificent, companionable, expansive, entertaining, 'thoroughly' unique and inexplicable guest Even the fact that he was American scarcely accounted for everything. Yesterday this guest had rung the bell and demanded a…Read More »
Jerry Junior Jean Webster

Even with the beauties of Valedolmo, Italy surrounding him, Jermyn Hilliard Jr. is bored. He has nothing to do, no one to talk to but his hotel's head waiter, and nothing to read in English but a four-day-old newspaper. It will be days before the rest of his family joins him to continue their grand tour. He has seen…Read More »
John Burnet of Barns John Buchan

In this epic tale of a family torn asunder by a long-lasting feud, renowned action-adventure author John Buchan spins an engrossing account of two cousins locked in conflict – and the horrible toll that their bad blood begets. In the wake of the ultimate betrayal, will the Burnet clan ever be able to bridge the cha…Read More »
Lady Chatterley's Lover D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence's controversial novel tells the story of an aristocratic woman, Constance (Lady Chatterley), who has an affair with the estate's gamekeeper when her husband is paralyzed. Central to the theme of the novel is the need for physical stimulation as well as mental stimulation in order to feel complete as a…Read More »
Lady Susan Jane Austen

The victim of a vicious scandal, the impoverished Lady Susan is obliged to take up residence with her brother-in-law and his family. Refusing to resign herself to the role of placid house guest, she conspires to baffle her hosts, seducing her sister-in-law's brother in the process by means of her impeccable gentilit…Read More »
Ligeia Edgar Allan Poe

Ligeia is a book written by Edgar Allan Poe and widely considered to be one of the top 100 greatest books of all time. This great novel will surely attract a whole new generation of readers. For many, Ligeia is required reading for various courses and curriculum's. And for others who simply enjoy reading timeless pi…Read More »
Louise de la Valliere Alexandre Dumas

Louise de la Valliere is the middle section of The Vicomte de Bragelonne or, Ten Years After. Against a tender love story, Dumas continues the suspense which began with The Vicomte de Bragelonne and will end with The Man in the Iron Mask. It is early summer, 1661, and the royal court of France is in turmoil. Can it …Read More »
Love and Mr. Lewisham H. G. Wells

Young, impoverished, and ambitious science student Mr. Lewisham is locked in a struggle to further himself through academic achievement. But when his former sweetheart, Ethel Henderson, re-enters his life, his strictly regimented existence is thrown into chaos by the resurgence of old passion; while she returns his …Read More »