Category: Novels

This is the author’s best-known work and was crowned by the French Academy. He is known as the “Apostle of Home Life.” The descriptions of French country life and the glimpses into that scholarly sanctuary, the National Library of Paris, have made this book very popular in translation. I WAS born in La Chatre, and […]

This was its author’s first book, and it immediately established her reputation as a writer of vivid and finished style. At the time of its publication no piece of fiction had so well presented the differences in English and American character, manners and social creeds. LATE in the autumn of 1873, Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher, […]

This fantastic story, written in imitation of the One Thousand and One Nights, is not only an extraordinary story in itself but was written in extraordinary circumstances. The author, a wealthy, highly cultivated, and much traveled young Englishman of twenty, wrote it at one sitting: “It took me,” he says, “three days and two nights […]

“Cuthbert Bede” was the pseudonym of the rector of Denton in Huntingtonshire, although he was not appointed to the living until six years after the publication of his first book. He wrote several stories of a mildly humorous nature, but none achieved the popular success of that which is presented here. FROM earliest times, as […]

This story of Village Life in New England was its author’s only novel. Mr. Beecher had been for several years previously to the Civil War a regular contributor to the New York Ledger, and when, at the close of the great conflict, he found himself at leisure to devote considerable time to literary work, he […]

Among the many productions of the prolific pen of Mrs. Behn, this tale occupies a unique place. Most of her other works were exceedingly imaginative poems, or else novels and plays of a very light and somewhat coarse character, intended to amuse the fops and rakes of the court of Charles II. But in the […]

The author of this story followed the examples of many of his contemporaries in imitating the style of Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi; but the Fieramosca won a high place on its own merits. AT the close of a day in April, 1503, the bell of St. Domenico, in Barletta, was sounding the last tocsins of […]

Wilkie Collins’s success as a novelist rested mainly upon his extraordinary power of complex construction; but in nearly all his novels he had an ear-nest purpose to serve, a thesis to maintain, a sermon to preach. In Man and Wife he had two such purposes: first to assail the iniquity of English, Irish, and Scotch […]

Except The Woman in White, none of Wilkie Collins’s novels was more widely popular at the time of its publication than No Name, though the great success of Man and Wife in its dramatized and acted form has since given that story a greater reputation and a firmer hold upon the popular mind. IN March, […]

This story was the most popular of all the author’s tales of mystery, and has gone through numerous editions. HERE is a lonely little bay on the coast of Yorkshire, where two spits of rock run out into the sea, with a great stretch of quicksand between them, which at the turn of the tide […]