Great Novels of the 19th Century
The 19th century was when the novel became the dominant literary art. These twenty-two works, listed in order of publication, are the form’s permanent core — the books every later novelist has had to read, argue with, or escape. Faust opens the century with a bargain for unlimited knowledge; Heart of Darkness closes it with the moral collapse of the empire that century built. Listen free on HearCandy.
Faust, Part I
A weary scholar trades his soul to the devil for unlimited knowledge and experience. Part I of Goethe’s masterpiece — sixty years in the making — gave Western literature its definitive bargain with evil, and one of its most haunting tragic heroines, Gretchen.
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Pride and Prejudice
A penniless gentleman’s daughter and a wealthy, insufferable bachelor will spend three hundred pages discovering they were wrong about each other. Austen’s 1813 comedy of manners is also one of the smartest novels ever written about love, money, and self-knowledge.
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Frankenstein
A young scientist builds a man from corpses, then abandons him in horror. Mary Shelley was nineteen when she invented science fiction, the modern horror novel, and the most enduring myth of the industrial age — all in one book.
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Faust, Part II
Goethe’s massive sequel takes Faust from medieval Germany through Greek myth to imperial politics — and finally to salvation. Stranger and more ambitious than Part I, completed the year Goethe died.
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The Count of Monte Cristo
Falsely imprisoned for fourteen years, Edmond Dantès escapes, finds a buried fortune, and reinvents himself to destroy the men who ruined his life. Fifty hours of one of the most ingeniously plotted revenge novels ever written.
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Jane Eyre
A plain governess, a wealthy employer with a terrible secret, and one of the most defiantly intelligent narrators in English fiction. The first major English novel to place a fully interior female consciousness at its center.
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Wuthering Heights
Heathcliff and Catherine love each other across two generations of cruelty, exile, and revenge. Emily Brontë’s only novel was so wild and structurally radical that its first readers thought it must have been written by a man.
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Vanity Fair
Becky Sharp, a charming social climber with no morals and no money, claws her way into Regency society. Thackeray’s massive panoramic satire is one of the few 19th-century novels to refuse a hero entirely.
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The Scarlet Letter
In 1640s Boston, Hester Prynne wears a scarlet “A” for adultery while the father of her child hides in plain sight. Hawthorne’s slim masterpiece is the founding moral fable of American literature.
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Moby-Dick
Captain Ahab pursues a white whale across the world’s oceans to destroy it for taking his leg. Part adventure, part Shakespearean tragedy, part metaphysical treatise — a commercial failure that nearly ended Melville’s career and is now considered the great American novel.
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Madame Bovary
A bored provincial doctor’s wife wrecks her life chasing the romantic illusions she absorbed from novels. Flaubert’s exact, merciless prose was put on trial for obscenity and changed what the novel could be.
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Great Expectations
An orphan blacksmith’s apprentice receives a mysterious fortune that turns out to come from someone he never imagined. Dickens’s most psychologically acute novel — and one of the finest first-person narrators in English.
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Les Misérables, Vol. 1
Hugo’s massive novel of post-revolutionary France opens with Jean Valjean, a paroled convict, shown an act of grace that changes his life. The first volume sets up the moral architecture of one of the century’s most ambitious works.
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Les Misérables, Vol. 2
Cosette is rescued from cruelty; Jean Valjean disappears into Paris to raise her in secret. The relentless Inspector Javert closes in.
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Les Misérables, Vol. 3
Marius — an idealistic young royalist turned republican — falls in love with the girl in the garden. Paris boils toward the insurrection of 1832.
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Les Misérables, Vol. 4
The barricades go up. Hugo’s novel turns to the politics of revolution, the Paris sewers, and the moral logic of resistance.
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Les Misérables, Vol. 5
Valjean carries Marius through the sewers of Paris in the most famous escape sequence in 19th-century literature. The novel closes on grace, forgiveness, and the cost of a life lived honestly.
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Crime and Punishment
A student murders two women to test his theory that extraordinary men are above morality. What follows is the most psychologically intense exploration of guilt ever written.
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War and Peace, Vol. 1
Russia, 1805–1807. As Napoleon’s army moves east, five Russian families — the Bezukhovs, Bolkonskys, Rostovs, Drubetskoys, and Kuragins — fall in love, fight, scheme, and try to understand what they are living through. Maude translation, the one Tolstoy himself approved.
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War and Peace, Vol. 2
Through the brief peace of 1807–1812, Pierre wrestles with Freemasonry, Andrei searches for meaning, Natasha becomes a woman, and Russia drifts toward war.
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War and Peace, Vol. 3
Napoleon invades. The novel pivots to Borodino, the burning of Moscow, and Tolstoy’s central argument: that history is not made by great men.
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War and Peace, Vol. 4
Retreat, partisan warfare, captivity, and the final philosophy of the novel: that the truth of life is found in ordinary love and quiet survival, not in armies or ideas.
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Middlemarch
A young woman’s idealistic marriage to an aging scholar; a young doctor’s principled marriage to a beautiful and shallow woman; and the slow, exact study of how a provincial town shapes every life inside it. The most morally intelligent novel in English.
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Anna Karenina
Anna leaves her husband for a young officer; Levin, on his country estate, tries to build a marriage and a moral life from scratch. Tolstoy’s twin plots become one of the great novels about love, society, and the meaning of work. Complete Dole translation.
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The Brothers Karamazov
A debauched father, three sons of wildly different temperaments, and the murder that exposes all of them. Dostoevsky’s last and largest novel asks — through faith, doubt, and parricide — what we owe each other and what we can be forgiven.
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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
A boy and a runaway slave flee down the Mississippi on a raft, learning that everything the world has taught them is wrong. Hemingway said all American writing comes from this one book.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
A beautiful young man stays untouched by age and sin while his portrait, hidden in the attic, becomes a monstrous record of everything he does. Wilde’s only novel — in the expanded 1891 book version — is at once Gothic fable, aestheticist manifesto, and confession.
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Quo Vadis
A Roman patrician falls in love with a young Christian woman during Nero’s persecutions. Sienkiewicz’s epic of early Christianity won him the Nobel Prize and became one of the most internationally read novels of its time.
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Dracula
An English solicitor visits a Transylvanian count and walks into a nightmare that follows him home. Stoker’s epistolary novel — letters, telegrams, phonograph recordings — created the modern vampire and the modern horror plot.
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Heart of Darkness
A boat captain ascends a great African river to find Kurtz, a colonial agent who has gone catastrophically wrong. Conrad’s short novel turned the 19th-century adventure tale inside out and gave the next century its definitive parable of imperial violence.
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