Book picks similar to
Our Friend the Charlatan by George Gissing


victorian
fiction
classics
19thcenturybritli<br/>t

Love's Shadow


Ada Leverson - 1908
    She lives with her husband Brace and her two children in a very new, very small, very white flat in Knightsbridge. As we follow Edith's fortunes we enter the enchanting world of Edwardian London, bewitched by the courtships, jealousies and love affairs of Edith's coterie - Hyacinth, Eugenia, Charles and Cecil, Vincy, Madame Frabelle and many more.

Middlemarch


George Eliot - 1871
    Among her characters are some of the most remarkable portraits in English literature: Dorothea Brooke, the heroine, idealistic but naive; Rosamond Vincy, beautiful and egoistic: Edward Casaubon, the dry-as-dust scholar: Tertius Lydgate, the brilliant but morally-flawed physician: the passionate artist Will Ladislaw: and Fred Vincey and Mary Garth, childhood sweethearts whose charming courtship is one of the many humorous elements in the novel's rich comic vein.

The Constant Nymph


Margaret Kennedy - 1924
    The fourteen-year-old Tessa has fallen in love with Lewis Dodd, a gifted composer like her father. Confidently, she awaits maturity, for even his marriage to Tessa's beautiful cousin Florence cannot shatter the loving bond between Lewis and his constant nymph.

A Room with a View


E.M. Forster - 1908
    "You love the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves you, and no other word expresses it ..."Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her, until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George.Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart?

Americanah: by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Top 50 Facts Coutndown: Reach the #1 Fact


Top 50 Facts - 2015
     • Rules are simple: no peeking, no skipping. • Do you agree? • Don't miss out! About Us Top 50 Facts is an unofficial collection of facts for fans and readers alike, looking to conveniently discover more about the books they love.

The Ebony Tower. Eliduc. The Enigma


John Fowles - 1980
    

Ross Poldark


Winston Graham - 1945
    But instead, he discovers that his father has died, his home is overrun by livestock and drunken servants, and Elizabeth, having believed Ross dead, is now engaged to his cousin. Ross must start over, building a completely new path for his life, one that takes him in exciting and unexpected directions....Thus begins an intricately plotted story spanning loves, lives, and generations. The Poldark series is the masterwork of Winston Graham, who evoked the period and people like only he could, and created a world of rich and poor, loss and love, that listeners will not soon forget.

Blackpool Evacuee


Maggie Mason - 2018
    Clara is worked like a dog, but the warmth of her Blackpool friendships will go far to save her. Julia just wants to find her beloved daughter - but the trials of war will keep them far apart. They will meet again - but the war will change everything for mother and daughter...

Consequences


E.M. Delafield - 1919
    But her favourite among her books was Consequences (1919), the deeply-felt novel she wrote about the plight of girls given no opportunities apart from marriage.Alex Clare is awkward and oversensitive and gets everything wrong; she refuses to marry the only young man who ‘offers’ and believes there is nothing left for her but to enter a convent. But that is not quite the end of her tragic story. Nor was it for EM Delafield, who also entered a convent for a year; but in her case she was able to find freedom through working as a VAD in an army hospital, ‘which was emancipation of the most delirious kind. It was occupation, it was self-respect.’Like Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, written at the same time, Consequences is a scream of horror against Victorian values; however, its ironic tone cannot disguise EM Delafield’s deeply compassionate and feminist stance.

Waverley


Walter Scott - 1814
    It relates the story of a young dreamer and English soldier, Edward Waverley, who was sent to Scotland in 1745. He journeys North from his aristocratic family home, Waverley-Honour, in the south of England (alleged in an English Heritage notice to refer to Waverley Abbey in Surrey) first to the Scottish Lowlands and the home of family friend Baron Bradwardine, then into the Highlands and the heart of the 1745 Jacobite uprising and aftermath.

Possession


A.S. Byatt - 1990
    It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from spiritualist séances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany—what emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passions and ideas.Man Booker Prize Winner (1990)

Trilby


George du Maurier - 1894
    Immensely popular for years, the novel led to a hit play, a series of popular films, Trilby products from hats to ice-cream, and streets in Florida named after characters in the book. The setting reflects Du Maurier's bohemian years as an art student in Paris before he went to London to make a career in journalism. A celebrated caricaturist for Punch magazine, Du Maurier's drawings for the novel--of which his most significant are included here--form a large part of its appeal.

Rape of the Fair Country


Alexander Cordell - 1959
    It is an enthralling story which has now been turned into both play and musical and is regarded as the finest of this popular author’s many novels.

Look at Me


Anita Brookner - 1983
    A lonely art historian absorbed in her research seizes the opportunity to share in the joys and pleasures of the lives of a glittering couple, only to find her hopes of companionship and happiness shattered.

Heartburn


Nora Ephron - 1983
    For in this inspired confection of adultery, revenge, group therapy, and pot roast, the creator of Sleepless in Seattle reminds us that comedy depends on anguish as surely as a proper gravy depends on flour and butter.Seven months into her pregnancy, Rachel Samstat discovers that her husband, Mark, is in love with another woman. The fact that the other woman has "a neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb and you should see her legs" is no consolation. Food sometimes is, though, since Rachel writes cookbooks for a living. And in between trying to win Mark back and loudly wishing him dead, Ephron's irrepressible heroine offers some of her favorite recipes. Heartburn is a sinfully delicious novel, as soul-satisfying as mashed potatoes and as airy as a perfect soufflé.