By era
Best Victorian Novels
The Victorian novel is the form at its most ambitious — long, crowded, morally in earnest, determined to hold an entire society between two covers. It invented much of what we still mean by 'the realist novel,' and it did so at industrial scale.
These are the age's landmarks, ranked by lasting force and annotated with what each one built: the multi-plot panorama, the marriage market laid bare, the child sent out alone into a hostile city. Each links to a full study guide.
- 21 books
- 13 authors
- 1843–1900 span
- 1
Wuthering Heights
AP Lit set textEmily Brontë · 1847 · Novel · novel
- 2
Great Expectations
AP Lit set textCharles Dickens · 1861 · Novel · novel
- 3
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Common CoreMark Twain · 1884 · Novel · novel
- 4
Bleak House
AP Lit set textCharles Dickens · 1853 · Novel · novel
- 5
Hard Times
AP Lit set textCharles Dickens · 1854 · Novel · novel
- 6
The Scarlet Letter
AP Lit set textNathaniel Hawthorne · 1850 · Novel · novel
- 7
The Awakening
AP Lit set textKate Chopin · 1899 · Novel · novel
- 8
Lord Jim
AP Lit set textJoseph Conrad · 1900 · Novel · novel
- 9
War and Peace
Common CoreLeo Tolstoy · 1869 · Novel · novel
- 10
Moby-Dick
AP Lit set textHerman Melville · 1851 · Novel · novel
- 11
The Mayor of Casterbridge
AP Lit set textThomas Hardy · 1886 · Novel · novel
- 12
The Brothers Karamazov
Common CoreFyodor Dostoevsky · 1880 · Novel · novel
- 13
Jane Eyre
AP Lit set textCharlotte Brontë · 1847 · Novel · novel
- 14
Middlemarch
AP Lit set textGeorge Eliot · 1871 · Novel · novel
- 15
Anna Karenina
Common CoreLeo Tolstoy · 1878 · Novel · novel
- 16
Crime and Punishment
Common CoreFyodor Dostoevsky · 1866 · Novel · novel
- 17
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
AP Lit set textThomas Hardy · 1891 · Novel · novel
- 18
A Christmas Carol
Eduqas set textCharles Dickens · 1843 · Novella · novella
- 19
Jude the Obscure
AP Lit set textThomas Hardy · 1895 · Novel · novel
- 20
Heart of Darkness
AP Lit set textJoseph Conrad · 1899 · Novella · novella
- 21
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Edexcel set textRobert Louis Stevenson · 1886 · Novella · novella
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