Best Books of the Decade: 1870s

Author

Leo Tolstoy

Acclaimed by many as the world's greatest novel, Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. In it Tolstoy uses his intense imaginative insight to create some of the most memorable characters in all of literature. Anna is a sophisticated woman who...

Author	George Eliot
ISBN	0451529170

Taking place in the years leading up to the First Reform Bill of 1832, Middlemarch explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life: art, religion, science, politics, self, society, human relationships. Among her characters are some of the most remarkable portraits in English literature:...

Author	Henrik Ibsen
ISBN	1406914835

A Doll's House (1879), is a masterpiece of theatrical craft which, for the first time portrayed the tragic hypocrisy of Victorian middle class marriage on the stage. The play ushered in a new social era and "exploded like a bomb into contemporary life".  The Student Edition contains these exclusive...

Author

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Alternate Cover Edition ISBN 0679734511. (ISBN13: 9780679734512)

Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russians in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a "novel-pamphlet" in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that...

Author

Comte de Lautréamont

Andre Breton described Maldoror as -the expression of a revelation so complete it seems to exceed human potential.- Little is known about its pseudonymous author, aside from his real name (Isidore Ducasse), birth in Uruguay (1846) and early death in Paris (1870). Lautreamont bewildered his contemporaries,...

Author	J. Sheridan Le Fanu
ISBN	0809510839

Bloody relevant to read!


BEFORE DRACULA, THERE WAS...

But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together.

This is a very important book in historic sense, in the genre of vampire reading, due that it was published 25 years before than Dracula....

Author	George MacDonald
ISBN	0140367462

Published in 1872, The Princess and the Goblin is one of the first books in the modern fantasy genre. This book had tremendous and very visible influence on all the (now much more famous) authors that came after it.

It is of course very dated. It does not match the standards that fantasy have created...

Author	Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
ISBN	0140447814

'Venus in Furs' describes the obsessions of Severin von Kusiemski, a European nobleman who desires to be enslaved to a woman. Severin finds his ideal of voluptuous cruelty in the merciless Wanda von Dunajew. This is a passionate and powerful portrayal of one man's struggle to enlighten and instruct...

Author	Jules Verne
ISBN	0812972120

I can't remember the number of times I have re-read this Verne masterpiece and discovered something new every time I had. In fact, my book has become so frayed around the edges over the years that I fear I won't be able to open it anymore without being afraid of ruining the pages or the cover for good.
Trying...

Author	Gustave Flaubert
ISBN	0140448004

First published in 1877, these three stories are dominated by questions of doubt, love, loneliness, and religious experience; together they confirm Flaubert as a master of the short story. A Simple Heart (also published as A Simple Soul), relates the story of Félicité, an uneducated serving-woman...

Author	Anthony Trollope
ISBN	1853262552

”There are a thousand little silly softnesses which are pretty and endearing between acknowledged lovers, with which no woman would like to dispense, to which even men who are in love submit sometimes with delight; but which in other circumstances would be vulgar,— and to the woman distasteful....

Author	Lewis Carroll
ISBN	0688120490

In 1865, English author CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON (1832-1898), aka Lewis Carroll, wrote a fantastical adventure story for the young daughters of a friend. The adventures of Alice-named for one of the little girls to whom the book was dedicated-who journeys down a rabbit hole and into a whimsical underworld...

Author	Samuel Butler
ISBN	0543899462

Erewhon, as a satire and/or essay, is interesting and has some thought provoking ideas. Erewhon as a novel has a fairly thin but still interesting plot line in an intriguing environment. Unfortunately, meshing the two of these together makes for a difficult book to swallow at times.

I enjoyed...

Author	Susan Coolidge
ISBN	0543904709

Twelve-year-old Katy is constantly making and quickly breaking resolutions about how she will change her ways and treat others, especially her five younger brothers and sisters, with more respect and compassion. When Katy meets her Cousin Helen, an invalid, Katy is awed by her kindness, prettiness,...

Author	Charles Dickens
ISBN	0140439269

Charles Dickens's final, unfinished novel, and one that has puzzled readers and inspired writers since its publication, The Mystery of Edwin Drood is edited with an introduction by David Paroissien in Penguin Classics.

Edwin Drood is contracted to marry orphan Rosa Bud when he comes of age,...

Author

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Вечный муж = Vechnyi muzh = The eternal husband, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Eternal Husband (Russian: Вечный муж, Vechny muzh) is a novel by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky that was first published in 1870 in Zarya magazine. The plot revolves around the complicated relationship...

Author	Wilkie Collins
ISBN	1587156911

Is there no explanation of the mystery of The Haunted Hotel? Is The Haunted Hotel the tale of a haunting -- or the tale of a crime? The ghost of Lord Montberry haunts the Palace Hotel in Venice --- or does it? Montberry's beautiful-yet-terrifying wife, the Countess Narona, and her erstwhile brother are...

Author	Émile Zola
ISBN	2253003662

A la fin d’une chasse, pendant la curée, les chiens dévorent les entrailles de la bête tuée. Pour le jeune Zola, qui déteste son époque, c’est le cœur de Paris, entaillé par les larges avenues de Napoléon III, que des spéculateurs véreux s’arrachent. Ce deuxième volume des Rougon-Macquart,...

Author	Gustave Flaubert
ISBN	0140444106

A book that deeply influenced the young Freud and was the inspiration for many artists, The Temptation of Saint Anthony was Flaubert's lifelong work, thirty years in the making. Based on the story of the third-century saint who lived on an isolated mountaintop in the Egyptian desert, it is a fantastical...

Author	Gustave Flaubert
ISBN	0811213188

A Simple Heart, also published as A Simple Soul.

In A Simple Heart, the poignant story that inspired Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, Felicite, a French housemaid, approaches a lifetime of servitude with human-scaled but angelic aplomb. No other author has imparted so much beauty and...

Author

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, was one of the big guns of Victorian literature. His books were bestsellers and he garnered considerable critical acclaim as well. And yet today he is not merely mostly unread, he has become a byword by bad writing, with a literary competition...

Author	Jules Verne
ISBN	1598183044

Autour de la Lune = Round the Moon (Extraordinary Voyages, #7), Jules Verne
Around the Moon (French: Autour de la Lune, 1870), Jules Verne's sequel to From the Earth to the Moon, is a science fiction novel which continues the trip to the moon which was only partially described in the previous novel....

Author	Thomas Hardy
ISBN	0140435239

Cytherea has taken a position as lady's maid to the eccentric arch-intriguer Miss Aldclyffe. On discovering that the man she loves, Edward Springrove, is already engaged to his cousin, Cytherea comes under the influence of Miss Aldclyffe's fascinating, manipulative steward Manston.

Blackmail,...

Author

Louisa May Alcott

Alcott's concerns about social justice, women's work, domesticity, and community lie at the heart of this provocative novel.
In this story of a woman's search for a meaningful life, Alcott moves outside the family setting of her best known works. Originally published in 1872, Work is both an exploration...

Author	Henry James
ISBN	0140432647

This is his first full-length novel and executed with such blazing, confident, thirty-one-year-old talent that even if he had produced nothing else, his fame would have been assured.
Roderick Hudson, egotistical, beautiful and an exceptionally gifted sculptor, but poor, is taken from New...

Author	Arthur Rimbaud
ISBN	0821224581

I'm an organized person. Psychotically organized. Except when it comes to books. I try to plan my readings, I try to finish one book in order to begin a new one, but it's all in vain. I read what I want to read, whenever I have the need of reading it. So, with four books on my currently-reading shelf, today I...

Author	George Meredith
ISBN	0140430342

Virginia Woolf said of The Egoist: 'Meredith pays us a supreme compliment to which as novel-readers we are little accustomed ... He imagines us capable of disinterested curiosity in the behaviour of our kind.' In this, the most dazzlingly intellectual of all his novels, Meredith tries to illuminate...

Author	J. Sheridan Le Fanu
ISBN	0192839470

This remarkable collection of stories, first published in 1872, includes Green Tea, The Familiar, Mr. Justice Harbottle, The Room in the Dragon Volant, and Carmilla. The five stories are purported to be cases by Dr. Hesselius, a 'metaphysical' doctor, who is willing to consider the ghosts both as...

Author	Richard Wagner
ISBN	0393008673

Richard Wagner's vast Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle comprises four full-length operas (Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried and Gotterdammerung) and is arguably the most extraordinary achievement in the history of opera. His own libretto to the operas, translated by Andrew Porter, is an intricate...

Author	Ivan Turgenev
ISBN	1853993204

راستش فکر نمی کردم این اثر، چنین دلنشین غافلگیرم کند

امروز قرار بود که فقط به یکسری از کارهایم که مثلا از قبل برنامه ریزی کرده بودم برسم ....اما می بینید؟...

Author	Thomas Hardy
ISBN	0140435026

Adventuress and opportunist, Ethelberta reinvents herself to disguise her humble origins, launching a brilliant career as a society poet in London with her family acting incognito as her servants. Turning the male-dominated literary world to her advantage, she happily exploits the attentions...

Author

Ebenezer Cobham Brewer

Various editions of this book are available online in digitized form. But that shouldn't stop you from getting your own physical copy. Nothing can rival the joy of browsing through it - you're bound to learn something fascinating along the way. As Terry Pratchett says in the Foreword, it's a storehouse...

Author	Nikolai Leskov
ISBN	0812966961

زنجیره قصه‌های قهرمان داستان (ایوان سیوریانیچ) قدری مسلسل‌وار و پی‌در‌پی نقل می‌شه که امان از مخاطب می‌گیره و کنار گذاشتن کتاب رو سخت می‌کنه
در انتهای...

Author	Robert Louis Stevenson
ISBN	1843500965

The wild Cevennes region of France forms the backdrop for the pioneering travelogue Travels with a Donkey, written by a young Robert Louis Stevenson. Ever hopeful of encountering the adventure he yearned for and raising much needed finance at the start of his writing career, Stevenson embarked on...