Oliver Goldsmith's 18th century novel "The Vicar of Wakefield" was so popular in Victorian times that it is mentioned in many classics of that era including George Eliot's "Middlemarch," Jane Austen's "Emma," Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" and Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", amongst others. It is the story of Dr. Charles Primrose, the titular Vicar, his wife Deborah and their six children who live an idyllic life in a country parish. The Vicar...

Deals with a brazen ex-football player who enters the ministry and, through his half-plagiarized sermons, his physical attractiveness, and his unerring instinct for promotion, becomes a successful evangelist and later the leader of a large Middle Western church.

Doctor Thorne is a tale of love, envy, violence, greed, and vanity...but mainly love. Doctor Thorne lives with his beautiful niece, Mary, who has every virtue save money for a dowry. Only Mary's uncle, Doctor Thorne, knows the truth of her mysterious origins and can resolve the many problems facing his ward.

Arthur's seduction of an innocent, young country girl results in remorse, suffering, and regret. According to The Oxford Companion to English Literature, "the plot is founded on a story told to George Eliot by her aunt Elizabeth Evans, a Methodist preacher, and the original of Dinah Morris of the novel, of a confession of child-murder, made to her by a girl in prison." The story's plot follows four characters' rural lives in the fictional community...

"Book 1 of Anthony Trollope's popular "Chronicles of Barsetshire" series. In "The Warden", a crusading young physician seeks to expose corruption in the operation of an old age home by the facility's administrator, the respected Rev. Septimus Harding. Unfortunately, the young doctor fancy's Harding's daughter.Trollope's "Chronicles of Barsetshire" has been prized by readers for its entertaining exploration of the fictional English county of Barsetshire...

It is the story of Sterne's fictional travel through both countries, particularly France. Sterne made two trips within the continent, in 1762-64 and 1765-66, but the book is not about his errands, but those of parson Yorick's (a character in "Tristram Shandy"). With a less acid and outrageous humor than in his previous work, Sterne anyway mixes the picaresque with an ironic and, frequently, hilarious philosophical irony. Yorick begins by trying to...

Hester Prynne is the adulteress, forced by the Puritan community to wear a scarlet letter A on the breast of her gown. Arthur Dimmesdale, the minister and the secret father of her child, Pearl, struggles with the agony of conscience and his own weakness. Roger Chillingworth, Hester's husband, revenges himself on Dimmesdale by calculating assaults on the frail mental state of the conscience-stricken cleric. The result is an American tragedy of stark...

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"When Ruby King's mother is found murdered in their home in Chicago's South Side, the police dismiss it as another act of violence in a black neighborhood. But for Ruby, it's a devastating loss that leaves her on her own with her violent father. While she receives many condolences, her best friend, Layla, is the only one who understands how this puts Ruby in jeopardy. Their closeness is tested when Layla's father, the pastor of their church, demands...

A novel of two sisters in postwar England that lets you “step into the Jane Austen–like lives of Harriet and Belinda Bede” (The Christian Science Monitor).
Belinda and Harriet Bede live together in a small English village. Shy, sensible Belinda has been secretly in love with Henry Hoccleve—the poetry-spouting, married archdeacon of their church—for thirty years. Belinda’s much more confident,...