hi!
I have been interested in reading books from the Victorian era England, but I don’t know many, especially GOOD ones. can somebody recommend me some?:’) both – books written during the time and also books set in Victorian time – are fine. thanks a lot🩷:)
by Puzzleheaded-Web4835
8 Comments
You can’t go wrong with Wilde
The Brontes, Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Gaskell, are all great authors of that era.
Books written by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Sarah Waters books are so well researched & well written.
Honestly you can’t go wrong with any of them.
I’m actually working on a project that’s set in the Gilded Age of America, which overlaps with the late Victorian Era. My characters have read or brought up a fair few books throughout the draft so I’ve been doing some research and here are a couple that have caught my eye:
* Alexandre Dumas – *Mémoires d’un médecin: Joseph Balsamo* – Part of his “Marie Antoinette” romance series, but Dumas himself wanted to be a doctor at one point, so I’m interested in this one quite a bit. But nearly all of Dumas’ works fit into the first half of the Victorian era and many are widely available, particularly the D’Artagnan (*Three Musketeers*) books and *The Count of Monte Cristo*.
* George Eliot was writing in this era, the pen name of a woman who lived a pretty remarkable life including an open marriage. She’s probably best known for *Middlemarch*, though one of my characters is trying to read *Daniel Deronda*.
* Dickens, of course, is the most classic pick. I haven’t quite seized the chance to have my characters argue about their least/most favorite Dickens works but I’m thinking about it >:)
* One work that came up that I’d never heard of but one of my characters is reading now is Charles Reade’s *The Cloister and the Hearth*, which is a bit of an adventure disguised as something more intellectual (or maybe something intellectual disguised as more of an adventure?)– but it’s *set* in the 16th century, despite being written later, so YMMV
You can also look into the Bronte sisters, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne – all were alive and writing in the Victorian era, though some more towards the beginning or end.
In The Fog, by Richard Harding Davis, and The Beetle, by Richard Marsh are considered minor classics.
Also Armadale, by Wilkie Collins – his The Woman in White is more famous.
If you like fantasy set in Victorian times (not written in , I always enjoy Gail carriager’s books, parasol protectorate series would be where I would start. Snarky and silly with many poofy dresses.
If you’ll go eight years outside the era, Anne of Green Gables series is fantastic. I think it counts because they’re in rural Canada and we tend to be a little bit behind everyone else