Books

160 titles · all English-language originals · every free-text link checked

This is the whole collection so far. Every book here was first published before 1930, and for each one we link to a specific Project Gutenberg edition whose identifier we have verified, rather than to a search page. We do not host the texts ourselves and we do not publish translations.

Each page gives a short original reading note, the reasoning behind the public-domain statement, other free sources, and a print edition link. If a modern edition has its own copyright in its introduction, notes or translation, that copyright is unaffected by the status of the original work — we say so on the page rather than blur the distinction.

All titles, by date of first publication

Troilus and Criseyde — Geoffrey Chaucer, 1385. The finest long poem in Middle English, and a serious study of betrayal without a villain.
The Canterbury Tales — Geoffrey Chaucer, 1400. The foundation of English comic narrative, and still one of the rudest things in the canon.
Hamlet — William Shakespeare, 1603. The most argued-about play in English, and still the best portrait of a mind talking itself out of action.
Macbeth — William Shakespeare, 1623. Shakespeare's tightest tragedy, where the poetry deteriorates as the moral world collapses.
Robinson Crusoe — Daniel Defoe, 1719. The founding novel of English adventure, and a document of how a solitary mind organises survival.
Gulliver's Travels — Jonathan Swift, 1726. The cruellest and most inventive satire in English, and still the best argument against complacency.
The Castle of Otranto — Horace Walpole, 1764. The first Gothic novel, and the source of a whole genre's furniture.
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker — Tobias Smollett, 1771. An epistolary road novel that is rude, energetic and unexpectedly modern about class.
Common Sense — Thomas Paine, 1776. The most effective political pamphlet in English, and a lesson in how to write for a crowd.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — Edward Gibbon, 1776. The greatest history written in English, and a permanent lesson in how civilisations lose confidence.
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin — Benjamin Franklin, 1791. The founding text of American self-improvement, written by a man who knew exactly what he was doing.
The Mysteries of Udolpho — Ann Radcliffe, 1794. The most influential Gothic novel in English, and a masterclass in suspense through description.
Songs of Innocence and of Experience — William Blake, 1794. The most original poetry book of the eighteenth century, and one that needs its images as well as its words.
The Italian — Ann Radcliffe, 1797. Radcliffe's best-plotted novel, and the one with the most interesting villain.
Sense and Sensibility — Jane Austen, 1811. Austen's first novel, and the best study of the difference between feeling something and saying it.
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage — Lord Byron, 1812. The poem that made Byron famous, and the best travel poem of the century.
Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen, 1813. The sharpest opening in English comedy of manners, and still the most readable account of how money shapes a marriage.
Waverley — Walter Scott, 1814. The novel that invented historical fiction, and still the clearest account of how a rising felt to the people in it.
Northanger Abbey — Jane Austen, 1817. Austen's funniest novel, and the best-tempered parody in English.
Persuasion — Jane Austen, 1817. Austen writing about regret rather than courtship, with the most grown-up heroine she created.
Rob Roy — Walter Scott, 1817. Scott at his most entertaining, with a heroine who runs circles around the hero.
Frankenstein — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1818. Short, structurally clever, and far more interested in abandonment than in electricity.
Poems Published in 1820 — John Keats, 1820. The best single volume of Romantic poetry, and the shortest route to Keats.
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner — James Hogg, 1824. A Scottish Gothic masterpiece about certainty, and the most unsettling novel in this list.
The Alhambra — Washington Irving, 1832. A romantic sketchbook that created the Alhambra as an image in the English-speaking world.
Nature — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1836. The founding text of American transcendentalism, and a bracing argument against secondhand experience.
The Pickwick Papers — Charles Dickens, 1837. Episodic, generous and genuinely funny; the novel that invented the Dickens audience.
Twice-Told Tales — Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1837. The best introduction to Hawthorne's shorter fiction, and to his habit of leaving the moral unresolved.
Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens, 1838. The fastest way into Dickens's social anger, and a reminder that sentimentality and reform can share a page.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket — Edgar Allan Poe, 1838. Poe's strange, unfinished sea novel: uneven, influential and genuinely unsettling.
The Voyage of the Beagle — Charles Darwin, 1839. The best travel book ever written by a scientist, and the raw material of the Origin.
The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 2 — Edgar Allan Poe, 1840. The core of Poe's fiction in one volume, including the first modern detective story.
Essays: First Series — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841. The most quotable book in American literature, and a permanent argument against conformity.
The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson — Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1842. The most musical Victorian poetry, and the best introduction to Tennyson's melancholy.
The Bible in Spain — George Borrow, 1843. A swaggering, unreliable travel classic about selling books in a country that did not want them.
The Raven — Edgar Allan Poe, 1845. The most famous American poem of the nineteenth century, and still effective when read aloud.
Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë, 1847. The first great English novel narrated by a woman with no fortune and no intention of apologising for it.
Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë, 1847. The most structurally ambitious of the Brontë novels, and the least sentimental.
Agnes Grey — Anne Brontë, 1847. Quiet, short and truthful; the best account we have of Victorian governessing from the inside.
Vanity Fair — William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848. The wittiest novel of the period, and the least sentimental about ambition.
Mary Barton — Elizabeth Gaskell, 1848. The first industrial novel in English, written from inside the streets it describes.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — Anne Brontë, 1848. The most clear-eyed Brontë novel, and the one that wears least well with romantic readings.
Shirley — Charlotte Brontë, 1849. The Brontë novel about work and money rather than romance, and the better for it.
The Scarlet Letter — Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850. A compact American classic about the difference between a rule and its consequences.
David Copperfield — Charles Dickens, 1850. The warmest and least defensive of the big Dickens novels, with a narrator who admits he was often wrong.
Moby-Dick — Herman Melville, 1851. A novel that refuses to stay a novel: part adventure, part encyclopedia, part sermon.
The Stones of Venice — John Ruskin, 1851. A Victorian argument about buildings that is really an argument about labour.
The House of the Seven Gables — Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851. Hawthorne's Salem novel: a haunted house, a family curse, and a sharp eye for genteel poverty.
Bleak House — Charles Dickens, 1853. The densest of Dickens's novels, and the one where his anger and his tenderness are most evenly matched.
Villette — Charlotte Brontë, 1853. The most interesting of Charlotte Brontë's novels, and the one that best repays rereading.
Walden — Henry David Thoreau, 1854. Part account book, part experiment in attention, still argued with 170 years later.
Hard Times — Charles Dickens, 1854. Dickens compressed into a fable, and the sharpest Victorian attack on education as accountancy.
Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman, 1855. The book that changed what an English poem was allowed to look like.
North and South — Elizabeth Gaskell, 1855. The best-balanced novel about the industrial dispute, with a heroine who has to learn what she is looking at.
A Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens, 1859. Dickens writing at speed and with unusual restraint, about a city learning how quickly a revolution can eat its own.
The Woman in White — Wilkie Collins, 1859. The first great sensation novel, with a villain worth the wait.
On the Origin of Species — Charles Darwin, 1859. A scientific classic that can still be read as an argument rather than a monument.
On Liberty — John Stuart Mill, 1859. The clearest statement of the case for individual liberty in English, and still the starting point for the argument.
The Marble Faun — Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1860. Hawthorne's Italian novel: slow, odd, and more interested in guilt than in plot.
Great Expectations — Charles Dickens, 1861. Dickens at his most controlled: one narrator, one long mistake, no subplot wasted.
Romola — George Eliot, 1863. Eliot's historical novel: demanding, carefully researched and unlike anything else she wrote.
The Water-Babies — Charles Kingsley, 1863. A Victorian children's fantasy that is much stranger than its reputation, and often beautifully written.
Apologia Pro Vita Sua — John Henry Newman, 1864. Victorian autobiography at its most lucid, written under pressure and without self-pity.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll, 1865. Genuinely funny for children and for mathematicians, for different reasons.
Letters from Egypt — Lucie Duff Gordon, 1865. Letters that turn a health trip into one of the most sympathetic travel books of the century.
The Moonstone — Wilkie Collins, 1868. The first great detective novel, and still one of the best-plotted books in the genre.
Culture and Anarchy — Matthew Arnold, 1869. The source of 'sweetness and light', and a serious argument about what education is for.
The Innocents Abroad — Mark Twain, 1869. The funniest travel book of the nineteenth century, and a useful antidote to reverence.
Middlemarch — George Eliot, 1871. The fullest account of ordinary life in English fiction, and the wisest novel of the century.
The Princess and the Goblin — George MacDonald, 1872. A fairy tale with real theology underneath, and the direct ancestor of much modern fantasy.
The Way We Live Now — Anthony Trollope, 1875. A Victorian financial thriller that has aged much better than its author expected.
Roderick Hudson — Henry James, 1875. An early James novel that already knows how to make failure interesting.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — Mark Twain, 1876. The great American boyhood novel, and the easiest way into Twain.
A Thousand Miles up the Nile — Amelia Edwards, 1877. The best Victorian account of the Nile, written by a woman who turned tourism into scholarship.
Black Beauty — Anna Sewell, 1877. The first great animal-rights novel, and still one of the most effective.
Daisy Miller — Henry James, 1878. Short, sharp and still capable of starting an argument about who was actually at fault.
Washington Square — Henry James, 1880. A small, perfect novel about a father, a daughter and the uses of intelligence.
The Portrait of a Lady — Henry James, 1881. The great novel about a woman's freedom being granted and then quietly withdrawn.
Treasure Island — Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883. The template for every treasure map since, told by a narrator who is allowed to be scared.
The Story of an African Farm — Olive Schreiner, 1883. The first great South African novel, and still the most quoted one.
Life on the Mississippi — Mark Twain, 1883. The best book about learning a craft, and the source of Twain's voice.
A Little Tour in France — Henry James, 1884. The best kind of literary travel writing: opinionated, unhurried and full of buildings.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain, 1884. The novel Hemingway said all modern American writing comes from, and still the funniest serious book in the language.
King Solomon's Mines — H. Rider Haggard, 1885. A fast, unapologetic adventure that shows exactly how the imperial imagination worked.
The Rise of Silas Lapham — William Dean Howells, 1885. The best American novel about business ethics, and a portrait of Boston looking down on new money.
The Purple Land — W. H. Hudson, 1885. A picaresque South American adventure by a writer who actually grew up there.
A Child's Garden of Verses — Robert Louis Stevenson, 1885. The most durable collection of children's verse in English, and a good first poetry book.
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde — Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886. Short, controlled and much stranger than the phrase 'Jekyll and Hyde' now suggests.
Kidnapped — Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886. A historical adventure with real politics underneath, and one of the best friendships in fiction.
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab — Fergus Hume, 1886. One of the first international detective bestsellers, and a snapshot of colonial Melbourne.
The Bostonians — Henry James, 1886. James on American reform movements, written with the cold eye he usually reserved for Europe.
The Happy Prince and Other Tales — Oscar Wilde, 1888. Wilde's best prose, in five short tales that are sadder than they look.
The Picture of Dorian Gray — Oscar Wilde, 1890. Aphorisms on one page and a genuinely disturbing moral structure on the next.
The Golden Bough — James George Frazer, 1890. A Victorian anthropology classic that shaped how the modern world thinks about myth.
Poems — Emily Dickinson, 1890. The most original American poet of the nineteenth century, and one of the strangest voices in English.
New Grub Street — George Gissing, 1891. The best novel about writing as a job, and quietly one of the saddest books of the century.
The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places — Rudyard Kipling, 1891. Early Kipling on the machinery of a colonial city, sharper and less sentimental than his later work.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles — Thomas Hardy, 1891. Hardy's most argued-about novel, and the one that makes the case against Victorian sexual morality most forcefully.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle, 1892. Twelve self-contained puzzles; the best possible introduction to detective fiction.
The Yellow Wallpaper — Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892. Twenty minutes long, and the most economical unreliable narrator in the language.
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets — Stephen Crane, 1893. The first American novel to treat the slums without sentiment, written by a twenty-one-year-old.
The Jungle Book — Rudyard Kipling, 1894. The best children's book about rules, and a masterclass in short-form storytelling.
Seven Little Australians — Ethel Turner, 1894. The Australian children's classic that refuses to be charming about children.
The Time Machine — H. G. Wells, 1895. Short enough for one sitting, and the origin of most time-travel fiction that followed.
Jude the Obscure — Thomas Hardy, 1895. Hardy's most direct attack on class and education, and his last novel.
The Red Badge of Courage — Stephen Crane, 1895. The first modern American war novel, written by a man who had never seen a battle.
The Importance of Being Earnest — Oscar Wilde, 1895. The wittiest play in the language, and a complete demolition of Victorian earnestness.
A Shropshire Lad — A. E. Housman, 1896. The most popular poetry collection of its era, and a masterclass in brevity and refrain.
Dracula — Bram Stoker, 1897. The founding vampire novel, and a surprisingly clever piece of documentary storytelling.
The War of the Worlds — H. G. Wells, 1898. The founding invasion narrative, written with a journalist's eye for what a disaster actually feels like.
The Turn of the Screw — Henry James, 1898. The most perfectly ambiguous ghost story in English, and a masterclass in unreliable narration.
Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad, 1899. A hundred pages that changed how English fiction writes about certainty and distance.
The Awakening — Kate Chopin, 1899. The first great American novel about a woman's desire, and still one of the most radical.
McTeague — Frank Norris, 1899. American naturalism at its most extreme, with an ending that is impossible to forget.
Sister Carrie — Theodore Dreiser, 1900. The first great American novel about a woman and money, written without moralising.
Lord Jim — Joseph Conrad, 1900. Conrad's best full-length novel about shame, and a masterpiece of indirect narration.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz — L. Frank Baum, 1900. The great American fairy tale, and a masterclass in pacing for young readers.
Kim — Rudyard Kipling, 1901. Kipling's best novel, and the most vivid picture of British India in fiction.
My Brilliant Career — Miles Franklin, 1901. The first great Australian novel about a woman who wants work more than marriage.
The Wings of the Dove — Henry James, 1902. James at his most morally intricate, with Venice doing half the work.
Just So Stories — Rudyard Kipling, 1902. The best read-aloud book of the period, and a reminder that Kipling could be silly as well as solemn.
The Hound of the Baskervilles — Arthur Conan Doyle, 1902. The best Holmes novel, and the one that shows Conan Doyle could write atmosphere as well as puzzles.
The Ambassadors — Henry James, 1903. James's masterpiece of late style, where the drama is entirely in what people avoid saying.
The Souls of Black Folk — W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903. The founding book of modern American sociology, and one of the most beautiful essay collections ever written.
Riders to the Sea — John Millington Synge, 1904. A one-act tragedy with no wasted word, and the best introduction to Synge's ear for speech.
The Well of the Saints — John Millington Synge, 1905. A comedy about the cost of a miracle, and Synge's most underrated play.
The House of Mirth — Edith Wharton, 1905. A controlled, painful novel about a woman with taste and no income.
The Jungle — Upton Sinclair, 1906. A muckraking novel whose images are still the reason people distrust industrial food.
The Railway Children — E. Nesbit, 1906. The best of Nesbit's novels, and a children's book that does not pretend money is unimportant.
The Longest Journey — E. M. Forster, 1907. Forster's most personal novel, and the one that shows what he was arguing with for the rest of his life.
The Aran Islands — John Millington Synge, 1907. A travel memoir that doubles as a writer's notebook, and the source of Synge's stage language.
A Room with a View — E. M. Forster, 1908. Forster's most generous comedy, and the best novel ever written about a pension in Florence.
The Wind in the Willows — Kenneth Grahame, 1908. The best animal friendship book in English, and a portrait of a riverbank that never existed.
Anne of Green Gables — L. M. Montgomery, 1908. The most lovable children's book in Canadian literature, and a masterclass in creating a character by voice.
Martin Eden — Jack London, 1909. The best novel about becoming a writer, and the worst one to read if you are looking for encouragement.
Peter and Wendy — J. M. Barrie, 1911. A children's classic that is really about the fear of growing up, and much darker than its adaptations.
The Secret Garden — Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1911. A gardening novel for children, and one of the few classics that takes work seriously as a cure.
The Innocence of Father Brown — G. K. Chesterton, 1911. The most original detective collection after Holmes, and a lesson in solving crimes by understanding people.
Gitanjali — Rabindranath Tagore, 1912. Devotional poetry that changed the way English readers thought about Indian writing.
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town — Stephen Leacock, 1912. Gentle, perfectly timed comedy about a town that thinks it is the centre of the world.
Pygmalion — Bernard Shaw, 1913. A comedy that is also a blunt argument about accent, money and who gets to be believed.
O Pioneers! — Willa Cather, 1913. The best novel about the American plains, and a cool, unsentimental portrait of settlement.
Sons and Lovers — D. H. Lawrence, 1913. Lawrence's most accessible novel, and the best account of a working-class childhood in English fiction.
Dubliners — James Joyce, 1914. The best short-story collection in English, and the cleanest way into Joyce.
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich — Stephen Leacock, 1914. Leacock with his claws out, satirising the people who fund culture without reading it.
The Titan — Theodore Dreiser, 1914. The best American novel about financial power, and a portrait of Chicago being built by men on the make.
Songs of a Sentimental Bloke — C. J. Dennis, 1915. Vernacular poetry that is funny, tender and much better than its novelty reputation.
The Voyage Out — Virginia Woolf, 1915. Woolf's first novel: imperfect, but already interested in the gap between a woman's inner life and her social role.
The Thirty-Nine Steps — John Buchan, 1915. The first modern chase thriller, and still one of the fastest books in the genre.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — James Joyce, 1916. A portrait of an artist as a young egotist, written with extraordinary control of style.
South Wind — Norman Douglas, 1917. The most enjoyable argumentative novel in English, set on an island you will want to visit.
The Wild Swans at Coole — W. B. Yeats, 1917. Yeats in transition, writing some of his most quoted poems in a plainer style.
Far Away and Long Ago — W. H. Hudson, 1918. One of the best childhood memoirs in English, and a portrait of a vanished landscape.
Bliss and Other Stories — Katherine Mansfield, 1920. The best short stories written in English in the early twentieth century.
The Age of Innocence — Edith Wharton, 1920. Wharton's masterpiece, and the best novel about how a society enforces its rules without ever stating them.
Ulysses — James Joyce, 1922. The novel that changed what fiction could do, and much funnier than its reputation.
The Garden Party and Other Stories — Katherine Mansfield, 1922. Mansfield's most famous collection, and the best place to start with her.
Mrs Dalloway — Virginia Woolf, 1925. The best introduction to Woolf: short, social, and technically astonishing without showing off.
The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925. The most perfectly constructed American novel of the twentieth century, and shorter than you remember.
The Sun Also Rises — Ernest Hemingway, 1926. The definitive novel of the lost generation, written with a discipline that hides its own feeling.

How we choose

We add a title only when we can point to a specific, freely readable edition and state its copyright position with a reason. We do not write about institutions, addresses or opening hours we cannot check. Where a date is uncertain, we leave it out rather than guess.