Sixteen novels about families

16 books · original English texts · free to read online

The list

1. Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë, 1847. The most structurally ambitious of the Brontë novels, and the least sentimental.
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2. Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë, 1847. The first great English novel narrated by a woman with no fortune and no intention of apologising for it.
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3. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — Anne Brontë, 1848. The most clear-eyed Brontë novel, and the one that wears least well with romantic readings.
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4. Shirley — Charlotte Brontë, 1849. The Brontë novel about work and money rather than romance, and the better for it.
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5. Agnes Grey — Anne Brontë, 1847. Quiet, short and truthful; the best account we have of Victorian governessing from the inside.
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6. Middlemarch — George Eliot, 1871. The fullest account of ordinary life in English fiction, and the wisest novel of the century.
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7. Sons and Lovers — D. H. Lawrence, 1913. Lawrence's most accessible novel, and the best account of a working-class childhood in English fiction.
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8. 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.
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9. Bleak House — Charles Dickens, 1853. The densest of Dickens's novels, and the one where his anger and his tenderness are most evenly matched.
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10. David Copperfield — Charles Dickens, 1850. The warmest and least defensive of the big Dickens novels, with a narrator who admits he was often wrong.
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11. Great Expectations — Charles Dickens, 1861. Dickens at his most controlled: one narrator, one long mistake, no subplot wasted.
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12. The Way We Live Now — Anthony Trollope, 1875. A Victorian financial thriller that has aged much better than its author expected.
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13. Vanity Fair — William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848. The wittiest novel of the period, and the least sentimental about ambition.
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14. The Bostonians — Henry James, 1886. James on American reform movements, written with the cold eye he usually reserved for Europe.
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15. Washington Square — Henry James, 1880. A small, perfect novel about a father, a daughter and the uses of intelligence.
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16. O Pioneers! — Willa Cather, 1913. The best novel about the American plains, and a cool, unsentimental portrait of settlement.
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