Twenty novels about money

20 books · original English texts · free to read online

The list

1. Vanity Fair — William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848. The wittiest novel of the period, and the least sentimental about ambition.
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2. New Grub Street — George Gissing, 1891. The best novel about writing as a job, and quietly one of the saddest books of the century.
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3. 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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4. 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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5. 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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6. Great Expectations — Charles Dickens, 1861. Dickens at his most controlled: one narrator, one long mistake, no subplot wasted.
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7. Middlemarch — George Eliot, 1871. The fullest account of ordinary life in English fiction, and the wisest novel of the century.
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8. The House of Mirth — Edith Wharton, 1905. A controlled, painful novel about a woman with taste and no income.
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9. 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.
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10. The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925. The most perfectly constructed American novel of the twentieth century, and shorter than you remember.
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11. Sister Carrie — Theodore Dreiser, 1900. The first great American novel about a woman and money, written without moralising.
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12. The Titan — Theodore Dreiser, 1914. The best American novel about financial power, and a portrait of Chicago being built by men on the make.
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13. 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.
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14. Washington Square — Henry James, 1880. A small, perfect novel about a father, a daughter and the uses of intelligence.
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15. The Portrait of a Lady — Henry James, 1881. The great novel about a woman's freedom being granted and then quietly withdrawn.
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16. The Wings of the Dove — Henry James, 1902. James at his most morally intricate, with Venice doing half the work.
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17. The Bostonians — Henry James, 1886. James on American reform movements, written with the cold eye he usually reserved for Europe.
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18. The Jungle — Upton Sinclair, 1906. A muckraking novel whose images are still the reason people distrust industrial food.
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19. McTeague — Frank Norris, 1899. American naturalism at its most extreme, with an ending that is impossible to forget.
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20. Martin Eden — Jack London, 1909. The best novel about becoming a writer, and the worst one to read if you are looking for encouragement.
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