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Read Me What to read, 1826-1850

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Earlier Mid-19th Century

The books that we re-read the oftenest are not always those that we admire the most; we choose and revisit them for many and various reasons, as we choose and revisit human friends. --Robert Louis Stevenson

Guy de MAUPASSANT (1850-1893) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: post His people are of many kinds: peasants, priests, soldiers, merchants, clerks, prostitutes--every kind, it would seem. But all of them are driven, as their creator also is while he works out the ironies of their lives; for irony is his matter, as intensity is his manner. --Mark Van Doren, The Great Ideas Today 1969, p. 291
One star: Short Stories (1917)

Robert Louis STEVENSON (1850-1894) Etext: The Online Books Page | Project Gutenberg Reference: Walter Alexander Raleigh biography Criticism: Ben Downing review
The New Arabian Nights (1882)
Treasure Island (1883)
The very model of an adventure story--buried treasure, secret maps, pirates, mutiny on the high seas. --Raphael and McLeish
Kidnapped (1886)
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
While as a youngster I was undoubtedly first captivated by its 'mystery and horror' aspects, I think even then I was aware of the moral tragedy Stevenson depicted so wonderfully. --Gordon R. Willey
The Master of Ballantrae (1889)
Weir of Hermiston (1896)
Essays (1906)

Edward BELLAMY (1850-1898) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Wood
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)

Pierre LOTI (Louis-Marie-Julien Viaud 1850-1923) Etext: The Online Books Page
The Desert (1894)

William E. HENLEY (1849-1903) Etext: The Online Books Page
Pro Rege Nostro (1900)

Sarah Orne JEWETT (1849-1909) Etext: The Online Books Page
The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)

August STRINDBERG (1849-1912) Etext: The Online Books Page Humor: Bradley and Bewley animations
One star: The Father (Fadren 1887)
One star: Miss Julie (Miss Julie 1888)
One star: To Damascus I and To Damascus II (Till Damaskus, forsta delen and Till Damaskus, andra delen 1898)
One star: A Dream Play (Ett dromspel 1901)
One star: The Dance of Death (Dodsdansen 1901–05) Criticism: Sandall
One star: The Ghost Sonata (Spoksonaten 1907)

Max Simon NORDAU (1849-1923) Etext: The Online Books Page
Degeneration (1893)

Ivan Petrovich PAVLOV (1849-1936)
One star: Conditioned Reflexes (Conditioned Reflexes: an Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex 1927)
taught me the importance of controlling laboratory conditions... --B. F. Skinner

1848

Vilfredo PARETO (1848-1923) Etext: Virginia ...the Pareto criterion: ...state of affairs A is more efficient than state of affairs B if it leads to an improvement for one of the parties without harming any of the other affected parties; Pareto optimality occurs when no further gains can be achieved from trade. --Samuel Estreicher, 'In Praise of Theory', The Green Bag, Autumn 2006, p. 55
The Mind and Society (1916)

Auguste FOREL (1848-1931)
The Senses of Insects (1900)

Bram STOKER (1847-1912) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: post
Dracula (1897)

Georges SOREL (1847-1923)
Reflections on Violence (1908)

Tristan CORBIERE (1845-1875)
Les Amours jaunes (1873)

Georg CANTOR (1845-1918) Criticism: post
Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers (1915)

Gerard Manley HOPKINS (1844-1889) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Wikipedia external links Criticism: Amanda Shaw review | post
One star: Carrion Comfort (Wessex Poems and Other Verses 1918)
One star: God's Grandeur (Wessex Poems and Other Verses 1918)
One star: Pied Beauty (Wessex Poems and Other Verses 1918)
One star: Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord (Wessex Poems and Other Verses 1918)

Paul VERLAINE (1844-1896) Etext: The Online Books Page | A. S. Kline translation
Selected Poems (1948)

Friedrich Wilhelm NIETZSCHE (1844-1900) Etext: The Online Books Page | Great Books and Classics Reference: Criticism: Humor: post You would not like Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound. --Jeeves to Bertie Wooster in 'Jeeves Takes Charge'
Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870s (edited by Daniel Breazeale, 1979)
A revolutionary series of treatises on the transvaluation of all inherited values. --Robert Brustein
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
A 'scholarly' discourse on Greek tragedy that boldly celebrates the passionate, the lyrical, the personal--as contrasted to the dryly rational, the 'soundly' balanced, the impersonal 'virtue' of mainstream scholarship. --Ricard D. Parker
Human, All-Too-Human (1878, 1879, 1880)
The Gay Science or Joyful Wisdom (Die froehliche Wissenschaft 1882)
Two stars: Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
One star: Toward a Genealogy of Morals (1887) Criticism: R. R. Reno essay
Twilight of the Idols (1888)
Two stars: Also sprach Zarathustra (1892)
The Antichrist (1895)
One star: The Will to Power (1895)
Ecce Homo (1908)

Anatole FRANCE (1844-1924) Etext: The Online Books Page
Thais (1890)
Penguin Island (L’Ile des Pingouins 1908)

Robert BRIDGES (1844-1930) Etext: The Online Books Page
Selected Poems (1974)

Jose Maria ECA DE QUIERIOZ [or QUIRIOS] (1843-1900)
The Sin of Father Amaro (1875)
Dragon's Teeth (1878)
One star: The Maias (1888) Criticism: Riding | Wood

Frederick W. H. MYERS (1843-1901) Etext: The Online Books Page
Human Personality (1903)

Robert KOCH (1843-1910)
The Etiology of Tuberculosis (1882)

Henry JAMES (1843-1916) Etext: The Online Books Page | Great Books and Classics Reference: Times Topics | Guardian: Authors | Guide to Web Sites Criticism: post He had a mind so fine no idea could penetrate it. --T. S. Eliot
the amount of unhappiness in the world of Henry James's novels and of lost opportunities, due to misunderstandings which could have been disposed of with a few straight words, is far greater than in real life. Unhappiness due not to passionate causes but to a 'sense of style' in esthetic living is what really gives an air of artificiality to the Jamesian world--far more than the aristocrats and their golden hangings. --Stephen Spender
Daisy Miller (1878) [H]as for its heroine an American girl, beautiful, innocent, and willful, who goes through Europe without any other thought than that she should behave there as she had behaved at home in Schenectady: her own mistress, free to see whom she pleases and to say whatever is in her mind. Her death from Roman fever is no punishment for this; rather, it is the accidental consequence of a rash visit one night to the Colosseum with a beautiful young man of Rome against whom she had been warned. --Mark Van Doren, The Great Ideas Today 1969, p. 292
Two stars: The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
The Bostonians (1886)
Apart from its quality as a novel, this book was prophetic: the author foresaw the disappearance from the world of the masculine spirit and the sentiment of sex. --Howard Green
The Princess Casamassima (1886)
One star: The Turn of the Screw (1898) It is a study of evil in the form of a ghost story--a ghost story unless the governess who tells it has imagined it all. Opinions differ as to this; but the evil, whether outside the governess's mind or in it, is real enough for horror of immense dimensions. --Mark Van Doren, The Great Ideas Today 1969, p. 293
The Awkward Age (1899)
The Wings of the Dove (1902)
What made him so compelling? Perhaps it was his complexities--of character, incidents and style. --Jeanne S. Chall
Two stars: The Ambassadors (1903)
for James, mental concepts, far from being opposed to the ordinariness of laundry lists and drains, seem themselves to have belonged to a lower category of inanimate objects, like the small article of 'the commonest domestic use' manufactured by the Newsome family in 'The Ambassadors'... --Mary McCarthy
One star: The Golden Bowl (1904)
The American Novels and Stories (anthology 1947)
Short Novels and Tales Reference: Wikipedia

Benito PEREZ GALDOS (1843-1920) Etext: The Online Books Page Spain's Dickens --Maria Elena de las Carreras-Kuntz, 'Luis Bunuel's Quarrel With the Church', Crisis, November 1999 p. 23
Nazarin (1895)
Halma (1895)
Misericordia (1897)
One star: Fortunata y Jacinta (1886-87)

Sidney LANIER (1842-1881) Etext: The Online Books Page
One star: The Revenge of Hamish (1878)

Stephane MALLARME (1842-1898) Etext: Poem Hunter
Selected Poetry and Prose (1982) The crucial move by this prominent French poet of the Victorian age was the conscious repudiation of the idea that language refers to a reality beyond itself. Mallarme was the precursor of a school of poets who held that what really matters about poetry is sound, not sense. --Russell Shaw, Liturgy, Laity, and the Sacramental Sense, Adoremus Bulletin, April 2008

William JAMES (1842-1910) Etext: The Online Books Page | Great Books and Classics Reference: William James web page Criticism: post
The Sentiment of Rationality (in Mind, 1879)
Great Men and Their Environment (1880)
A lecture before the Harvard Natural History Society; published in the Atlantic Monthly, vol. 46, no. 276 (October 1880), pp. 441-459
One star: The Principles of Psychology (1891) James is the founder of *functionalism* in psychology. --V. J. McGill, Biology, Psychology, and Medicine (1963), p. 254 He always remained faithful ... to the observed world as he saw it, and especially to facts which, however unusual, had a bearing on the life and aspirations of the individual. --Seymour Cain, Philosophy (1963), p. 279
Is Life Worth Living? (1896)
Originally given before the Young Men's Christian Association of Harvard University, in May, 1895.
Stanford's Ideal Destiny (1906)
Science, Volume 23, Issue 595, pp. 801-804, May 1906
Letter to B. P. Blood (June 28, 1896)
The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)
On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings (in Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals 1899)
One star: The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
From James's book I learned how hazardous it is to generalize about something as complex as religion. --D. Quinn Mills
Remarks at a Peace Banquet (1904)
Speech given in Boston on the closing day of the World Peace Congress, October 7, 1904
The Moral Equivalent of War (1906) The psychological realism of Luther, Edwards, and other Protestant theologians--whose analysis of conversion, James thinks, can hardly be surpassed by modern psychologists--does not mean that religion should be replaced by psychology. It means only that psychological understanding has been part of religion all along. --Christopher Lasch, 'The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics' (1991), p. 285
Two stars: Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)
Though denigrated by those who misunderstand the essential nobility of James's conviction that emotion and action can be transform the world and that truth can be found in experience, this book is a monument to the effort to make ideas influential and transform them into action. --Kenneth Andrews
One star: Four Essays from The Meaning of Truth (1907)
A Pluralistic Universe (1909)
Some Problems of Philosophy (1911)
Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912)

Ambrose BIERCE (1842-1914) Etext: The Online Books Page
Collected Writings (1946)

W. H. HUDSON (1841-1922) Etext: The Online Books Page
The Naturalist in La Plata (1892) Etext: Project Gutenberg

Oliver Wendell HOLMES, Jr. (1841-1935) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: post
The Common Law (1881)
A valuable account of some of the great formative ideas of English law. --Samuel Thorne
Collected Legal Papers (1921)
On Life and Work (March 7, 1931) Etext: History and Politics Out Loud

Emile ZOLA (1840-1902) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: Buss
Therese Raquin (1867)
deals with a married woman and her lover, the shadowy Laurent, who determine to murder Camille Raquin in order to live together openly. But Camille's paralyzed old mother gradually becomes aware of what has happened... --Philip Ward
One star: L'Assommoir (1877)
...Gervaise Macquart comes to Paris with her lover Lantier and their two children. Lantier deserts her, but she marries Coupeau and starts a laundry on borrowed money. For a while all goes well, but then Coupeau has an accident, and spends most of his time (and the housekeeping money) in the drinking-shop of the title. --Philip Ward
Nana (1880)
One star: Germinal (1885)
...Gervaise's son Etienne loses his job in Lille and finally obtains employment in the coal-mines. Ethienne forms a friendship with the Russian nihilist Suvarin and together they incite the miners to strike for bearable living conditions. --Philip Ward

William SUMNER (1840-1910)
Socialism (in Scribner's October 1878)
Folkways (1906)
full title 'Folkways: a study of the sociological importance of usages,manners, customs, mores, and morals'
The Challenge of Facts, and Other Essays (1914)

Alfred Thayer MAHAN (1840-1914) Etext: The Online Books Page the geopolitical theorist who coined the term 'Middle East'. --Harvey Sicherman, A Thousand and One Nights, review of 'Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present' by Michael B. Oren, Claremont Review of Books, Fall 2007, p. 22
The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 (1890)
Command of the sea is essential for any nation aspiring to leadership in world affairs and to maximum properity and security at home. Land powers, no matter how great, are doomed to eventual collapse and decay without access to the sea. --Robert B. Downs

Giovanni VERGA (1840-1922) He poured his genius into many bottles, haphazardly it sometimes seems. Only in the one he initially most despised, the short and shamelessly regional novella, did it yield its full and explosive flavor. --Tim Parks, The New York Review of Books, January 11, 2001, p. 48
One star: The House by the Medlar (1881)
One star: Little Novels of Sicily (1883)
One star: Mastro Don Gesualdo (1889)
The She-Wolf and Other Stories (1973)

Thomas HARDY (1840-1928) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Criticism: post
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
One star: The Return of the Native (1878)
One star: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
The Woodlanders (1887)
Two stars: Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)
One star: Jude the Obscure (1895)
The Well-Beloved (1897)
Serialized in 1892
One star: Hap (Wessex Poems and Other Verses 1898)
One star: Selected Poems (1993) His theory of life was bleak, but his account of it in song and story--he is rich in examples of both--is warm and wonderful. He is most at home in mist and gloom, and then, lo, in brilliant sun. His verse is crabbed and peculiar; but once we are accustomed to his voice it is something we want to keep on hearing. --Mark Van Doren, The Great Ideas Today 1969, p. 286-287

Henry GEORGE (1839-1897) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: post
Progress and Property (1879) Subtitled: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions, and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth; the Remedy

Josiah Willard GIBBS (1839-1903)
On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances (1876-1878)
Elementary Principles of Statistical Mechanics (1902) full title: Elementary Principles of Statistical Mechanics, Developed with Especial Reference ot the Rational Foundation of Thermodynamics

Charles Sanders PEIRCE (1839-1914) Reference: Arisbe | Studies Criticism: Oakes (pronounced 'purse') --Summer Classics 2003 Catalog, St. John's College, Sante Fe, New Mexico
The Fixation of Belief (1877)
How to Make Our Ideas Clear (1878)
Evolutionary Love (1893)
What Pragmatism Is (1905)
The Red and the Black
Chance, Love, and Logic: Philosophical Essays (anthology 1923) Peirce, the son of mathematician Benjamin Peirce, was especially interested in symbolic representations of logic. --Byron E. Wall, 'John Venn, James Wood and the Chair of Mental Philosophy and Logic at the University of Cambridge, Journal of the History of Ideas, January 2007, p. 148
Collected Papers (8 vol. 1931-1934)

Walter PATER (1839-1894) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: Roger Kimball essay | Louis Auchincloss essay
Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873)
Marius the Epicurean (1885)
Imaginary Portraits (1887)
Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (1889)

W. E. H. LECKY (1838-1903) Etext: The Online Books Page
History of European Morals (1869)
Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe (1865)

Henry ADAMS (1838-1918) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Henry Adams, Globe Trotter Criticism: post
History of the United States of America from 1801 to 1817 (1889-91)
One star: Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904)
Two stars: The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
A rich, knotty, idiosyncratic evocation of what time, as it speeds up with the industrial and scientific revolutions, does to values, attitudes, institutions and elites in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, and to the terms and conditions of employment on which political power can be held, and by whom--all from the standpoint of a specially invested historian, grandson of the sixth, gret-grandson of the second U.S. president. --Richard E. Neustadt
Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1919)

Algernon Charles SWINBURNE (1837-1909) Etext: The Online Books Page
Atalanta in Calydon (1865)
Letters (1919)

William Dean HOWELLS (1837-1920) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: Tuttleton
A Modern Instance (1882)
The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)

J. J. THOMSON (Joseph John Thomson, 1837-1921) Reference: AIP
Conduction of Electricity Throught Gases (1903)

Gustavo Adolfo BECQUER (1836-1870)
Collected Poems (Rimas) (2007)

W. S. GILBERT (Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, 1836-1911) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Criticism: post
Bab Ballads (in Fun, 1861-1871)
Plays, with Arthur Sullivan (1871-1896)

One star: Kalevala (1835) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: post

Samuel BUTLER (1835-1902) Etext: The Online Books Page
Erewhon (1872)
The Way of All Flesh (1903)

Giosue CARDUCCI (1835-1907)
Hymn to Satan (l'Inno a Satana 1865)
The Barbarian Odes (Odi Barbare 1878-1889)
Rhymes and Rhythms (Rime e Ritmi 1966)

Mark TWAIN (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: post
For Americans who want to know who they are and how they got that way, Twain is center stage. --Harold Howe II 'Mark Twain' is a slang phrase used on the river to mean 'two fathoms deep' and indeed Clemens wrote his best work on and around the Mississippi. --Philip Ward, A Lifetime's Reading (1982) p. 13
Letter from New York to the [San Francisco] Alta California (May 28, 1867)
The Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation (1867)
The Innocents Abroad (1869) manages to be simultaneously amused and appalled, and by things that are mostly just appalling. --Algis Valiunas, Encountering Islam, Claremont Review of Books, Spring 2007, p. 35 deflated American illusions about the [Middle East] region and, mordantly, about themselves. --Harvey Sicherman, A Thousand and One Nights, review of 'Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present' by Michael B. Oren, Claremont Review of Books, Fall 2007, p. 22
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) The first manuscript submitted to the publisher typewritten. --Tom Goldstein and Jethro K. Lieberman, 'The Lawyer's Guide to Writing Well' (1989)
Remarkable Gold Mines (letter to New York Post 1880)
Four stars: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) ...all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn'. --Ernest Hemingway
reveals more about nineteenth-century America than any work I know. Yet it also displays a moral sensibility that resonates clearly with the values and beliefs of our own era. --Alan Brinkley
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)
Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar (from The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson 1894)
Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)
Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar (in Following the Equator 1897)
The Disappearance of Literature (1900)
Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (1909)
The Mysterious Stranger (1916)
Notebook (1936)
Complete Short Stories (anthology 1956)
Life as I Find It (anthology 1961)
Number Forty-Four: The Mysterious Stranger (1969)
The Devil's Racetrack: Mark Twain's "Great Dark" Writings: The Best from 'Which Was the Dream?' and 'Fables of Man' (anthology, John S. Tuckey, ed. 1980)
Concerning the Jews (1985)

Mendele Mokher SEFORIM (1835-1917)
The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third (1878)

Charles W. ELIOT (1834-1926) Criticism: post
The Harvard Classics (Editor, 1910) Etext: Bartleby

Bysshe VANOLIS (James Thomson, 1834-1882)
The City of Dreadful Night (1874)

Sir John Robert SEELEY (1834-1895) Etext: The Online Books Page
Ecce Homo (1865)

William MORRIS (1834-1896) Etext: The Online Books Page
One star: A Dream of John Ball (1892)
News from Nowhere (1893)
The Earthly Paradise (1896)
The Well at the World's End (1896)

Ernst Heinrich HAECKEL (1834-1919) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: post
The Evolution of Man (1874)
The Riddle of the Universe (1901)

Louisa May ALCOTT (1832-1888) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: post
Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868)
One of the great progenitors of the family story. Alcott writes from her own life with a sincerity and warmth which transcend the often pious particulars. --Raphael and McLeish

Lewis CARROLL (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Times Topics
An ounce of Lewis Carroll is in my opinion worth a ton of his contemporaries sermons... --Philip Ward
Two stars: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) Reference: Interactive Criticism: Sonkin In 'Alice' four worlds meet, worlds that he knew either consciously or intuitively. ... They are the worlds of childhood, dream, nonsense, and logic. Their strange interaction gives 'Alice' its complexity, and, more important, its strange reality. --Clifton Fadiman, The Lifetime Reading Plan (1960), p. 99 The images of 'Alice in Wonderland' are unforgettable; we can hardly get them out of our heads. (Partly this is because of John Tenniel's wonderful illustrations for the original edition ... .) --Charles Van Doren, The Joy of Reading (1985) p. 87
Two stars: Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) The two books make up one great fantasy, and it is hard to keep them apart in the memory. In fact, it is not worth trying to do so. --Charles Van Doren, The Joy of Reading (1985) p. 88

Horatio ALGER, Jr. (1832-1899) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Roach
Ragged Dick, or, Street Life in New York (1867)

Wilhelm WUNDT (1832-1920) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: post
Physiological Psychology (1880)
Outline of Psychology (1896)

James Clerk MAXWELL (1831-1879) Etext: The Online Books Page
before Maxwell people conceived of physical reality--in so far as it is supposed to represent events in nature--as material points, whose changes consist exclusively of motions, which are subject to total differential equations. After Maxwell they conceived physical reality as represented by continuous fields, not mechanically explicable, which are subject to partial differential equations. --Albert Einstein
Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873)

Nikolai Semyonovich LESKOV (1831-1895)
Selected Tales (1856-58)

Paul du CHAILLU (1831-1903) Etext: The Online Books Page
Equatorial Africa (1861)

Julius Wilhelm Richard DEDEKIND (1831-1916)
Essays on the Theory of Numbers (1924)

Emily DICKINSON (1830-1886) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Dickinson Electronic Archives | Emily Dickinson International Society | Academy of American Poets Criticism: post
Two stars: Complete Poems (1960) Her style is terse to the limit; she lights landscapes, actual or imagined, temporal or eternal, as lightning does. --Mark Van Doren, The Great Ideas Today 1969, p. 286 ... probably no poet of comparable reputation has been guilty of so much unpardonable writing... --Yvor Winter, quoted in 'No Laughing Matter,' by Brad Letihauser, New York Review of Books, September 21, 2000, p. 70
No reader of Emily can be so insensitive as to leave this extraordinary woman (who could be relentlessly sarcastic on occasion) and her poetry without a sense of exhilaration. --Philip Ward

Christina Georgina ROSSETTI (1830-1894) Etext: The Online Books Page
One star: Goblin Market and Other Poems (1847-93)

Frank A. HASKELL (1828-1864)
The Battle of Gettysburg (1863)

Dante Gabriel ROSSETTI (1828-1882) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: The Complete Writings and Pictures; A Hypermedia Research Archive
One star: The King's Tragedy
One star: Sonnets (1880)

Nikolay CHERNYSHEVSKY (1828-1889)
What Is to Be Done? (1863)

Jules VERNE (1828-1905) Etext: The Online Books Page
From the Earth to the Moon (1865)

Henrik IBSEN (1828-1906) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Centre for Ibsen Studies Criticism: post
One star: Brand (1866)
One star: Peer Gynt (1867)
Emperor and Galilean (Kejser og Galilaeer 1873)
One star: The Pillars of Society (Samfundets Stotter 1877)
Three stars: A Doll's House (Et Dukkehjem 1879) [W]ell-nigh perfect in its rendering of the young wife Nora who leaves her husband and shuts the door behind her--a famous door that no one forgets. --Mark Van Doren, The Great Ideas Today 1969, p. 282
One star: Ghosts (Gengangere 1881)
One star: An Enemy of the People (En Folkefiende 1882)
One star: The Wild Duck (Vildanden 1884)
One star: Hedda Gabler (1884) She is a Medea of the North, with no children to kill but with two men to hurt--her husband and the author whose manuscript she burns--before she ends the play by shooting herself: good riddance to all but divine rubbish. --Mark Van Doren, The Great Ideas Today 1969, p. 282
The Lady from the Sea (Fruen fra Havet 1888)
One star: The Master Builder (Bygmester Solness 1892)
One star: When We Dead Awaken (Nar vi dode vaagner 1899)

George MEREDITH (1828-1909) Etext: The Online Books Page
Poems (1851)
The Egoist (1879)
In fact, he has not lasted, except, I think, for 'The Egoist'; the mock-heroic vein, which he worked and over-worked, failed to undermine the old structure and became a blind alley. --Mary McCarthy

Leo Nikolayevich TOLSTOY (1828-1910) Etext: Reference: Criticism: post Criticism: Isaiah Berlin essay
Childhood, Boyhood and Youth (1853)
The Cossacks (1863)
Four stars: War and Peace (1869) What was originally intended as a story of family life, set against the background of the conflict between Russia and Napoleanic France, became a great historical novel, including a philosophy of history. --Seymour Cain, Imaginative Literature II: From Cervantes to Dostoevsky (1962), p. 171 ...one can see Tolstoy trying to catch in a network of abstract concepts the multifarious, tidal flow of his own novelistic imagination, within which his characters, acting in the belief that they are distinctive, self-driven individuals, reveal themselves to be subject to internal and external forces over which they have little or no control. --Dan Jacobson, Less a Wheel than a Wave, London Review of Books, 11 May 2006, p. 11
the most memorable statement of the relationship between men and history, between individuals and events, in all fiction. --Hale Champion
One star: Anna Karenina (1878)
it is enough if a man is able to save his own soul by living for it, which is the same as living for God--the rest will take care of itself. --Mary McCarthy
Twenty-three Tales (1881)
The Death of Ivan Illych (1886)
a powerfully wrought, ever-so-affecting reminder of what moral matters we had best try to settle before we take leave. --Robert Coles
The Power of Darkness (1886)
On Life (1887)
One star: A Confession (1888)
The Kreutzer Sonata (1889)
The Kingdom of God is Within You (c. 1894) full title: The Kingdom of God is Within You; or, Christianity Not as a Mystical Teaching but as a New Concept of Life
Religion and Morality (1894)
What Is Art? (1897) In War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Resurrection, he pushes his characters about with the greatest conceivable brusqueness in order to prove his thesis, and exhorts his readers to accept his interpretations of their movements. He even admits in What Is Art? that he thinks this the proper way for an artist to behave. --Rebecca West, in Charlotte Bronte, from The Great Victorians (1932), in The Essential Rebecca West, p. 436
What is Religion? (1902)
Critical Essay on Shakespeare (1903)
Short Novels (1965)

John Hanning SPEKE (1827-1864) Etext: The Online Books Page
Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863)

James Augustus GRANT (1827-1892)
A Walk Across Africa (1863)

Joseph, 1st Baron LISTER (1827-1912) Etext: The Online Books Page
On the Antiseptic Principle in the Practice of Surgery (1867)

G. F. B. RIEMANN (Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, 1826-1866) Etext: Mathematical Papers Reference: History of Mathematics archive | Clay Mathematics Institute Criticism: post
The Hypothesis of Geometry (1867)

Walter BAGEHOT (1826-1877) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: The Economist column Criticism: post
The Economist (editor, 1861-1877) Etext: Website
The English Constitution (1867)

SHCHEDRIN (Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov, 1826-1889) Etext: The Online Books Page
The Golovlovs (Gospoda Golovlyovy 1876)
tracing the fifteen years of decay and corruption within a family of country nobles. The hypocrite Porfiri (Judas or Iudenshka) has become an eponymous figure in Russia, just as have Tartuffe in France and Uriah Heep in England. --Philip Ward

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Revised May 1, 2010.

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