Romance

Tradition wears a snowy beard, romance is always young

Night and Day

Virginia Woolf

Night and Day is a novel by Virginia Woolf first published on 20 October 1919. Set in Edwardian London, Night and Day contrasts the daily lives and romantic attachments of two acquaintances, Katharine Hilbery and Mary Datchet. The novel examines the...

A House of Gentlefolk

Ivan Turgenev

The novel's protagonist is Fyodor Ivanych Lavretsky, a nobleman who shares many traits with Turgenev. The child of a distant, Anglophile father and a serf mother who dies when he is very young, Lavretsky is brought up at his family's country estate h...

Rudin: A Novel

Ivan Turgenev

Rudin was written by Turgenev in the immediate aftermath of the Crimean War, when it became obvious to many educated Russians that reform was needed. The main debate of Turgenev's own generation was that of Slavophiles versus Westernizers. Rudin depi...

On the Eve: A Novel

Ivan Turgenev

The story revolves around Elena Stakhova, a girl with a hypochondriac mother and an idle father, a retired guards lieutenant with a mistress. On the eve of the Crimean War, Elena is pursued by a free-spirited sculptor (Pavel Shubin) and a serious-min...

The Torrents of Spring

Ivan Turgenev

The story opens with a middle-aged Dmitry Sanin rummaging through the papers in his study when he comes across a small cross set with garnets, which sends his thoughts back thirty years to 1840. In the summer of 1840, a twenty-two-year-old Sanin, arr...

The Man Who Was Afraid

Maksim Gorky

Gorky started working on The Man Who Was Afraid in 1898. "It is supposed to present the broad and true picture of the contemporary life, while featuring the figure of an energetic, healthy man, craving for space to realize his power's potential....

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë

Wuthering Heights is a novel by Emily Brontë published in 1847 under her pseudonym "Ellis Bell". It is her only finished novel. Wuthering Heights and Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey were accepted by publisher Thomas Newby before the success of her...

Rousseau and Romanticism

Irving Babbitt

 Author, In the early 1890s that he first allied himself with Paul Elmer More in developing the core doctrines that were to constitute what he called the "New Humanism". In 1895 he gave a lecture What is Humanism?, which announced his attack on...

Ten Years Later

Alexander Dumas

The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later is a novel by Alexandre Dumas. It is the third and last of The d'Artagnan Romances, following The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After. It appeared first in serial form between 1847 and 1850  

Northanger Abbey

Jane Austen

  Northanger Abbey is a newcomer novel and satire of Jane Austen's Gothic novels. It was completed for publication in 1803 and was the first of Austen's novels in order of completion, but was published posthumously in 1817 with another novel, P...