Notable for its marvellous villains and, like all Collins's work, for its complex, spirited and believable female characters. The most popular novel of the 19th century, and still one of the best plots in English literature. Looking for books by William Makepeace Thackeray See all books authored by William Makepeace Thackeray, including Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero. Even more so than Dorian Gray's, Mr Hyde's sordid and perhaps deviant excesses are rendered more suggestive through being left undescribed.

Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde by Robert Louis StevensonĪnother, more definitive, novel of shameful double-living. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar WildeĪ heady late-Victorian tale of double-living, in which Dorian's fatal, corruptive influence over women and men alike is left suggestively indistinct.ĩ. The one in Highgate cemetery, where Arthur and Van Helsing drive a stake through the writhing body of the vampirised Lucy Westenra, is my favourite.Ĩ. The most resonant of Dickens's novels, with an elusive moral centre and a gallery of grotesques - Jenny Wren, the dolls' dressmaker Mr Venus, articulator of human bones the demented stalker Bradley Headstone the loathsome Lammles - which, even by Dickensian standards, are really very grotesque indeed.Īn exercise in masculine anxiety and nationalist paranoia, Stoker's novel is filled with scenes that are staggeringly lurid and perverse. It's also a kind of anti-romance: Gissing was uncompromising in his analysis of gender relations and his exposé of the withering impact of economics upon love.Ĭommonly thought of as 'romantic', but try rereading it without being astonished by the comfortableness with which Brontë's characters subject one another to extremes of physical and psychological violence. My favourite moment is the one where Magwitch makes his stumbling way up the shadowy staircase towards an unnerved but unsuspecting Pip: the halting but inexorable rise of the repressed 'from the darkness beneath'.ĭeserves its spot in the top 10 if only for the wonderful Becky Sharp.Ī devastating study of the late-Victorian literary industry, New Grub Street still has an unnervingly modern ring.

Wm thackeray novels