Great 19th-century novels

The nineteenth century made the novel the genre that claims to contain a whole society: one follows a fortune being made and unmade, a marriage going wrong, a convent, a mine, a courtroom, a barricade. These books often appeared in serial form, which explains their scale and their reversals, and they were read by a new public that state education had just created. From Balzac to Tolstoy the method is the same: take an ordinary character and make him cross every layer of a world.

works 11

• NovelPride and PrejudiceJane Austen · 1813A house full of sisters, and almost nothing coming to them.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelThe Red and the BlackLe Rouge et le NoirStendhal · 1830An ambitious carpenter's son seeks to rise in the society of the Restoration.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelOld Man GoriotLe Père GoriotHonoré de Balzac · 1835In a Parisian boarding house, an ambitious student discovers what an old man has sacrificed for his daughters.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelOliver TwistCharles Dickens · 1838London, its workhouses and its gangs of child thieves, through the fate of an orphan.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelMoby-DickHerman Melville · 1851American whalers then set out on voyages of several years to fetch sperm oil from the other side of the world; these pages give the detail of it and use it for something else.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelMadame BovaryGustave Flaubert · 1857A provincial woman demands from life what her reading had promised her.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelLes MisérablesVictor Hugo · 1862A former convict builds a new life under another name, and a policeman suspects him.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelCrime and PunishmentПреступление и наказаниеFyodor Dostoevsky · 1866A novel of 1866: a poor student in Saint Petersburg kills a pawnbroker to test a theory, and has to live with his act.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelAnna KareninaАнна КаренинаLeo Tolstoy · 1878A novel in eight parts, published in a magazine in instalments, then in volume form in 1878: Anna's passion and, in counterpoint, a landowner's quest.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelGerminalÉmile Zola · 1885An unemployed worker goes down the mine and urges the starving miners to strike.Literature
• CinemaAnna KareninaАнна КаренинаAlexander Zarkhi · 1967A colour adaptation, in 1967, of Tolstoy's novel, with Tatiana Samoilova in the role of Anna.Cinema