Pride and Prejudice
1813 · 352 pages
Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy dislike each other on sight and spend the novel being wrong. Austen wrote conversation better than anyone in English, and readers return to it their whole lives.
★ 9.5
Browse by time · decade
1810s
1810 – 1819
Showing 149 works across all media from the 1810s
The Third of May 1808
1814 · El Prado, Madrid
A lantern lights a man in a white shirt throwing his arms wide before the firing squad. Goya painted it six years later.
★ 9.4
Raft of the Medusa
1819 · Louvre, Paris
Survivors of a real shipwreck pile toward a speck of sail on the horizon. Géricault studied corpses and asylum patients before he began.
★ 9.0
Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog
1818 · Kunsthalle, Hamburg
A man stands on a summit with his back to us, looking out over fog, so that we end up looking at what he sees.
★ 8.8
Emma
1815 · 592 pages
Emma Woodhouse is rich, clever, and sure she knows what everyone needs, so she arranges marriages and ruins them. Austen puts you inside her head until you miss what she misses.
★ 8.1
La Grande Odalisque
1814 · Louvre, Paris
Ingres stretched her spine past anything anatomy allows, and critics joked she had three vertebrae too many. He was chasing line, not truth.
★ 8.0
Frankenstein
1818 · 288 pages
Victor Frankenstein builds a man from corpses and flees when it opens its eyes. The creature teaches itself to read, then comes back to bargain with its horrified maker for one companion.
★ 7.4
Sense and Sensibility
1811 · 353 pages
Left poor by their father's death, Elinor Dashwood hides her heartbreak while her sister Marianne broadcasts hers. Austen weighs the two ways of feeling and gives the sisters the real love story.
★ 7.2
Chalk Cliffs on Rugen
1818 · Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur
Three figures at the lip of a white chalk drop, painted around the time of his marriage, the eye pulled out to sea and straight down.
★ 7.1
The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm
The Complete First Edition
1812 · 568 pages
These are the tales before the Grimms softened them: mothers rather than stepmothers abandon their children, the violence goes unexplained, and the folk imagination of a whole culture stands intact.
★ 7.0
The Colossus
1812 · El Prado, Madrid
A giant stands with his head in the clouds while everything below scatters. Whether Goya actually painted it is now disputed.
★ 6.8
The Declaration of Independence
1819 · Yale Art Gallery, New Haven
Trumbull knew many of the men and painted their faces from life, which is why this version ended up on the two-dollar bill.
★ 6.8
Majas on a Balcony
1810 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Two women in white smile out from the railing while two men in dark cloaks stand behind them in the shadow, watching.
★ 6.5