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
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1810s
1810 – 1819
Showing 7 books from the 1810s
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
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
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
Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
1817 · 320 pages
Two countries gain by trading even when one makes everything more cheaply. Ricardo's proof turned free trade from a preference into a theorem, and no tariff debate has escaped it.
★ 6.2
Ivanhoe
1819 · 496 pages
Scott built the Middle Ages everyone still pictures: tournaments, Norman lords over conquered Saxons, Robin Hood in the greenwood, and Rebecca, a Jewish healer tried for witchcraft, who takes the novel over.
★ 5.6