The Betrothed
1827 · 736 pages
In seventeenth-century Lombardy two peasants want to marry, and a lord who wants the bride frightens their priest into refusing. Riot, famine, and plague come between them. Italian prose was remade on it.
★ 7.2
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1820s
1820 – 1829
Showing 5 books from the 1820s
The Major Works
1822 · 880 pages
Shelley put atheism, revolution, and free love into lines nobody has matched for sheer music. In "Ozymandias" a tyrant's boast survives as two stone legs and a shattered face in empty sand.
★ 7.0
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
1821 · 296 pages
De Quincey gives the pleasures of opium first and the pains after, in prose that turns a habit into visionary autobiography. Drug writing from Baudelaire to Burroughs still works his seam.
★ 5.6
The Last of the Mohicans
1826 · 398 pages
The scout Hawkeye and the last two Mohicans guide two sisters through the French and Indian War. Cooper made the frontiersman a national hero, and the Western has lived off him since.
★ 5.5
The Physiology of Taste
1825 · 464 pages
Brillat-Savarin, a French magistrate, made the table a subject for philosophy: tell me what you eat, he wrote, and I will tell you what you are. No food writer has bettered him.
★ 5.4