Wuthering Heights
1847 · 353 pages
Heathcliff, a foundling on a Yorkshire farm, spends his life destroying two families over the girl he loves. The poet Rossetti called it a fiend of a book, its action laid in hell.
★ 8.8
Browse by time · decade
1840s
1840 – 1849
Showing 24 books from the 1840s
Jane Eyre
1847 · 284 pages
English fiction found its first fierce female voice in Jane, plain and poor and conceding nothing. She survives a brutal charity school, becomes a governess, and loves an employer with a secret.
★ 8.8
Democracy in America
1840 · 722 pages
No foreigner has ever read America this well. Touring the young republic in 1831, Tocqueville found equality rather than liberty the engine of the place, and warned that majority opinion smothers free minds.
★ 8.6
Dead Souls
1842 · 432 pages
Traveling the Russian provinces, a charming stranger buys serfs who have died but still count on the tax rolls. Gogol's landowners are grotesque and hilarious, and then the laughter turns on you.
★ 8.1
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
1845 · 176 pages
Born into slavery, Douglass taught himself to read in secret, fought the slave-breaker he was hired out to, and escaped. Naming his owners in print at twenty-seven forced him out of the country.
★ 7.4
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto
1844 · 243 pages
You work a machine you do not own, making something you never see again, and it hollows you out. Marx calls this alienation, and the Manifesto makes it a demand for revolution.
★ 7.3
Vanity Fair
1848 · 951 pages
Becky Sharp leaves school with no money and claws her way through English society while her friend Amelia wastes her love on a worthless man. Thackeray spares nobody, and Becky is magnificent company.
★ 7.2
The Portable Edgar Allan Poe
1849 · 628 pages
Poe invented the detective story and perfected the tale of terror. His narrators wall people up alive, hear a heart beating under the floorboards, and watch a house split apart.
★ 7.2
Cousin Bette
1846 · 490 pages
Passed over by her rich relations, a poor spinster sets out to ruin them, helped by a wife who bankrupts men for a living. Balzac makes envy a protagonist and never looks away.
★ 7.1
A Christmas Carol
1843 · 116 pages
Scrooge hates Christmas until his dead business partner turns up wrapped in chains and three spirits walk him through his own life. The modern Christmas takes its shape from this book.
★ 7.1
Fear and Trembling
1843 · 158 pages
Abraham climbs the mountain to sacrifice Isaac, and Kierkegaard asks how obedience to God can require a murder. Faith suspends ethics altogether, and the believer cannot explain himself to anyone.
★ 7.1
Lost Illusions
1843 · 721 pages
Lucien leaves Angouleme certain his poems will make him famous in Paris, and finds literature there is a trade in favors and paid reviews. Balzac invented the modern story of selling out.
★ 7.0
The Communist Manifesto
1848 · 287 pages
A spectre is haunting Europe, Marx and Engels announce, then read all recorded history as class struggle and hand the workers of the world a program. No pamphlet has moved more people.
★ 7.0
Either/Or
1843 · 640 pages
Two ways of living stand side by side, unreconciled: the aesthete who lives for the interesting moment and whose papers include a seducer's diary, and the judge who defends marriage and duty.
★ 7.0
The Count of Monte Cristo
1844 · 1276 pages
Edmond Dantes, a sailor about to marry, is denounced by rivals and buried in an island prison for fourteen years. He returns rich and unrecognizable, and revenge fiction still runs on his design.
★ 7.0
The Sickness Unto Death
1849 · 179 pages
Despair, Kierkegaard argues, is not a passing mood but the standing condition of a self refusing to be itself. He catalogs its forms with clinical precision, and the diagnosis reaches everyone.
★ 6.8
A Hero of Our Time
1840 · 168 pages
Pechorin seduces, duels, and wrecks lives across the Caucasus, then records in his diary exactly why he does it. Russian fiction took its habit of merciless self-analysis from this bored young officer.
★ 6.6
The Three Musketeers
1844 · 625 pages
Arriving in Paris from Gascony, d'Artagnan duels Athos, Porthos, and Aramis into friendship, then serves the queen against Cardinal Richelieu. No adventure novel has ever moved faster or been better company.
★ 6.6
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
1848 · 576 pages
Helen Graham bolts her bedroom door against a drunk husband, takes her son, and lives by selling paintings. Victorian reviewers called it coarse and unfit to put in a girl's hands.
★ 6.6
What is Property?
1840 · 225 pages
Property is theft, Proudhon answered, meaning property that lets one man live off another's labor. Nobody had called himself an anarchist before, and his quarrel with Marx still splits the left.
★ 6.2