Anna Karenina
1877 · 896 pages
Anna leaves her husband for a young officer while, in the other half of the book, Levin farms and marries and worries about God. Tolstoy gives both lives the same total sympathy.
★ 9.6
Browse by time · decade
1870s
1870 – 1879
Showing 13 books from the 1870s
Middlemarch
1872 · 810 pages
Dorothea Brooke marries a dry scholar for the wrong reasons and a gifted doctor lets small compromises close around him. Eliot knows more about how people actually fail than any English novelist.
★ 9.6
A Doll's House
1879 · 72 pages
Nora Helmer forged a signature to save her husband's life and has been paying the debt in secret ever since. The play ends on a closing door that modern theater still hears.
★ 8.0
Demons
1872 · 768 pages
Pyotr Verkhovensky assembles a revolutionary cell of five in a provincial Russian town and binds them together by having them murder one of their own. Dostoevsky saw the whole twentieth century coming.
★ 7.3
Far from the Madding Crowd (Oxford World's Classics)
1874 · 496 pages
Three men want Bathsheba Everdene, who runs her own farm: a shepherd, a neighbor she unhinges with a joke valentine, and a soldier. Hardy stages a storm you will not forget.
★ 7.1
A Season in Hell
1873 · 103 pages
Nine sections of prose delirium in which Rimbaud, eighteen years old, arraigns his ancestry, his damnation, and his own attempt to derange the senses into vision. Modernism starts in this voice.
★ 7.0
The Birth of Tragedy
Out of the Spirit of Music
1872 · 120 pages
Greek tragedy came from a collision of two forces, Nietzsche argues: Apollo's clear forms against Dionysus's music and intoxication. Socrates killed it by insisting the world could be explained rather than endured.
★ 7.0
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
1876 · 184 pages
Tom cons the neighborhood boys into whitewashing his aunt's fence, then witnesses a graveyard murder and attends his own funeral. Twain gave America the childhood it has claimed to remember ever since.
★ 6.7
Daniel Deronda
1876 · 849 pages
Gwendolen Harleth sells herself into marriage with a cold, cruel man, and beside her Eliot sets an Englishman finding out he is a Jew. Early Zionists dated their conviction to this book.
★ 6.7
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
1870 · 528 pages
The monster ramming ships proves to be an electric submarine whose captain has renounced every nation above. Submarine builders read it as boys, and the first nuclear boat took the Nautilus name.
★ 6.5
A Simple Heart
1877 · 62 pages
Félicité serves one Norman household for half a century, loses everyone she loves, and fastens her faith to a stuffed parrot. Flaubert grants her a dignity the world never did.
★ 6.5
The Extraordinary Journeys
Around the World in Eighty Days (Oxford World's Classics)
1872 · 247 pages
Phileas Fogg wagers half his fortune that steamships and railways have shrunk the world to eighty days, and leaves that evening. Seventeen years later the reporter Nellie Bly ran the route in seventy-two.
★ 5.5
Black Beauty
1877 · 186 pages
A horse narrates his own life, passed down from a gentleman's stable to the London cab ranks. Sewell wrote to make drivers feel the head-wrenching bearing rein, and England stopped using it.
★ 5.3