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 177 works across all media 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
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Anna Karenina · 1877
Impression, Sunrise
1872 · Musee Marmottan Monet, Paris
A critic seized on the word in the title to mock the whole group, and the insult ended up naming the movement.
★ 8.6
The Descent of Man · 1871
Bal du Moulin de la Galette
1876 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Sunlight comes through the trees in patches over a Montmartre dance floor, a big ambitious canvas given over entirely to a Sunday afternoon.
★ 8.5
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
Whistler's Mother
1871 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Whistler called it Arrangement in Grey and Black and insisted it was about tone, not feeling. The sitter was his mother, and nobody was fooled.
★ 8.0
America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without.
Democratic Vistas · 1871
Paris Street; Rainy Day
1877 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Umbrellas cross the wet cobbles of Haussmann's new boulevards, composed with a photographic exactness his Impressionist friends had no use for.
★ 7.6
The Gross Clinic
1875 · Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
The surgeon turns from the open incision to lecture, scalpel still bloody, while a woman at the side covers her eyes. Philadelphia was appalled.
★ 7.5
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
L'Absinthe
1876 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Two people sit shoulder to shoulder at a cafe table staring at nothing, pushed off to one side behind a run of empty tables.
★ 7.3
Pictures at an Exhibition
1874
Mussorgsky wrote it for piano after a memorial show of a friend's drawings, and several of the pictures it describes have since been lost.
★ 7.2
Breezing Up (A Fair Wind)
1876 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
A man and three boys heel a catboat over into open water, painted in the centennial year and read ever since as the country's optimism.
★ 7.2
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
Gare Saint Lazare
1877 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Monet set his easel up inside the station and painted the steam until the roof and the city beyond it had dissolved into it.
★ 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
Snap the Whip
1872 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Barefoot boys crack the whip outside a red schoolhouse and the last one is already stumbling. Painted just after the Civil War.
★ 6.9
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
White Frost
1873 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Critics at the first Impressionist show in 1874 said it looked like palette scrapings. The furrows are streaked with blue, violet and gold.
★ 6.6
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
The Cotton Pickers
1876 · LACMA, Los Angeles
Two young Black women in a cotton field a decade after emancipation, given a gravity American painting had not extended to field labor.
★ 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
Boating
1874 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Manet painted this beside Monet at Argenteuil and let the blue water climb all the way to the top edge of the canvas.
★ 6.3
The Rehearsal
1879 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Dancers stretch while a spiral staircase cuts the corner and the frame slices figures off. Degas cared about the practice, not the performance.
★ 6.1
A Girl with a Watering Can
1876 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
She stands in a garden in a blue dress holding a watering can, and Renoir spends the rest of the canvas on light.
★ 6.1
La Promenade
1876 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Two girls walking under trees, the elder leading the younger, everything blurred into one shimmer of dappled light and pale dress.
★ 6.1
The Brothers Karamazov · 1879
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer · 1876
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
If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.
Through the Looking-Glass · 1871
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
1877
1870
Woman Before a Mirror
1876 · Guggenheim, New York City
A woman in a white corset seen from behind, painted so loosely the picture seems to stop just before the image settles.
★ 5.2
Portraits at the Stock Exchange
1879 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Degas turned from dancers to financiers, catching heads bent close over documents in the crush of the Paris exchange.
★ 5.2
Kin Beyond Sea · 1878
Human, All Too Human · 1878
1879
Ecce Homo (Ciseri)
1871 · Location unknown
We are standing behind Pilate, looking out over his shoulder at the crowd, which puts us among the officials rather than the mob.
★ 4.2
Melancholy
1874 · Phillips Collection, Washington, District of Columbia
A woman slumped back on a sofa, and Degas reads the whole state of mind off the slope of her shoulders.
★ 4.2
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer · 1876