Masterpieces of the English Short Novel

These nine novels are the best of the best—great writing by some of the most brilliant literary minds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Samuel Johnson’s biography of Richard Savage raises the life of a scoundrel to the level of great art; George Eliot profoundly influenced Henry James with her horror story The Lifted Veil; Le Fanu writes a “sinister but gracious” supernatural gothic; Joseph Conrad draws from his life as a sea captain in The Secret Sharer; Nightmare Abbey is Thomas Love Peacock’s satire on his friends, the romantic poets Shelley, Coleridge, and Byron.

These, with the other short novels in this collection, represent the pinnacle of achievement in their genre.

Life of Richard Savage, by Samuel Johnson
Castle Rackrent, by Maria Edgeworth
The Room in the Dragon Volant, by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Cousin Phillis, by Elizabeth Gaskell
The Lifted Veil, by George Eliot
The Secret Sharer, by Joseph Conrad
The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper, by George Meredith
Nightmare Abbey, by Thomas Love Peacock
Liber Amoris, by William Hazlitt

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