Baron Lytton: 24 books

Published in 1838, “Alice, or The Mysteries” picks up the story of the disenchanted poet-gone-politician-gone-recluse Ernest Maltravers, his early love Alice Darvil and his underhanded antagonist Lumley Ferrers. Whereas, after Florence Lascelles’s death, Ernest has withdrawn from the world,...

Excerpt: “The rich moonlight that now shone through the windows streamed on little that it could invest with poetical attraction.The room was small, though not squalid in its character and appliances.The bed-curtains, of a dull chintz, were drawn back, and showed the form of a man, past middle age,...

From Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth to Rudy Rucker's The Hollow Earth, subterranean worlds have been a source of both fascination and fear for the literary imagination, and The Coming Race is no exception. An evolutionary fantasy first published in 1871, the story draws upon ideas...

A rationalist Victorian visits a haunted house in order to explain the nature of its ghostly inhabitants. (Goodreads)

The work, a portion of which is now presented to the reader, has occupied me many years—though often interrupted in its progress, either by more active employment, or by literary undertakings of a character more seductive. These volumes were not only written, but actually in the hands of the publisher...

If it be the good fortune of this work to possess any interest for the Novel reader, that interest, perhaps, will be but little derived from the customary elements of fiction. The plot is extremely slight, the incidents are few, and with the exception of those which involve the fate of Vivian, such...

Kenelm Chillingly is the son of noble parents, but he doesn't seem to quite fit in. Too philosophical for his own good, really. His father feels he should embark on a Grand Tour, but while his father is making formal preparations to do so, Kenelm sets out on his own, and the bulk of the books talk...

Much has been written by critics, especially by those (the native land of criticism), upon the important question, whether to please or to instruct should be the end of Fiction—whether a moral purpose is or is not in harmony with the undidactic spirit perceptible in the higher works of the imagination....