Historical novels are a kind of fictional stories created by authors under a certain historical background. In this kind of novel, plots and images of characters can be invented by authors with freedom. Although the whole stories of historical novels were assumed to happen in a certain or uncertain historical period, their plots are seldom limited by its background and authors have a large space to create stories based on their imagination and experience. You will feel the things described in historical novels seem to happen in the past truly , which maybe urges you to search for some historical knowledge in the period mentioned in novels.
1. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Epic in scale, War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events leading up to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families.
2. Middlemarch by George Eliot
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life is a novel by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Anne Evans, later Marian Evans. It is her seventh novel, begun in 1869 and then put aside during the final illness of Thornton Lewes, the son of her co……
3. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr. Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neighboring squire—though he sometimes succumbs……
4. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury is set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. The novel centers on the Compson family, former Southern aristocrats who are struggling to deal with the dissolution of their family and its reputation. The novel is separ……
5. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however, longs onl……
6. Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac
Le Père Goriot (English: Father Goriot or Old Goriot) is an 1835 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), included in the Scenes de la vie privee section of his novel sequence La Comedie humaine. Set in Paris in……
7. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
As its title suggests, the book is ostensibly Tristram’s narration of his life story. But it is one of the central jokes of the novel that he cannot explain anything simply, that he must make explanatory diversions to add context and colour……
8. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Hardy
Buddenbrooks was Thomas Mann’s first novel, published in 1901 when he was twenty-six years old. It portrays the downfall (already announced in the subtitle, Decline of a family) of a wealthy mercantile family of Lübeck over four generations……
9. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce, first serialized in the magazine The Egoist from 1914 to 1915, and published first in book format during 1916.The story describes the formative years o……
Edited with an introduction and notes by Martin Seymour-Smith. In his evocation of the republic of Costaguana, set amid the exotic and grandiose scenery of South America, Conrad reveals not only the lives and fates of his characters but als……
11. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Created from two short stories, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister", the novel’s story is of Clarissa’s preparations for a party of which she is to be hostess. With the interior perspective of the novel, th……
12. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
David Copperfield is the story of a young man’s adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters he encounters are ……
13. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford wrote The Good Soldier, the book on which his reputation most surely rests, in deliberate emulation of the nineteenth-century French novels he so admired. In this way he was able to explore the theme of sexual betrayal and i……
14. Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
Daniel Deronda opens with one of the most memorable encounters in fiction: Gwendolen Harleth, alluring yet unsettling, is poised at the roulette-table in Leubronn, observed by Daniel Deronda, a young man groomed in the finest tradition of t……
15. My Antonia by Willa Cather
In Willa Cather’s own estimation, My Antonia, first published in 1918, was "the best thing I’ve ever done." An enduring paperback bestseller on Houghton Mifflin’s literary list, this hauntingly eloquent classic now boasts a new foreword by ……
16. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Clyde Griffiths is a young man with ambitions. He’s in love with a rich girl, but it’s a poor girl he has gotten pregnant, Roberta Alden, who works with him at his uncle’s factory. One day he takes Roberta canoeing on a lake with the intent……
17. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Written when Ernest Hemingway was thirty years old and lauded as the best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a be……
18. The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope
The Last Chronicle of Barset concerns an indigent but learned clergyman, the Reverend Josiah Crawley, the perpetual curate of Hogglestock, as he stands accused of stealing a cheque. The novel is notable for the non-resolution of a plot cont……
Oblomov is the best known novel by Russian writer Ivan Goncharov, first published in 1859. Oblomov is also the central character of the novel, often seen as the ultimate incarnation of the superfluous man, a symbolic character in 19th-centu……
20. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Against the backdrop of the French Revolution, Charles Dickens unfolds his masterpiece of drama, adventure, courage, and romance about a man falsely accused of treason.Unjustly imprisoned for 18 years in the Bastille, Dr. Alexandre Manette ……
21. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
It is 1757. Across north-eastern America the armies of Britain and France struggle for ascendancy. Their conflict, however, overlays older struggles between nations of native Americans for possession of the same lands and between the native……
22. The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek
The Good Soldier Schweik is the story beginning in Prague with news of the assassination in Sarajevo that precipitates World War I. Schweik displays such enthusiasm about faithfully serving the Austrian Emperor in battle that no one can dec……
23. The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham
Based on the life of Paul Gauguin, "The Moon and Sixpence" is the story of Charles Strickland, an English banker who walks away from a life of privilege to pursue his passion to become a painter. Strickland leaves London for Paris and ultim……
24. Jean-Christophe by Romain Rolland
The central character, Jean-Christophe Krafft, is a German musician of Belgian extraction, a composer of genius whose life is depicted from cradle to grave. He undergoes great hardships and spiritual struggles, balancing his pride in his ow……
25. All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Hailed by many as the greatest war novel of all time and publicly burned by the Nazis for being “degenerate,” Erich Maria Remarque’s masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front, is an elegant statement on a generation of men destroyed by wa……
Lord Jim tells the story of a young, idealistic Englishman--"as unflinching as a hero in a book"--who is disgraced by a single act of cowardice while serving as an officer on the Patna, a merchant-ship sailing from an eastern port. His life……
27. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agent; communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven around an attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 masterminded by Verloc, a Russian spy working for the……