Romance Books
Classic romance isn't the genre modern publishing calls "Romance" — these are novels where courtship and marriage drive the plot, but the real subject is usually money, class, or a heroine's limited options in a world that offered women very few of them. That's what makes Jane Austen's comedies of manners so different in tone from the Brontë sisters' more turbulent, emotionally extreme novels, even though both write about the same basic question: who should this woman marry, and why does it matter so much. Reading a few of these back to back is the fastest way to see how differently 19th-century writers handled the exact same premise — Austen with wit and social precision, the Brontës with something closer to obsession.
Where to start
Pride and Prejudice
Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy — still the template every romantic comedy since has borrowed from.
Where to start
Jane Eyre: An Autobiography
A governess, a brooding employer, and one of the fiercest first-person narrators in the genre.
Where to start
Wuthering Heights
Far darker and stranger than Austen — a love story built on obsession and revenge, not manners.
19 books total in this collection, free to read with synchronized LibriVox audio.
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Jane Eyre: An Autobiography
Charlotte Brontë
Emma
Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen
Mansfield Park
Jane Austen
Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy
The Enchanted April
Elizabeth Von Arnim
Anna Karenina
graf Leo Tolstoy
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Jane Austen A Linked Index of all PG Editions of Jane Austen
Jane Austen
Anthem
Ayn Rand
Ramona
Helen Hunt Jackson
The Professor
Charlotte Brontë
Rose o' the River
Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
The Street of Seven Stars
Mary Roberts Rinehart
Night and Day
Virginia Woolf
The Glimpses of the Moon
Edith Wharton
Lavender and Old Lace
Myrtle Reed
The Cloister and the Hearth
Charles Reade