If you liked
Books like The History of Tom Jones
Loved The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding? Here are 10 books with a similar appeal — drawn mostly from classics, ranked by how confidently we'd recommend them next.
10 books · ranked
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1
Fanny Hill
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure — known as Fanny Hill — follows an orphaned country girl who arrives in London, falls into a brothel, and narrates her subsequent sexual and social education with remarkable candour. The first English-language prose pornography, it is also a novel about class, economics and female survival; it was prosecuted for obscenity on publication and its author briefly imprisoned.
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2
Sense and Sensibility
Elinor and Marianne Dashwood embody two opposing temperaments — sense and sensibility — as they navigate love, heartbreak and financial precarity after their father's death leaves them dependent on others' goodwill. Austen's first published novel is a sophisticated study of what it costs women to feel and what it costs them not to.
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3
Pride and Prejudice
Wit, manners and misjudged first impressions in Regency England — the template for the modern romantic comedy and still the most quoted of Austen's novels.
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4
Persuasion
Anne Elliot, persuaded against her better judgment to break off her engagement to the naval officer Frederick Wentworth, encounters him again years later — now successful and still unmarried. Austen's last completed novel is her most melancholy and most quietly feminist, written as she was dying and published posthumously.
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5
Frankenstein
A scientist creates life and abandons it, with consequences for both — the founding myth of science fiction, written when the author was barely twenty.
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6
Jane Eyre
An orphaned governess insists on her own dignity against everything stacked against her — fierce, gothic and unexpectedly modern.
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7
Wuthering Heights
A storm of obsession and revenge on the Yorkshire moors; for readers who want their love stories dark and uncompromising.
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8
Great Expectations
A blacksmith's boy, a mysterious fortune and the question of what really makes a gentleman — Dickens at his most personal.
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9
A Tale of Two Cities
In the years before and during the French Revolution, the fates of the Manette family, the emigre Charles Darnay, and the dissolute English lawyer Sydney Carton converge in Paris and London. Dickens's novel is about resurrection, self-sacrifice and the terror that accompanies revolutions that began with idealism. It contains one of the most famous opening sentences and one of the most famous final lines in English fiction.
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10
War and Peace
Russian aristocrats live, love and survive the Napoleonic wars in a vast, surprisingly readable panorama of a society in upheaval.