If you liked
Books like Emma
Loved Emma by Jane Austen? 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
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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2
The Red and the Black
Julien Sorel, a carpenter's son of brilliant intelligence and fierce ambition, rises through Napoleonic society using his abilities and his lovers — first a provincial mayor's wife, then an aristocratic Parisian — to advance beyond his station. Stendhal's novel is a study in the psychology of ambition, hypocrisy and the impossibility of authentic selfhood under social constraint.
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3
A Christmas Carol
Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly old businessman who despises Christmas and the poor, is visited on Christmas Eve by the ghost of his former partner Marley and by three spirits who show him his past, his present and the grim future that awaits him if he does not change. Dickens's most enduring short novel is a plea for social compassion written during a period of acute Victorian inequality.
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4
The Count of Monte Cristo
Edmond Dantès, a young sailor falsely imprisoned for years in the Château d'If, escapes to find a vast hidden treasure and uses it to engineer a meticulous revenge on the three men who destroyed his life. Dumas's adventure novel is one of the most popular works of fiction ever written — a study in patience, justice, revenge and whether vengeance can ever truly satisfy.
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5
Jane Eyre
An orphaned governess insists on her own dignity against everything stacked against her — fierce, gothic and unexpectedly modern.
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6
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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7
Bleak House
The case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce — a Chancery lawsuit that has consumed generations and may never be resolved — provides the frame for one of Dickens's richest novels, weaving together characters from every level of Victorian society. Bleak House uses a double narrative (third person and first person by the heroine Esther Summerson) and the mystery of Esther's parentage to create the closest thing to the great Victorian novel.
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8
Hard Times
In the fictional northern industrial town of Coketown, the philosophy of fact and utilitarianism — embodied by the schoolmaster Gradgrind — produces its human cost: children unable to imagine, workers brutalised by their labour, and a circus family that represents everything the Gradgrind world suppresses. Dickens's most polemical novel, and one of the shortest.
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9
North and South
When Margaret Hale moves from the rural south of England to the industrial northern mill town of Milton, she is confronted with a world of poverty, labour disputes and a mill owner she initially despises. Gaskell's social novel is both a love story and an examination of the human cost of industrialisation — and of the prejudices that class and geography create between people who need to understand each other.
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10
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.