If you liked
Books like The Awakening
Loved The Awakening by Kate Chopin? 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
Heart of Darkness
Marlow, a riverboat captain, travels deep into the Belgian Congo to find the ivory trader Kurtz, whose methods have become legendary for their horror. One of the most debated texts in English literature — a study of colonialism and the human capacity for evil that has itself been accused of reproducing the racism it critiques.
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2
Jude the Obscure
Jude Fawley is a stonemason in rural Dorset who dreams of entering the university at Christminster — a city that will never accept him. His relationships with his cousin Sue Bridehead and his marriage to Arabella Donn are both wrong for different reasons, and the novel follows their combined tragedy with an unsparing honesty that scandalized its first readers. Hardy's last novel.
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3
The Yellow Wallpaper
A woman recovering from a 'nervous condition' in a summer rental house is prescribed rest and forbidden from writing — and begins to fixate on the yellow wallpaper of her room, eventually believing a woman is trapped behind it. Gilman's semi-autobiographical short story is the foundational text of feminist literary criticism and one of the most-assigned texts in women's literature courses.
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4
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Tess Durbeyfield, a peasant girl whose father discovers a dubious claim to noble descent, is sent to seek kinship with the d'Urbervilles and meets with catastrophe. Hardy's most devastating novel follows Tess through betrayal, hardship, murder and execution, asking whether any person can be truly 'pure' in a world that will not let her simply be herself.
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5
The Call of the Wild
Buck, a large domesticated dog, is stolen from his California home and sold into service as a sled dog in the Klondike Gold Rush, where the brutal conditions and the atavistic pull of the wild gradually transform him. London's novella is both a survival adventure and a meditation on civilisation and wildness — and one of the most widely assigned books in American primary schools.
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6
The Cherry Orchard
The Ranevskaya family returns to their ancestral estate with its cherry orchard, facing financial ruin and unable to take the practical steps that would save them. Chekhov's final play is simultaneously funny and heartbreaking — a study in the incapacity of people to respond to change, and in the passing of one world and the arrival of another.
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7
The House of Mirth
Lily Bart is beautiful, witty and socially brilliant — and she is slowly sliding toward ruin. Wharton's first major novel traces Lily's downfall with the precision of a social scientist and the sympathy of someone who understood exactly how the gilded cage of New York society worked.
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8
Howards End
Three families — the intellectual Schlegels, the business-minded Wilcoxes and the lower-middle-class Basts — become entangled through property, love and tragedy. Forster's novel, anchored by its epigraph 'Only connect', asks what England is and who belongs to it — and whether connection across class and sensibility is even possible.
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9
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Michael Henchard, a hay-trusser who in a drunken auction sells his wife and daughter to a sailor, rises to become the Mayor of Casterbridge — only to see his reputation, business and relationships destroyed by the return of the man he sold her to, now his business partner. Hardy's study of self-destruction and the remorselessness of consequence is among the most dramatically compelling of his novels.
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10
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
The respectable Dr Henry Jekyll creates a potion that releases his darker nature as the violent Mr Hyde — smaller, freed from conscience, and capable of acts Jekyll himself cannot commit. As Hyde's crimes grow worse, Jekyll loses control of the transformation. Stevenson's Gothic novella is a founding text of the double-identity story and a study of Victorian repression and the darkness it conceals beneath respectability.