Told by the death's head: A Romantic Tale

The Count of Monte Cristo

Dumas, Alexandre; Maquet, Auguste

The opening of this work places the reader squarely in the bustling port of Marseilles in early 1815,…

A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens

The novel is a historical fiction set against the turbulence of the French Revolution and its echo in…

The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is a work of historical and psychological fiction that foregrounds…

The String of Pearls; Or, The Barber of Fleet Street. A Domestic Romance.

Rymer, James Malcolm; Prest, Thomas Peckett

The work is a lurid blend of historical fiction and horror, set in late‑eighteenth‑century London where the…

War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy

The novel opens in a July evening of 1805, inside the drawing‑room of Anna Pávlovna Schérer, a well‑connected…

Les Misérables

Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo’s opening places the reader squarely in the early nineteenth‑century world of post‑revolutionary…