Too dearly bought: or, The town strike

Middlemarch

George Eliot

Middlemarch is a didactic work of fiction that weaves together the ordinary rhythms of English town and…

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde

The novel opens with a sprawling preface in which Oscar Wilde lays out his aesthetic creed, insisting that…

The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The novel opens with a detailed portrait of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a land‑owner whose reputation in the…

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina is a Russian novel that begins with a stark observation about families, then plunges into the…

A pair of blue eyes

Thomas Hardy

The novel opens as a kind of didactic fable set against a vividly described Wessex landscape, where the…

Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman

Thomas Hardy

The work is a Victorian‑era didactic novel that weaves together themes of poverty, social hierarchy, and…