British Literature

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Mrs. Dalloway, one of Virginia Woolf’s best-known novels, was published in 1925. The entirety of the novel takes place over the course of one day in London, in June of 1923. At the start of the novel, in the morning, Clarissa Dalloway, the protagonist, makes last-minute preparations for her party scheduled for that evening. As the day progresses, readers meet various characters, major and minor, and learn about their thoughts and feelings about the past, present... Read Mrs. Dalloway Summary

Published in 1930, Murder at the Vicarage is Agatha Christie’s first novel featuring the elderly detective Miss Marple. The character first appears in a 1927 short story entitled “The Tuesday Murder Club.” In Murder at the Vicarage, unpopular bully Colonel Protheroe dies from a gunshot wound in the study of St. Mary Mead’s Vicarage. All suspects have an alibi, including the victim’s wife and her lover, who each admits guilt to divert suspicion from the... Read Murder at the Vicarage Summary

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Book Details & Major ThemesNever Let Me Go is a 2005 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro set in a dystopian version of Great Britain in the 1990s in which cloning technology allows for the mass proliferation of organ donation. Medical problems like cancer are cured because organs are harvested from clones through a state-sanctioned program. The cloned “donors” have their organs taken one at a time until they die. The novel is narrated by Kathy H... Read Never Let Me Go Summary

New Atlantis is an unfinished novel published posthumously in 1626 by the English philosopher Francis Bacon. It details the customs and culture of a utopian island society known as Bensalem, at the center of which lies a science and research institution called Salomon’s House. The work expresses many of Bacon’s scientific, philosophical, political, and religious ideas, though its unfinished status has made it the subject of intense scholarly debate over the novel’s meaning and themes... Read New Atlantis Summary

Nicholas Nickleby is Victorian writer Charles Dickens’s third novel. Published through serialization in 1838, it first appeared in its novel form in 1839. The novel has been adapted for the stage and for the screen several times, the first theatrical version appearing in 1838, before the novel was even finished. Dickens wrote Nicholas Nickleby with the intention of exposing the abuses of for-profit boarding schools in England. In focusing on the titular hero, Nicholas, Dickens’s... Read Nicholas Nickleby Summary

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Northanger Abbey is an early novel by Jane Austen. Though it wasn't published until after her death in 1817, Austen wrote the novel in 1803, intending it as a satire of the gothic novels that were popular during this period. Northanger Abbey follows the life and loves of its unlikely heroine, seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland, a naïve young woman away from her family for the first time and trying to navigate the world and the heart—with... Read Northanger Abbey Summary

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British author Zadie Smith’s tragicomic novel NW (Penguin Press, 2012), nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2013, presents the interconnected story of several protagonists living in contemporary London. The friendship of Leah Hanwell and Keisha (later Natalie) Blake is central to the narrative. As they grow from childhood, through adolescence, and adulthood, the two are repeatedly challenged in their attempts to navigate issues of social class, race, gender, education, career aspirations, and family... Read NW Summary

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