Beautiful Joe was a dog from the town of Meaford, Ontario, whose story inspired the bestselling 1893 novel Beautiful Joe, which contributed to worldwide awareness of animal cruelty.
Set in northern Italy in 1628, during the terrible, oppressive years under Spanish rule, it is sometimes seen as a veiled attack on Austria, which controlled the region at the time the novel was written.
This novel explores slavery''s destructive effects on African-American families, the difficult lives of American mulattoes or mixed-race people, and the "degraded and immoral condition of the relation of master and slave in the United States of America.
''Cousin Phillis'' is a haunting story about Paul Manning, a youth of nineteen who moves to the country and befriends his mother''s family and his cousin Phillis Holman, who is confused by her own placement at the edge of adolescence.
Much of the novel is written from the view-point of his canine character, enabling London to explore how animals view their world and how they view humans.
A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay combines fantasy, philosophy, and science fiction in an exploration of the nature of good and evil and their relationship with existence.
After an unspecified family disaster, protagonist Lucy Snowe travels to the fictional city of Villette to teach at an all-girls school where she is unwillingly pulled into both adventure and romance.
Dissatisfied with life in her rural Wisconsin home, 18-year-old Caroline moves to the big city where she starts realizing her own American Dream by first becoming a mistress to men that she perceives as superior and later as a famous actress.
Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters, is a collection of short free-form poems that collectively describe the life of the fictional small town of Spoon River, named after the real Spoon River that ran near Masters'' home town.
The story follows the main character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of early 19th-century England.
