CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog
Nineteenth-Century Historical Fiction on the Web
Databases and bibliographies. The most copious online database is the Project Historische Roman, which allows you to search over 6700 German novels by author, title, and/or year. Unfortunately, if you're studying nineteenth-century British historical fiction, the best you can do online is Jonathan Nield's Best Historical Novels and Tales, archived at Project Gutenberg and various other sites. (The best guide to nineteenth-century historical fiction proper: Ernest Baker's Guide to Historical Fiction.) That being said, one can learn quite a bit by poking around in such essential resources as British Fiction 1800-29 (which includes reviews and publication histories), Corvey Women Writers on the Web (which covers work published between 1796 and 1834), and the Literary Encyclopedia. While it doesn't have a search function, British Juvenile Story Papers and Pocket Libraries Index includes many authors of children's historical tales in its listings. If you desperately need to find a nineteenth-century historical novel about Rome, head to Fictional Rome. Soon Y. Choi has a good, albeit sporadically annotated, master list of historical novelists. For e-texts, try Project Gutenberg, A Celebration of Women Writers, and Blackmask.
Individual authors:
- Grace Aguilar (Anglo-Jewish novelist & one of the first Jewish popular theologians)
- Deborah Alcock (staunchly evangelical Protestant novelist, still popular in some fundamentalist circles; site reprints Elizabeth Boyd Bayly's 1914 biography)
- Lydia Maria Child (American abolitionist and activist)
- James Fenimore Cooper
- Alexandre Dumas (bilingual)
- Erckmann-Chatrian (in French)
- George Eliot
- G. A. Henty (article in the Guardian)
- Victor Hugo
- Charles Lever (Irish novelist)
- Captain Frederick Marryat (nautical fiction)
- Karl May (German novelist heavily influenced by Cooper)
- John Mason Neale (Anglo-Catholic fiction)
- Charles Reade
- Walter Scott Digital Archive (superbly done)
- Catherine Maria Sedgwick (Unitarian novelist)
- Joseph Henry Shorthouse (another Anglo-Catholic)
- Stanley John Weyman (swashbucklers)
- Charlotte Mary Yonge (prolific High Church Anglican)
- Thanks! by Ralph E. Luker (May 20, 2005 at 11:11 PM)
- My appreciation! by Anne Zook (May 29, 2005 at 11:23 PM)
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