Today Thackeray's best known for Vanity Fair—a rollicking, satirical novel without a hero. But in the 19th century, he was famous for a whole bookcase worth of reasons. He was a big contributor t...

Although she wasn't the most prolific of authors, Charlotte Brontë wasone of the most widely read and discussed. When she and her sisters Emily and Anne started publishing under pseudonyms—firs...

If you were reading or writing novels in the second half of the 19th-century, you were either loving or competing with George Eliot. This lady (her real name is Mary Anne Evans; George Eliot is her...

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was a force to be reckoned with on the Victorian literary scene. He wrote one of the most popular poems of the 19th century: In Memoriam, an extended reflection on the death o...