British Literature

“Meg Merrilies” (sometimes titled “Old Meg she was a gipsy” or simply “old Meg”) is a short, playful ballad by the English Romantic poet John Keats. It was written on Keats’s walking tour of northern England and Scotland in 1818. At the time, Keats was worried about the health of his brother, Tom, and about his own health; the tuberculosis that would soon kill Tom had already begun to manifest in Keats. While his doctor... Read Meg Merrilies Summary

Middlemarch or Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life is a Victorian realist novel by George Eliot (the penname of Mary Ann Evans). Published over the course of 1871-72, the novel depicts the trials and tribulations of life in the small English town of Middlemarch. The novel has been hailed as one of the greatest works of English literature and has been adapted for radio, television, theater, and opera. Other works by Eliot include The Lifted... Read Middlemarch Summary

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Published in 1722, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe tells the life story of a woman who carves her own path through late 17th-century England and North America. Like Defoe’s first novel, Robinson Crusoe, this work also tells the tale of a singular individual who overcomes adversity—in her case, extreme poverty—to become considerably wealthy. Moll Flanders is a wife, a thief, a sex worker, and an impresario. She is... Read Moll Flanders Summary

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Penelope Lively’s 1987 novel Moon Tiger is a work of historical fiction. Set primarily in England and Egypt during the 20th century, the novel is a frame story that joins protagonist Claudia Hampton on her deathbed as she reflects on the relationships, memories, and historical forces that shaped her life. The author was awarded the 1987 Booker Prize for the novel. Moon Tiger explores the subjective nature of memory, the difference between lived and linear... Read Moon Tiger Summary

Mothering Sunday is a 2016 novella written by British author Graham Swift. Like much of Swift’s writing, it has a psychological bent, exploring the relationship between history and memory. Swift won the Booker Prize for his 2006 novel Last Orders and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. This guide uses the 2016 Scribner edition of the text.Plot SummaryIt is March 30, 1924 in the upper-middle-class house of Beechwood in Berkshire, Southern England... Read Mothering Sunday Summary

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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