
High Society Romance: 40 Gilded Age Novels
Courtship, Scandal, Inheritance, and Class Ambition in Gilded Age SocietyBy Frances Hodgson Burnett, Gene Stratton-Porter, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Guy de Maupassant, Mrs. Oliphant, Alexandre Dumas fils, Edmund Yates, Robert Barr, Booth Tarkington, Albert Ross, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Leo Tolstoy, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, George William Curtis, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Henry James, Mrs. Alexander, Horatio Alger, David Graham Phillips, Theodore Dreiser, Anna Katharine Green, Grace Livingston Hill, Wilkie Collins, Mary Augusta Ward, George Meredith, George GissingLength705h 49m
About this audiobook
High Society Romance: 40 Gilded Age Novels surveys the glittering yet precarious world of wealth, marriage, inheritance, and social ambition across a broad transatlantic canon. Its selections range from drawing-room comedy and sentimental courtship to psychological realism, sensation fiction, social satire, and morally searching domestic drama. Beneath scenes of balls, country houses, fashionable resorts, and carefully brokered engagements, the volume exposes tensions of class mobility, gendered constraint, commercial power, and the costs of respectability. The anthology's variety makes aristocratic and bourgeois romance alike a lens on modern social change. Bringing together writers associated with American regionalism, Victorian realism, French naturalism, Russian moral fiction, popular romance, and the late-nineteenth-century novel of manners, the collection demonstrates how capacious "high society" could be as a literary subject. Frances Hodgson Burnett, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, and their contemporaries represent sharply different national traditions and readerships. Yet their converging attention to marriage markets, money, reputation, and desire situates these works within the cultural upheavals surrounding the Gilded Age and its international equivalents. This volume is especially rewarding for readers seeking a comparative introduction to social fiction and romance. It offers an unusual opportunity to trace recurring plots across divergent styles while observing how each work revises the assumptions of its neighbors. Students, scholars, and general readers will find in these novels a rich conversation about intimacy, status, and the changing architecture of modern life.
Audiobook details
Rating★★★★ 4.2 (11)
Includes Amazon
GenreLiterary Classics, Romance
Length705 hrs 49 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateJul 31, 2024
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1The Well of Loneliness & Carmilla (Annotated)
26Chapter XXIV
2Sister Carrie
27Chapter XXV
3Chapter I
28Chapter XXVI
4Chapter II
29Chapter XXVII
5Chapter III
30Chapter XXVIII
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6Chapter IV
31Chapter XXIX
7Chapter V
32Chapter XXX
8Chapter VI
33Chapter XXXI
9Chapter VII
34Chapter XXXII
10Chapter VIII
35Chapter XXXIII
11Chapter IX
36Chapter XXXIV
12Chapter X
37Chapter XXXV
13Chapter XI
38Chapter XXXVI
14Chapter XII
39Chapter XXXVII
15Chapter XIII
40Chapter XXXVIII
16Chapter XIV
41Chapter XXXIX
17Chapter XV
42Chapter XL
18Chapter XVI
43Chapter XLI
19Chapter XVII
44Chapter XLII
20Chapter XVIII
45Chapter XLIII
21Chapter XIX
46Chapter XLIV
22Chapter XX
47Chapter XLV
23Chapter XXI
48Chapter XLVI
24Chapter XXII
49Chapter XLVII
25Chapter XXIII
50Bel Ami, or the History of a Scoundrel